Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ashraf al-Hur reports at al-Quds al-`Arabi [Arab Jerusalem] that the extremist government in Israel has escalated its military attacks on the Gaza Strip in the past few days. The moves come after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to start the second phase of the ceasefire deal earlier this week, making some observers suspect he has no intention of fulfilling that bargain.
Still, Aljazeera reports that Netanyahu, after stiffing the negotiators for a week, has finally agreed to send an envoy to Doha, Qatar, to explore an American proposal that Hamas release another 10 Israeli hostages in return for an extension of the ceasefire. The Trump administration appears to have negotiated this suggestion directly with Hamas, deeply angering Netanyahu.
When Netanyahu reneged on beginning phase two last Saturday after a 42-day ceasefire, he blocked all goods from going into Gaza, creating more misery among the civilians there, who saw sudden food shortages and price spikes that they cannot afford.
This deliberate starvation of civilians, which is quite illegal in international law and violates the provisional measures ordered by the International Criminal Court, is intended to force Hamas to return all the hostages immediately. Netanyahu appears to intend to start back up his total war on Gaza, which has already killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with some 70 percent of those murdered from the skies consisting of children, women and elderly men.
Al-Hur argues that the planned return to total war is in part a bid by Netanyahu to keep his far-right coalition in the government, since the Minister of Finance and leader of the small Religious Zionism bloc, Bezalel Smotrich, has threatened to withdraw from the government and provoke new elections should a genuine peace deal be implemented.
Smotrich is also threatening to cut water off to the Gaza Strip again.
“Blockaded,” Digital, Midjourney, 2025
The Israeli government is preventing the entrance into Gaza, which it surrounds, of food, medicine and fuel. Even before the renewed blockade, not enough such goods were entering the territory, after 14 months of total war had made all the 2.3 million people of Gaza into homeless paupers.
The Ministry of Social Development in Gaza said that the closure of the checkpoints threatens a serious humanitarian catastrophe, since most Palestinians in Gaza depend on aid as their sole means of survival, given that Israel destroyed the farmland, infrastructure and crops in the Gaza Strip.
The new blockade raises the specter of famine and the deprivation of all food sources to Palestinians residing there. Bakeries will have to stop working for lack of flour and fuel. The aid stoppage menaces the lives of some 290,000 children and 140,000 elderly, who are especially vulnerable to hunger and freezing cold. Likewise, tents are not being allowed in, forcing thousands of famililies to continue to sleep rough.
The Mezan Human Rights organization says the blockade also threatens the lives of 12,000 wounded and critically ill patients, since the Israelis are also interdicting medicine. Mezan complains that the impunity granted Netanyahu’s extremist government has emboldened it to violate the Geneva Conventions and other bodies of International Humanitarian Law.
Meanwhile, Israel is engaged in kinetic war-making again in Gaza, killing three Palestinians in drone strikes and an artillery barrage on Saturday.
Although Netanyahu, his defense minister, and the new chief of staff, are rattling sabers about going back to war to retrieve the remaining hostages from Hamas, this course is much more likely to kill the hostages than to rescue them.
Crowds of protesters thronged Tel Aviv Saturday demanding that Netanyahu pursue peace negotiations as the only sure way of getting back the Israelis taken captive.
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