Negotiations between Israel and Hamas over a ceasefire and the release of hostages have exposed two facts about the current state of the seven-month war in Gaza.
The first is that neither side is convinced that what is on offer is satisfactory enough to bring this horrific war to an end, even temporarily. The other – which has been a lesson for the mediators – is that they are unable to pursue an agreement that goes further than the combatants are willing to go. Instead, Israeli forces have advanced into Rafah, despite international criticism and condemnation, including from Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States.
Confusion and suspicion
The situation is even more tragic given that only a week ago negotiations seemed to be edging closer to an agreement. It was reported that Hamas leadership accepted a ceasefire proposal mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the US, only for Israel to reject the terms, claiming that it was not the same draft proposal it had agreed to.
The world is now watching Israel’s military operation in Rafah, which began with taking over the Rafah border crossing and the eastern part of the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, but is yet to advance into the city itself.
Despite this military development, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to send a negotiating team, albeit not a senior one, to Cairo to see if a truce and hostage release agreement could still be reached with Hamas. It remains unclear whether this move is no more than a smokescreen, while Israel’s true intention is a full-scale military operation in Rafah.
Yet what looks like contradictory behaviour to the outside world also has its own twisted logic, which epitomizes relations between Israel and Hamas.
The Egyptian-led proposal to which Hamas agreed did go through changes after it received Israel’s consent, thus outraging the already suspicious minds of the Israeli government which perceived it as a deliberate deception jointly engineered by Egypt and the US. The aim of that, according to Israel’s rationale, was to push it into a corner, and persuade it to agree to the Hamas demand that a six-week truce should turn into a permanent ceasefire.
Motivations
Israel still insists that the war will not end until Hamas is eliminated. Hamas is reluctant to release the hostages, who are its main if not only asset, without an Israeli commitment to ending the war. Hamas is playing a cruel game with the hostages and its own people, and in the gory nature of these negotiations claims that out of the 33 hostages that it would release, some would be the bodies of those killed during their captivity, or on 7 October and snatched and taken into to the Strip. At the same time their demand to end the war is not devoid of self-preservation logic.
Israel’s operation in Rafah is motivated by its objective to continue the war until Hamas is eliminated, and indeed the last Hamas brigade is thought to be in the city.
Israel’s second argument for the Rafah assault – which thus far has not proven to bear fruit – is that military pressure on Hamas is the only way the hostages will be released. A more cynical view, which seems closer to the truth, is that Netanyahu’s main concern in his desperation to keep his coalition together, which means appeasing the far-right elements in his government and completely ignoring the pleas from the hostage families and the international community, including President Biden, not to take this course of action.
It has become clear to the hostages’ families and many Israelis that for Netanyahu and his ultra nationalist-religious coalition, releasing the hostages is secondary to a full-scale military operation in Rafah. This is why they are back on the streets protesting. To those with this view, Netanyahu’s position on the negotiations is not perceived as brinkmanship, but rather as attempts to prolong the war for his own political survival, which is closely linked to his corruption trial.
The initially limited nature of the operation in Rafah was intended to signal to Hamas that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were capable of taking the Rafah crossing with little resistance. They now control all the crossings to the Gaza Strip, although not the tunnels underneath.
Entering Rafah city itself where around 1.4 million Palestinians, 600,000 of them children, are suffering unbearable conditions, many of them sick, injured and malnourished, is likely to result in further catastrophic consequences for the people of Gaza.
Warnings and threats
The fear of a full-scale IDF offensive has led President Biden to warn Israel that ‘If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah.’ For now, this pressure has made little or no impression on the Israeli government, but should Biden carry out his threat, it could quickly have dire consequences for Israel’s military preparedness. US aid to Israel amounts to nearly 70 per cent of its arms imports and some of the items it brings in could have significant impact on the battlefield which is significant in the Rafah context. That is aside from Israel’s dependence on America’s diplomatic support.
The urgent need for a ceasefire which will prevent another round of intolerable bloodshed in Rafah, is obvious. It would be a lifeline for the more than 2.3 million people of Gaza and offer the possibility of the future reconstruction of this tiny, albeit highly populated locality. It would also bring home the hostages and enable the return home of those evacuated from the northern and southern extremities of Israel.