What Prospects for Ending the War on Gaza?
2024-05-13458 view
Despite tireless efforts by regional mediators, negotiations between Palestinian factions and Israel have hitherto failed to end the war on Gaza. Months of failures come after years of negotiations that preceded the current crisis, which also failed to lift Israel’s siege on the territory, and over time contributed to deepening the critical economic and humanitarian situation afflicting Gaza since Hamas came to power in 2006.
All this has led Palestinians to believe that the proposals made during periodic armed escalations in Gaza were in fact drafted by Israel itself, and that regional mediators had no choice but to adopt them and present them, ready-made, to Palestinian factions. This has been clear during the current war on the Gaza Strip—the Hamas leadership has repeatedly travelled to Cairo to examine and respond to these proposals. Its diplomatic behavior during the months following the October 7 attacks reflects a more effective approach to negotiations than during previous rounds of violence, as it has consistently sought to reach an agreement and refrained from giving the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any opportunity to blame the group for the continuation of the war on Gaza.
Over recent months, the Hamas leadership has welcomed a string of regional proposals, of which it has only rejected three. It has also discussed with Egypt and Qatar many details related to ending the war, achieving a comprehensive Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and reaching a prisoner exchange deal with Israel. This has side-stepped Netanyahu’s efforts put the ball in the Palestinian group’s court and keep it under relentless public and regional pressure.
Netanyahu’s U-Turn Blocks a Ceasefire
Just hours after Hamas announced its acceptance of the “Egyptian” proposal on May 6, war cabinet member Benny Gantz stated that what the group had accepted was not, in fact, in keeping with what mediators had communicated, and it had major gaps, something Netanyahu confirmed the next day.
This suggests that Israel rejected a proposal formulated in advance by its own officials—or at the very least, that regional mediators usually keep Hamas in the dark about proposals until their details have been agreed with Israel. It is worth noting that Israel has in recent months worked with CIA Director William Burns in Paris to formulate such proposals and present them to Hamas.
This raises an important question: Why did the Netanyahu government reject a proposal of its own making? The answer relates to a decision at a meeting of the Ministerial Council for Political and Security Affairs on May 5, unanimously backed by all members of Netanyahu’s cabinet. According to Israeli media outlets, Minister of Defence Yoav Galant had called on Netanyahu to approve the “Egyptian” proposal, which would guarantee the return of all Israeli hostages. The meeting came a few hours before Hamas announced its approval of the proposal.
However, it appears that Netanyahu and his government were betting on Hamas rejecting the proposal, given that they had already launched military preparations to invade the overcrowded city of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip, moves aimed at putting more pressure on Hamas and pushing it to respond positively to the “Egyptian” proposal. Over the days prior to Hamas accepting the package, Israeli and Western media had been examining the militant group’s position, attempting to embarrass it and step up the pressure it faces from Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza, as well as various regional parties that are accustomed to exerting pressure exclusively on the Palestinian side.
The Palestinian movement’s approval of the proposal thus came as a shock to Netanyahu, accentuated the contradictory domestic pressures on the leader of the most extremist government in Israel’s history. On the one hand, his allies from the religious far right have openly threatened to withdraw and topple his government if he reaches a truce with Hamas. On the other, huge crowds of Israelis have been demonstrating in Tel Aviv to denounce the war and demand that the government reach a prisoner exchange deal with Hamas.
This situation highlights the fact that the collapse of Netanyahu’s government would not only remove him from power, but also hurl Israel’s political system back into the confusion and political deadlock it experienced between April 2019 and November 1, 2022. During that period, Israel saw five rounds of legislative elections, demonstrating a chronic crisis within the Israeli political system. Both Netanyahu and the religious Zionists backing him fear such a scenario, being fully aware that Israel is facing a real political crunch point and a crisis within the political elite, from which no political leadership has emerged that is capable of managing the disagreements and contradictions within the system.
Here, their interests intersect. Netanyahu is not facing the world alone, but rather with the support of the Zionist movement and its leverage over the American administration regarding the war on Gaza. This means that the administration of President Joe Biden, the weakest in the history of the United States, not only provides unlimited support to Netanyahu, but is also taking part in planning for post-war Gaza. As soon as the Israeli army announced its attack on eastern Rafah on May 7 and closed the Rafah crossing, almost the only lifeline for residents of the Gaza Strip, the U.S. army resumed building operations on the pier. Palestinians fear that the port will be used to displace the population of the Gaza Strip, a reminder of how the population of northern Palestine was displaced to the surrounding countries in 1967.
As the Netanyahu government strives to thwart any truce agreement with Hamas and insists on launching military operations in Rafah, the fears of many in the Israeli elites are coming true. Israel has laid waste to most of the Gaza Strip, but failed to reach the hostages being held by Hamas or to dismantle the Palestinian resistance by taking out its leadership and communication systems. All this gives fuel to domestic criticisms of Netanyahu’s government, which is simultaneously losing its justifications for continuing the war. It will soon have carried out military operations in every city of the Gaza Strip, yet simultaneously lost its political pressure on Hamas, making it more difficult to reach a truce agreement acceptable to both sides.
‘The most difficult battlefield’
In conclusion, there is little immediate prospect of an end to the war in Gaza, given the realities in the battlefield and the political arena. Efforts to sketch out the future of the Gaza Strip, based on the outcome of the war, are still underway and preoccupying the Netanyahu government regional and international actors. The failure to achieve regime change in Gaza after more than 200 days of war has even pushed Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari to publicly admit the difficulty of getting rid of Hamas, describing Gaza as the most difficult battlefield in the world.
Netanyahu’s rejection of the truce deepened his woes with the Biden administration, which even took the unprecedented step of suspending a shipment of heavy bombs to Israel, sparking a wave of attacks from the Israeli right on the American administration, undermining the cover of legitimacy the administration has extended to Netanyahu in response to the October 7 attacks. However, the pressure on Netanyahu does not appear to be enough to force him stop his war, which still seems to be his best means of clinging to power.
