Israel stalls Gaza ceasefire implementation while preparing to escalate the war, driven by political survival and supremacist policies.
Israel has shifted its primary war tactic to collective punishment through starvation and restriction of basic necessities. After failing to achieve any of their military objectives, an embarrassed Israeli Prime Minister is prepared to expand the war once again to ensure his own political survival.
The Gaza ceasefire agreement/prisoner exchange was set to be implemented in three primary phases, the first of which has now met its deadline. While Israel was supposed to have begun negotiations on the implementation of phase 2, some two weeks ago, it has instead dragged its feet and called for an extension to the first phase and the release of more prisoners instead.
When Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to the Gaza ceasefire deal, he did so while pledging to return to the war whenever he chose and to destroy Hamas.
Although his former security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, decided to step down from his cabinet position, he did not choose to try and collapse Netanyahu’s fragile coalition. However, the threat was issued by Ben Gvir and his extremist ally, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, that if Israel entered phase II they would collapse the coalition.
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Why is Phase II Important?
Why is phase II so important? This is when the war ends and Israel withdraws its armed forces from the Gaza Strip completely.
Although the occupation army has pulled out from the Netzarim Corridor that intersects north and central Gaza, it still remains in southern Rafah, some open areas near the separation fence and the Philadelphi Corridor.
Israel violated the ceasefire agreement around 15 minutes into its implementation with a string of civilian massacres, then continued to commit hundreds of violations of the deal every day since then.
It has blocked the agreed upon aid from entering the territory, including essential shelters like tents and caravans, also preventing the entry of medical professionals and transport of injured civilians to hospitals outside of Gaza.
Due to these cruel measures that were taken without any justification, newborn babies have been dying from hypothermia, as Israel continued to directly murder over 114 civilians through bombings and gunfire.
If Israel was to actually follow through with its commitments and end the war, it would be able to receive the rest of its prisoners in exchange for transferring more Palestinian hostages, yet it appears as if Netanyahu’s political survival is more important than the lives of his fellow Israelis.
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Supremacist Thinking
There are a range of issues that Tel Aviv now faces with the Gaza ceasefire, the most central is the failure to find an alternative rule to that of Hamas.
However, Israeli and US thinking on this matter has so far reflected the exact same maniacal racism that resulted in the crushing blow of the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. They speak of imposing restrictions on humanitarian aid and leveraging reconstruction in order to apply pressure upon the people, assuming they have no agency.
Both US and Israeli policy makers have made it clear that international law does not exist to them, that they operate by the law of the jungle to use their own vernacular, yet they still choose to opine on the alleged standards that ought to be upheld by the Palestinians and other global south populations.
If they were to have actually viewed the Palestinians as human beings, which the Israelis and the Western establishment (whether in media or government), they could have worked on building an alternative to Hamas, but they refuse to even give collaborators any space to work.
Instead they carry on with a level of supremacist thinking that enables a genocide to be carried out, believing that this will work to serve as a lesson to the Arab peoples not to mess with them, when in fact it only does the very opposite.
Israel, with the full support of its American and European allies, has carried out what amounts to one of the worst atrocities in human history, all of which has been broadcast around the world for everyone to see.
Incapable of looking in the mirror, blinded by a sense of unhinged ethno-narcissism, the solution being proposed for Gaza is either an Arab-led international proxy force to be used in Gaza, or a return to the extermination campaign that has been on temporary pause.
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Scrapping the PA
It appeared for a short time period that the Palestinian Authority (PA) – based in the West Bank – would perhaps play a role in the post war Gaza scenario, yet it appears as if the Israeli-US alliance is considering scrapping the PA altogether, after it failed to perform the task of eliminating the Jenin Brigades through a 41-day siege on Jenin Refugee Camp.
The US Trump administration has withdrawn funding from the PA’s Security Forces in the West Bank, while Washington and Tel Aviv have imposed legislation aimed at dismantling the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
These two above-mentioned steps appear to represent a clear strategy going forward, the elimination of the PA would mean robbing Palestine of international representation at the UN, while destroying UNRWA would prevent their being an internationally recognised registry for Palestinian refugees.
The answer to who rules the West Bank – which Israel plans to illegally annex – and the Gaza Strip, is potentially a foreign force that could work with some local elements in the occupied territories in order to serve as an Israeli proxy force.
This appears to be the direction we are headed. However, as this idea’s foundations rest upon the assumption that Palestinians are the equivalent of barn animals, it will fail dramatically.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has cut off all entry points for aid into Gaza, while asserting that he has ordered the Israeli army to prepare to summon 400,000 reservists. The blocking of aid instantly led to a spike in the prices of food inside Gaza, during the Holy Month of Ramadan. Yet, the idea that Israel could mobilise 400,000 soldiers is borderline insane, as it could not even do this in the advent of October 7, 2023, let alone now.
Assuming that this is the intention and that they could manage to do it, this large number of reservists would be way too much for a Gaza invasion, perhaps indicating they would be deployed to other fronts as well.
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Witkoff’s ‘Proposal’
The Israeli regime is currently threatening airstrikes against Iran, an invasion of Damascus, refuses to withdraw from southern Lebanon, has placed tanks in the northern West Bank for the first time since the early 2000s and still threatens escalation in occupied East Jerusalem.
The potential backlash that could come as a result of all these provocations is enormous. In the event that it re-launches a war effort against Gaza, Yemen’s Ansarallah has also made it clear that volleys of missiles and drones will be on their way to Tel Aviv.
If Israel is to re-open the Gaza front, it would be doing so with no real vision or strategy to bring about victory, instead choosing to bog their troops down, while other fronts wait to expand. It would be a huge drain on the Israeli military, even with the some 12 billion dollars in new weapons transfers approved by the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, US and Western media have been covering the Israeli violation of the ceasefire through the warped lens of “Hamas rejects ceasefire extension”.
What the corporate media professional fabricators have done here is twist the fact that US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff presented Hamas with an unworkable “Ramadan ceasefire” that would serve as a temporary extension to phase one of the ceasefire deal and something that no one in their right mind would agree to.
Witkoff’s proposal essentially scrapped the original ceasefire agreement, but is now being presented as if it is some kind of gift that Hamas is irrationally rejecting.
Hamas Urges UN, Global Community to Take ‘Effective Action’ against Israel’s Actions in West Bank
Egypt’s Proposal
In the background, Egypt is now putting forth a proposal of its own for how to end the war and reach phase II of the ceasefire deal, which is to be placed before the Arab League.
There has been a sense of urgency ignited amongst the Israeli-aligned Arab leaderships, who fear the destabilising effects of the US and Israeli proposals for the region.
Unfortunately, it appears as if however this plays out, we will continue to see the same racist arrogance driving US-Israeli policy across the region, which will in one way or another ignite more tensions.
Whether this will translate to a complete collapse of the Gaza ceasefire in the short term is yet to be seen.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
