Israel keeping ‘no war, no peace’ to avoid entering phase two of Gaza truce
Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre, says Israeli attacks have been “more or less continuous” from the start of the latest ceasefire arrangement and will likely continue.
This strategy is about “keeping adversaries off balance and under pressure” in order to extract political concessions whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria, Sayigh told Al Jazeera.
A key question is whether the ceasefire will ever move into phase two, he said.
“I think there’s a lot of reluctance in the Israeli government to ever move into phase two, which means basically letting go of a big chunk of Gaza to international protection and governance, and that potentially could lead to the Israeli army having to pull out of the rest of Gaza,” Sayigh said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are trying to “raise the political stakes” so provisions in the ceasefire have to be negotiated over, he added.
Netanyahu wants to maintain a situation of “no war, no peace” – not just with Gaza, but also in the occupied West Bank and neigbbouring countries, Sayigh said.
US-brokered Gaza truce allows Israel to ‘continue genocide by other means’
Israel’s intensified attacks on Gaza indicate it has no intention of ending the war on the Palestinian territory despite the US-brokered ceasefire, an analyst says.
“Until this moment, Israel has not given up on its plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the idea of reintroducing Jewish-only settlements in Gaza,” said Muhammad Shehada, visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa programme.
“That’s why you see Israel dividing Gaza into east Gaza and west Gaza with an invisible ‘yellow line’ that is deadlier than the Berlin wall. East Gaza, nobody is allowed to live there except for the [Israeli army] and a few hundred gang members who are cultivated by Israel as proxy groups,” Shehada told Al Jazeera.
The biggest “red flag” during the start of the ceasefire should have been the reaction by the hardliners in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s far-right government, he added.
“Neither Ben-Gvir nor Smotrich resigned from Netanyahu’s government because both of those extremist ministers have repeatedly said if the war comes to an end, they would leave the government and collapse it immediately. But neither of them did because they understand this Trump deal is not going to end the war – it is allowing Israel to continue the genocide by other means.”
Gaza ceasefire: ‘Nothing has really changed’
Israel has carried out repeated strikes against what it says are “Hamas targets” during the ceasefire, resulting in the death of more than 312 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.
As we’ve been reporting, at least 33 Palestinians were killed on Thursday. Wednesday’s Israeli strikes on the Strip left 27 dead, according to the Gaza civil defence agency.
“The war hasn’t ended. Nothing has really changed,” said Mohammed Hamdouna, 36, who was displaced from northern Gaza to a tent in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in the south.
“The intensity of the death toll has decreased, but martyrs and shelling happen every day. We are still living in tents. The cities are rubble, the crossings are still closed, and all the basic necessities of life are still lacking,” he noted.
