In Gaza this weekend, the mood is darker than it has been at perhaps any time in this long, appalling war. Last Tuesday Israeli warplanes, tanks, artillery, drones and ships launched a wave of strikes, shattering the increasingly fragile pause in hostilities that had brought respite to the devastated territory for nearly two months. The ceasefire had also brought hope which, Palestinians in Gaza said, made the return to violence that much more unbearable.
In a video statement last Wednesday, Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, called on 2.3 million people in Gaza to “banish Hamas”, saying “the alternative is complete destruction and ruin”.
Two days later, as air strikes continued and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) seized a key strategic corridor that divides Gaza, Katz issued a new ultimatum, this time telling Hamas to give up the 59 hostages it is still holding or “lose more and more land that will be added to Israel”. He said that the IDF would use “all military and civilian pressure, including … implementing US President Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents”.
These last lines were important. A second phase of the ceasefire deal agreed in January was supposed to start three weeks ago and lead to an eventual definitive end to the war. A principal reason for Israel ditching this plan in favour of a 30- to 60-day truce with no such endpoint is that Israel’s most senior policymakers feel not just empowered but even inspired by the new incumbent of the Oval Office.
The Israeli government has adopted Trump’s lexicon of internal enemies. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, last week railed against the leftist deep state that supposedly opposes the will of the Israeli people.
Trump’s loud proposal to displace the entire population in Gaza so it can be turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East” has made the previously unspoken desire of many increasingly influential actors in Israel into a project that can be publicly discussed – and even possibly realised in the relative short term.
Katz’s threats echo Trump’s almost word for word. “To the People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD,” the US president posted earlier this month.
Historians may well see the return of Trump to the White House as the inflection point in this current war.
Its first phase began with the horrors of the October 2023 surprise attack, when 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Hamas militants who attacked communities in southern Israel. Hundreds, young and old, were gunned down in their homes or at a music festival. More than 250 were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.This phase then continued through the first months of the hugely destructive and lethal Israeli reaction. A relentless military offensive killed some 29,000 people within four months. Families were wiped out by single strikes on homes. A tight blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel meant growing shortages of everything from cooking oil to anaesthetics. A single truce lasted 10 days.
A second phase of the war lasted almost a year, with periods of intense and deadly but often localised Israeli military operations. Gaza was plunged into an acute and protracted humanitarian crisis. There were marchers around the world but international outrage had only a marginal effect. Palestinians in the devastated territory survived as best they could, moving from ruined town to crowded tented camps and back to the rubble of their former homes in a desperate bid to avoid missiles, shells, shrapnel and starvation. There was no realistic plan for a “day after”, and few could envisage one.
The pause in hostilities in mid-January, which initially led to a degree of hope, may now be seen as the relative calm before a brutal new phase of the conflict. The threats of Katz, Trump and Netanyahu suggest what is coming next.
General Eyal Zamir, the new chief of staff of the IDF, has told Netanyahu that the only way to achieve Israel’s avowed war aims of destroying Hamas and returning the hostages in Gaza is through massive and completely unrestrained force involving large numbers of troops on the ground, say well-informed Israeli experts. This is what the prime minister and his cabinet, particularly those drawn from Israel’s surging far right, want to hear.
It is also what some Israeli strategic analysts and military experts have been arguing since the start of the war. A year ago, those saying that a military administration of Gaza – with the IDF controlling aid supplies and the population– was inevitable were ignored. But that is not the case now.
The plan to seize much of Gaza and “reorder its space in a more favourable way”, in the words of one Jerusalem-based expert who backs the military administration plan, also matches the thinking of the far right in Israel who see a chance now to at least partially empty Gaza of Palestinians. One way to do this is by making it unliveable and then finding some way to allow inhabitants to leave. There are military and political officials in Israel currently looking at ways of encouraging “legal immigration” – even if, given conditions in Gaza, any migration would almost certainly be illegal under international law.
The wave of air strikes last Tuesday came in a brief 10-minute period just after 2am, and appear to have primarily targeted middle-ranking and some senior Hamas political and military officials, of whom many were at home asleep with their often large families. This explains, to some extent, the apparently high proportion of women and children among the 400 casualties. Israeli officials have spoken of striking 80 “terrorist” targets.
Netanyahu described the wave of strikes as “just a beginning”. The Israeli prime minister has been guilty of speaking many untruths during this war. It is fair to assume this was not one of them.
