Gaza ceasefire: After 15 months of brutality, Israel has failed on every front
Palestinians mourn the death of loved ones killed in an Israeli airstrike, Nasser Hospital, Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 21 September 2024
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 15 January 2025:
When push came to shove, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blinked first. For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.
That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left for the army to do in Gaza. Still Netanyahu persisted. Last spring, he rejected a deal signed by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an offensive on Rafah.
In the autumn, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan, aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be treated as a terrorist. It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war, that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war crime and ethnic cleansing.
Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the Israeli border to the sea. The Netzarim Corridor would have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third and become its new northern border. No Palestinian pushed out of northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.
Red lines erased
No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this plan. Not US President Joe Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza; nor Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, who earned the dubious distinction of being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.
Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement, Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the truth. Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay in coming to this one.
It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war. After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.
Fighting back
There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza. A senior Israeli Air Force official has admitted that planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been resupplied by the US.