The coordinated chorus of despair by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and their various henchpersons and flacks was quite impressive. The message was that everybody should stop hoping for a negotiated peace. Netanyahu has stared Trump down once again and the four-month pantomime search for a new ceasefire in Gaza is at an end.
On 19 July Steve Witkoff, Trump’s billionaire real estate pal and lead diplomatic negotiator, said: “Hamas does not appear to be co-ordinated or acting in good faith. We will now consider alternative options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza. It is a shame that Hamas has acted in this selfish way.”
Trump himself, speaking from the White House, was more colourful: “Hamas didn't really want to make a deal. I think they want to die. Now we are down to the final hostages, and they know what happens after you get the final hostages. And basically because of that, they really didn't want to make a deal.”
Of course, the surviving junior members of Hamas (all the senior ones are dead) didn’t want the only deal Israel is willing to offer them. A 60-day ceasefire during which all Israeli hostages are released, followed by a resumption of the war until the Hamas fighters are all dead or driven out of Gaza, was never a plausible offer. Might as well die fighting.
Similarly, the current Israeli government would never offer Hamas a better deal. Most of its members share Netanyahu’s determination is that the Gaza Strip should be largely or wholly “cleansed” of its Palestinian population, although there is not full agreement on what should follow: Israeli control and Jewish settlement, or Trump’s “Riviera on the Mediterranean”.
All the back-and-forth diplomacy of the past six months was just for show, and the only audience that mattered was Trump. His naive belief that his personality alone could persuade bitter opponents in both Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine to sign peace deals had to be indulged for a while, because the United States is so powerful, but it was never realistic.
The last ceasefire in Gaza, declared one day before Trump took office in late January, was a precautionary measure taken by both sides while they tried to make sense of what the new president intended. When Netanyahu realised that Trump was even easier to manage than Joe Biden was, he unilaterally broke that ceasefire in mid-March.
Through March, April and most of May, Israel blocked all food, water, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza, most of whose 2,1 million civilians were near starvation by the time.
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Israel restarted deliveries. But now it was no longer international aid distributed from 400 neighbourhood locations in the Strip.
Instead, it’s the four massive centres of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, controlled by American mercenaries and Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers. They are only open for a few minutes twice a day, people have to walk for hours to reach them, and every day some are shot by the IDF or the mercenaries.
The number of Palestinians killed rarely exceeds a hundred a day and is often just a dozen or so, but the amount of food delivered by the new system since May 26 amounts to only one meal per person every second day. Since distribution is so erratic, moreover, many people are getting far less and the deaths from this artificial famine continue to grow.
It’s not clear whether this is random malevolence or mere incompetence, but it is accompanied by an IDF military campaign that has brought 89% of Gaza’s land under direct Israeli military occupation. For Palestinian civilians, these are virtually free fire zones.
Trump’s last flailing attempt to bring Netanyahu to heel failed during the latter’s recent visit to Washington, and Bibi is now off the leash. He no longer needs to pretend he is negotiating for a ceasefire to keep Trump happy. On July 26 he wrote on X: “Together with our US allies, we are now considering alternative options.”
The next three months is the summer recess of the Knesset (parliament), traditionally the time when Israeli governments make controversial decisions.
It would be the ideal time to activate Netanyahu’s plans for the future of Gaza, if he has any. So what “alternative options” might he be considering?
Is this when Defence Minister Israel Katz puts into action his plan to build a giant concentration camp (sorry, “humanitarian city”) on the ruins of Rafah to hold 600 000 Palestinians?
Will the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians to other countries willing to take them also start? Bribes (sorry, “relocation assistance”) will be available.
Will Jewish settlement in the Strip start? Will Trump reveal his plans for Gaza-sur-Med?
l Dyer is a London-based independent journalist. His new book is titled Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. Last year’s book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available.
