If the number of fatalities from the resumption of the Israeli air raids this week has left any doubt that Israel has returned to war in Gaza – including more than 130 Palestinian children who were killed in a single day. According to Unicef – Then new evacuation commands for Gazans and the return of Israeli soil troops in the strip should be proof enough.
Whether someone should be surprised is another matter.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would not end the war until Hamas will end up, although regional analysts say that this is almost impossible.
And Israeli experts have long insisted that Netanyahu sees the extension of the war as its best chance of political survival an ongoing attempt to corruption And the dependence of his own coalition government on hard Jewish nationalists who want the war to be continued.
“The real reason for the use of the war is to strain the annexationist war of the extreme right and to gain the prime minister more time in power,” wrote Esther Solomon, editor -in -chief of the left -wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on Thursday.
It certainly prompted that Fast return to the ITAMAR Ben-Gvir cabinet, An ultra nationalist settlers who reset his post when Netanyahu agreed to the January Ceasefire-Deal, who predicted the staggered publication of Israeli hostages in exchange for the publication of Palestinians from Israeli prisons.
“This is the right, moral and best justified step to destroy the terrorist organization Hamas and return our hostages,” said Ben-Gvir at the beginning of this week after Netanyahus Kabinett had again appointed him as the Israeli National Security Minister.
But many Israelis, including supporters and family members of the hostages, do not agree and have demonstrated against the decision of Netanyahu to resume war, and explains that the life of hostages is endangered. It is pressure that the Israeli Prime Minister has contradicted over the past year.
“What will happen is that the hostages are killed and the government of Israel sacrifices the hostages of Netanyahus’s own political survival,” said Gershon Baskin, a well -known Israeli activist who supports a two -state solution for the Israeli conflict.
“If we want to bring the hostages home – what should be the main goal of an Israeli government that it is not – we have to end the war and withdraw from the Gaza.”
Armistice phases
The war was triggered after the attack on Israeli border communities led on October 7, 2023, in which, according to Israeli two, around 1,200 people were killed and around 250 more captured.
Israel reacted with a military campaign in which, according to Gazastedia, more than 49,000 Palestinians were killed. Thousands of others are still feared to bury under the rubble and countless.
The now dissolved ceasefire welches entered force on January 19th And lasted 42 days – the release of 25 hostages of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the corpses of eight others in exchange for 1,800 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
The break also offered traumatized Gazans the prospect of sleeping without fear, an opportunity to find and bury their dead, and the likelihood that more humanitarian aid achieved the affected area.
A second phase was given in relation to the release of all remaining living hostages (it is assumed that there is 24) and the negotiation of a permanent ceasefire. A third would have seen how the corpses of all hostages have returned and conversations about the reconstruction of Gaza strips were called.
The demand for Israel after an expansion of the first phase and the refusal to start the second conditions of the deal was strongly supported by US President Donald Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff.
In a television address on Tuesday, Netanyahu accused Hamas for the collapse and said further negotiations would take place “under fire” until all Israel’s war goals were met, including the return of hostages and the defeat of Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday in a television speech that his government treats the ceasefire with Hamas as temporarily and that the “right to fight back”.
Hussein Ibish, Senior based at the Institute of the Arab Gulf States in Washington, believes that Netanyahu knows very well that it will be impossible to eradicate Hamas.
“Hamas will fight and die and that’s what you do. You will recruit more fighters. You will lose more fighters,” he said in an interview with CBC News.
But he agrees with those who say that Netanyahu wants to extend the war – and goes one step further by suggesting that it is not in the interest of Netanyahu to see the Hamas completely cleared out.
“Tighten unlimited”
“I think (Netanyahu and his government) want to leave Hamas in a quasi-force. You want, you know, a kind of war tractor indefinitely.”
If Hamas would disappear from the scene, it would possibly offer Hamas’ Fatah rival a stronger hand for the Palestinian authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, he says.
“You consider fatah to be more dangerous than Hamas because the (goal of the Netanyahu government) is the annexation of the West Bank,” he said.
The right-wing extremist Israeli ministers such as Ben-Gvir and Minister of Finance Bezhalel Smotrich have made no secret of the conviction that the West Bank, which they describe as Judea and Samaria-according to biblical law.
And the weaker the PA, the better for Israel, says Ibish.
It is not the first time that Netanyahu is accused of undermining Hamas to undermine the PA and block the view of Palestinian statehood. It was generally reported that Netanyahu has approved cash flows in Gaza for years Help to strengthen Hamas at the expense of the PADespite Israel’s decades of blockade from Gaza.
Trump’s effects
Gershon Baskin, the Trump and Witkoff for Israel and Hamas in the phase of one of the ceasefire -Deal recognizes – says that Washington’s support for the efforts of Israel, the conditions, make the terms much more difficult to achieve a further break in the fights.
“What (Trump) Netanyahu and his government gave the green light to renew the war in Gaza, which is really terrible,” he said.
Israel has again imposed a ban on humanitarian aid by entering the Gaza two weeks before his military operations in Gaza Strip.
Ibish says Trump’s commitment in the region – including his widely convicted considerations about the shift of millions of Palestinians to make room for a Gazan -Riviera – never really ended in ending the war in Gaza.
“I think he has to fry larger fish in the Middle East, especially a potential nuclear deal with Iran. And when he hits you, he will make Israeli law and her conservative evangelical American friends and right -wing Jewish groups in the USA.”
The support of the United States for a potential Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank could make a way to soften this blow.
Israeli settlements that were set up at the territory occupied in the war of 1967 are considered illegal and one of the greatest obstacles to the creation of an independent Palestinian state in accordance with international law.
During Trump’s first presidency, his government said that the settlements “were no longer compatible with international law”. One of the first acts of his second was to tear back sanctions against violent Israeli settlers, which his predecessor Joe Biden imposed.
According to BASKIN, the Iranian nuclear problem is a distraction from what it calls the central question of Israel’s existential existential existence.
“The Palestinian topic must be our focus, but Netanyahu has managed to distract the Israeli public’s attention from the question of the Palestinians and their rights to the Iranian question for two decades.”
