The lamentations about the lack of a ceasefire in Gaza, to say nothing of a political settlement that will end the war and enable the territory’s postwar governance and reconstruction, deny a reality that by now ought to be undeniable. The Israeli government, an amalgam of the far-right Likud Party and the further right, messianic religious parties, Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionist Party, has no interest whatever in negotiations that silence the guns. To believe otherwise amounts to indulging in fantasies.
One sign that a state doesn’t want ceasefire talks to succeed is its attempt to kill its interlocutors—and in a third country that is acting as one of the mediators, no less. That’s exactly what Israel did when it took aim, unsuccessfully as it turned out, at a group of Hamas’s political leaders, including its chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya. They were, mind you, gathered in Qatar at the behest of the United States and the Qatari government, to study Israel’s proposals for a ceasefire and to offer ideas of their own.
That Qatar is closely aligned with the United States and hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East—al-Udeid Air Force Base—didn’t give Israel pause. To the contrary, despite the widespread condemnation of the attack, the response of Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Yechiel Leiter, was to say that the assassination attempt had failed but that “if we didn’t get them this time, we’ll get them next time.” Not a hint of contrition from Netanyahu’s government. That’s not surprising. About all that Trump—who’d recently been gifted the equivalent of a second Air Force One by Qatar’s monarch and whose family has done various business deals worth billions of dollars with the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms—did was to say that he wasn’t “thrilled about the whole situation” and felt “very badly” that it had happened. Trump also claimed that the US wasn’t told in advance about the Israeli strike on Doha. But that begs the question of how the United States, given its substantial military presence in Qatar, could possibly have failed to detect it, even if it wasn’t told in advance.
If this is the mealy-mouthed response from Israel’s indispensable ally, why would Netanyahu not try something similar again? It’s often said that Israel has become progressively more isolated internationally because of the slaughter in Gaza. But Netanyahu couldn’t care less—so long as he can count on unconditional American support, which Israel has received regardless of who occupies the White House. This was apparent from the Prime Minister’s statement during a press conference held with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was on a two-day visit to Israel this week, that Israel would launch further attacks on Hamas’s leaders in third countries and that they would be vulnerable “wherever they are.”
The attack on negotiators in itself isn’t an unprecedented act by Israel. For example, as part of its June strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel targeted top-level Iranian military and political officials, including Ali Shamkhani, who had led the talks with the United States aimed at regulating Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and preventing its morphing into one that builds nuclear bombs. After the June attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz stated that Israel had even sought to kill Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during the operation but couldn’t find a way to do it.
Netanyahu bombed Iran because in his view agreements with Tehran, such as the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which he persuaded President Donald Trump to ditch in 2018, are useless. For the Prime Minister, nothing short of toppling the Islamic Republic itself will suffice.
Netanyahu takes the same view of the war in Gaza: his avowed aim has been to destroy Hamas as a military and political movement. If that is the premise, how can Israel’s participation in ceasefire negotiations be anything other than a going-through-the-motions gambit aimed at blaming Hamas for any and all failures?
If you want more proof for this conclusion, consider the fate of the single substantive effort by Western and Arab mediators to achieve a political solution to the war in Gaza. On January 15, Israel and Hamas reached agreement on the text of a three-phase diplomatic process, each lasting 42 days, the last providing for talks on the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza and the enclave’s postwar governance and economic reconstruction. The opening phases involved the staggered release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Israel’s freeing, on each occasion, of a much larger number of Palestinian political prisoners from its jails. That exchange proceeded as planned, but once the timetable called for talks on the IDF’s withdrawal from Gaza, Netanyahu abandoned the talks unilaterally on March 18and resumed the war, ending a ceasefire that had lasted two months.
The talks were doomed from the start. The ultra-hardliners in Netanyahu’s cabinet, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, opposed signing the negotiation agreement from the get-go. To buy their support, Netanyahu, assured Smotrich in advance that he wouldn’t allow the talks to culminate in a full IDF pullout, let alone a permanent end to the war.
What did Washington, one of the parties that had sponsored the talks, say or do? Nothing. So again, why would Israel hesitate to deep-six any talks on a ceasefire once it concludes that proceeding further would prevent it from destroying Hamas (something it has failed to do in nearly two years of fighting and despite having an overwhelming advantage in firepower)?
As for why Netanyahu accepted the January agreement to begin with, he saw two advantages, both political. It was not to Israel’s advantage to be seen as rejecting talks with Hamas outright, especially when they were part of an agreement backed by the United States. Plus, given the large, relentless street demonstrations within Israel demanding a ceasefire to enable the return of the hostages, a deal that would bring back at least some of them was a gesture to Israeli public opinion.
Since its withdrawal from the January accord, Israel has shown no inclination to negotiate—unless Hamas agrees to release all hostages and disarm itself, but without receiving any assurance that the IDF would actually withdraw from Gaza and that there would be a permanent ceasefire guaranteed by the United States and Arab governments. Netanyahu’s government has portrayed Hamas’s unwillingness to accept this Carthaginian peace as proof that the movement is not serious about ending the war.
The record shows otherwise.
Drop Site News reports that Hamas has offered to release ten living hostages and the bodies of 18 over a two-month period and to accept two key Israeli demands: a continued IDF presence in the Philadelphi Corridornorth of the Gaza-Egypt border and buffer zones that extend even deeper into Gaza than it had been willing to accept. Hamas has also consented to the continued role of the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s role as the distributor of aid to Gaza. This even though 2,000 Palestinians have been shot by the organization’s security guards while waiting for food at its distribution points (which total four, all but one in southern Gaza, far from the territory’s most populated areas, such as Gaza City).
Israel, by contrast, has just launched its full-scale assault on Gaza City, home to a million Palestinians, including the bombardment of high-rise apartment buildings, a move that will create another wave of refugees, who, even at this early stage of the operation, total 250,000 people. The death toll in Gaza now exceeds 60,000. Israel’s government has dismissed the figure as nothing more than propaganda put out by Hamas’s Health Ministry. But that claim is wearing thin. The IDF’s former Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevy—certainly not a dove—acknowledged recently that 200,000 Gazans have been killed or wounded since the war began. The British medical journal The Lancet as well as a study by a group of scholars including Professor Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London, a renowned expert on wartime deaths, concluded that the Health Ministry’s tally was an undercount by as much as 40%.
What’s more, all of these calculations include only violent deaths. If fatalities attributable to disease, starvation, and malnutrition (even without taking account of the bodies entombed in the 50 million-plus tons of rubble in Gaza, which the UN estimated in April totaled 11,000) are included, the total number of deaths may now be substantially higher because the ratio between direct and indirect deaths in wars substantially favors the latter. (I’ve appended to the end of this post the link to one report that concludes that overall deaths in Gaza may have exceeded 600,000.)
In short, there’s no reason to believe that Netanyahu’s government has abandoned its goal of destroying Hamas. The corollary is that it is not serious about a ceasefire in Gaza. Its ultimate goal is to find a way to reverse Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s dismantling of the 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza, to resettle the territory in whole or in part, and, if possible, to expel the Palestinian population. Netanyahu praised Trump’s February proposal to relocate Gaza’s population in order to build a “Riviera” as “a brilliant vision.” Indeed, in October 2023, soon after Hamas’s attack, Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence produced a document proposing the permanent expulsion of Gaza’s Palestinians to Egypt. Netanyahu’s government continues to press the Egyptian government to agree to this plan—even to the point of holding up a planned $35 billion gas project—and has also said that it has been conducting discussions with various countries about taking in Palestinians expelled from Gaza. Finance Minister Smotrich has been open about reestablishing settlements in Gaza, which he called“an inseparable part of the land of Israel,” and both he and National Security Minister Ben Gvir favor the “voluntary” relocation of the local population. Not only does this idea of annexing and settling Gaza have widespread support within Israel’s far right, polls show that a majority of the wider public—82 percent according to a March survey—favors the expulsion of Gazans from their homeland.
So next time you read about the stalled peace talks between Hamas and Israel, keep in mind that one of the two parties has never had any interest in their success—except on terms that, as it knows full well, the other will never accept.