VP Vance heads to Israel ‘to check on how things are going’ with Gaza truce
Vice President JD Vance, soon on his way to Israel, adds another layer of US pressure on the Netanyahu government to live up to its obligations under the Gaza ceasefire. Vance made no comments on Monday.
After heavy Israeli bombardment killed more than 40 Palestinians on Sunday, Vance told reporters that “we’re trying to figure it out” and “check on how things are going” with the Gaza truce.
He said that Muslim and Arab nations are expected to play a major role in keeping the truce going.
“Before we actually can ensure that Hamas is properly disarmed, that’s going to require … some of these Gulf Arab states to get forces in there, to actually apply some law and order and security keeping on the ground,” said Vance.
That's not what Netanyahu wants, he wants gangs to destroy civil order. US will have to stop the IDF from sending guns to clans and providing them safe harbor behind the yellow line in order to perform hit and run attacks on aid convoys.
Ceasefire may collapse as Israel blocks aid at scale into Gaza
If US envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law adviser Jared Kushner and Vice President JD Vance intend to make the ceasefire work, they’ll have to demand that Israeli authorities abide by the deal and allow more aid into Gaza, an analyst says.
“They have to allow in 600 trucks a day, minimum. It means they need to allow in the heavy equipment and the fuel for it, very crucially, to begin this process of digging out the thousands of Palestinian bodies and the 14 bodies of Israeli hostages that are left under the rubble,” Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies told Al Jazeera.
“There’s no way that the Palestinians can do that without getting that equipment in,” she added.
Bennis said the US officials will have to take “a very different approach where they actually put the pressure on [Israel] to get the aid in”.
“[Otherwise], this partial ceasefire, which is already teetering on the brink, is likely to collapse entirely,” she said.
Or will Gaza turn in another South Lebanon, no reconstruction allowed, daily assassinations, regular bombings.
Israel still fires on Lebanon almost a year after ceasefire
As a tenuous ceasefire took hold in Gaza this month, Israel launched more air strikes on southern Lebanon, 11 months into a ceasefire there.
Near-daily Israeli attacks have become the new normal in Lebanon, nearly a year after a US-brokered truce halted the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
Mona Yacoubian, the director of the Middle East programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said that Lebanon “could well serve as the model for Gaza, essentially giving leeway to Israeli forces to strike whenever they deem a threat without a full resumption of conflict”.
Yacoubian said she doesn’t see the situation in Lebanon changing any time soon, “barring a breakthrough in behind-the-scenes negotiations brokered by the US”.
With the Gaza ceasefire, she said, the difference could be the “significant role” of fellow mediators Qatar, Egypt and Turkiye.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry has reported that more than 270 have been people killed and 850 wounded by Israeli military attacks since the ceasefire last November. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has called Israel’s air strikes a “blatant aggression against civilian facilities”.
