Through the 16 months of the war, Benjamin Netanyahu refused to say what he predicted for the future of Gaza. However, the day of the showdown for the long -lasting Israeli leader and the broken Palestinian enclave may be nearby.
Netanyahu He should meet with US President Donald Trump next week at the White House, and the discussion is expected to agree on a temporary truce last month – and ready to run for another four weeks – to become a permanent truce.
From the outside, Netanyahu is dedicated to both goals he set up at the beginning of the war: destruction Hamas In the gaza belt and the return of all hostages seized during the attack group on October 7, 2023, which Israeli officials say they killed 1,200 people and launched a conflict.
But it is clearer than ever before these goals are almost certainly incompatible. Just as the fighting ended, starting a procedure that would eventually return 33 hostages, which appeared Hamas Gunmen to confirm control of the coastal territory, parading their weapons and organizing mass conferences.
It was shocking to the Israeli public that Netanyahu’s often “total victory”-despite a furious offensive for which local officials say, was killed by 47,000 Palestinians -ba Himer.
The war “did not force Hamas’s collapse or hostage release,” said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer. There were “tactical achievements, but there was no strategic direction. Hamas still rules, and still dominant actor in Gaza. Period.”
International intermediaries, led by the USA, will start talks about the second phase details next week truceIn what is expected to be a painful negotiations to ensure the freedom of dozens of additional hostages and forces the warring parties to agree to completely stop.
Netanyahu will soon have to decide if he is ready to see the agreement until the end.
On the one hand, he must turn to Mercury Trump, his most important international patron saint, who strongly armed the Israeli leader in accepting the initial 42-day trial and made the return of all hostages with his primary goal.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, must be held by the ultimate right members of their cabinet, such as the Bezalel Review, Minister of Finance. The show, who opposed the interruption of the fire, vowed to go and “dismantle” Netanyahu’s management coalition if Israel does not continue the war and stop gauze again after the first phase of the agreement ended in late February.
It is this apparent dilemma of Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist who has worked with Netanyahu in the past, described as a “sandwich of Bibi”, and nicknamed the nickname Veteran.
In contrast to the festival, “Trump wants to continue the agreement.. The goal is to finish gauze [war]”, He claimed.
Yet, in Trump’s turn, the figures and other ultra -nationalist leaders have taken repeated recent calls from the US leader to “clean” Gaza and move the majority of the population to Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim states.
“I work with the Prime Minister and the cabinet to prepare the operating plan and ensure that this vision of President Trump is realized,” said the Rev. last week.
Although Netanyahu did not measure the option – widely convicted as a form of ethnic cleansing that could seriously destabilize the region – a person familiar with the thinking of the Israeli government claimed that Trump comments “did not come as a surprise.”
“This is not an idea that just came to Trump,” the person said. “Israel was aware that he would say that. They [the US and Israel] are aligned and coordinated. “
Many, however, interpreted Trump’s inflammatory comments as an introductory gambite in major negotiations, not just in the future of Palestinian territory.
Like former US President Joe Biden, Trump did not secretly do his desire to relate the end of the Gaza conflict to the broader agreement on the normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which insists on the creation of a “irreversible” path to Palestinian situation. Normalization with the kingdom would be an incentive for Netanyahu to end the war – Riyadh does not want to agree until the conflict is raging – and provides its heritage.
As Adam Boehler, Trump’s delegate about hostages, said Israeli Channel 12 on Wednesday, “Arab states” should present an alternative option “if they opposed the plan of the US president. Trump is “always open to different options,” he said.
The preferred choice for Israel and its American allies, as far as it is, is the possibility that Hamas, as part of the negotiations for the second phase, willingly agree to lay their hands and heads in exile.
Netanyahu, said a person familiar with the Israeli government who thinks: “He doesn’t want more Hamas anymore [in Gaza]And he has support for that. “
However, different schemes that were floated by American Arabic allies such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates are more likely to create an international transitional body supported by the Palestinian administration for re -confirmation of civil controls over the enclave.
However, the Netanyahua government during the war was rejected by allowing, and, which has a limited autonomy on the occupied west coast, and Hamas was violently expelled from Gaza from Gaza in 2007.
Ava Issacharoff, Israeli analyst and co -founder Lie The television series, she said she was on, was the only real option for the “alternative regime” in Gaza.
“Trump should now condition the second phase on the entry and into the concessions of Gaza and Hamas,” he said. “They have to make Hamas realize that they cannot stay in power.”
Other analysts claim that the pure price of gauze reconstruction – estimated to do tens of billions of dollars – will limit Hamas’s negotiating power.
But Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence analyst, claimed that any such plan was “naive” and that it would perish. He said he would be attracted to – led by Oktogenar President Mahmoud Abbas – serve as a mere fig leaf that allowed Hamas to remain a de facto military force on the ground.
Instead, Milshtein claimed for the third time: to fulfill the entire dedication agreement for Gaza Gaza, return all the Israelites from captivity and admitted that Hamas would remain in power in the foreseeable future-to the next war.
“We cannot live with Hamas in Gaza, but we will need a big campaign in which we will have to take over Gaza, stay there for a long time and dismantle Hamas’s rule,” Milshtein said. “This needs serious planning, as well as domestic and international support. It will take years. “
Finally, Netanyahu did not rule out the possibility of returning to war – “in new ways to great force,” as he said last month – if negotiating with Hamas fell apart.
Two people familiarized with this question said Trump and Biden gave a written guarantee that they would return to the fight if Hamas violated the terms of the trial agreement.
What is crucial, it remains unclear whether it will include interrupting the negotiations on the second phase of the agreement.
But for now, Netanyahu has a few weeks to make a decision. It’s “long in this war,” said Shtrauchler, a political strategist. “Bibi is not a gambler – he’ll take what he thinks [contrasting] Options to the last moment and even wider, and then select. “
Cartography Aditi Bhandari
