Within minutes after the Ceasefire, north Gazans were returning to their homes which are now rubble and possibly nesting countless unexploded bombs.
The United Nations estimates this City of Rubble and Dead can’t be cleared and built again before 2040.
The road is long for rehabilitation alone, forget the two-state solution.
Very few believe that even the Ceasefire would go through as inked.
Netanyahu on his own won’t keep his word on Ceasefire: His government is one of coalition and giving up on Gaza would amount to signing his own death warrant.
We are talking of a country where elections happen every season.
Five elections had been held in three and a half years before Netanyahu’s Likud party cobbled together no less than eight political parties to gain the majority of 61 seats in a 120-member Knesset (parliament) in 2022.
There is no chance of Netanyahu remaining in power in the event of a successful Ceasefire.
There is already a court case against Netanyahu; globally he could be arrested as war criminal in a number of countries; and even at home, Israelis would bay for his blood for like Zelensky he has single handedly destroyed his own country.
Netanyahu has all along sought a military solution to his precarious political position but one thing we know from last 15 months is that no military solution is possible in Middle East.
The only way out of this quagmire is cessation of wars – or Netanyahu takes down a lot of countries including Israel with him.
Military Embargo
The most important deterrent to Netanyahu is if Israel runs out of imported weapons.
Most of Israel’s weapons come from the United States (60%) and Germany (30%).
But several countries even in the West and its allies have a military embargo in place for the genocidal regime.
The United States of course is funding Israel to the teeth. But it’s delivering its weapons not directly: Rather through many of these very countries who have military embargo in place.
But all this is changing.
Now the workers’ unions in various European ports are refusing to ship these weapons as legally it makes them criminals in defiance of military embargo.
In Greece, the union of one of the ports had information on weapons in a ship-container. They took that container to the fish market and guarded it before it was returned to its origin of departure.
Spain has stopped ships carrying weapons to Israel; it’s refusing transit of jet fuel which helps Israel bombs defenceless Palestinians from the sky.
Sweden has put in place a law where it would neither ship any weapon to Israel nor would let any such container pass through its ports.
In the United Kingdom, civil servants have demanded a written guarantee that they won’t be prosecuted for authorising and processing weapon export permits.
And then you have Global South where Israel’s biggest arms exporters, Elbit Systems have confirmed their sales have halved in recent months.
Netanyahu’s bluster
Netanyahu was quoted last year that if Israel can’t import weapons from abroad, he would fight with tooth and nail.
It evoked a shriek of delight in the propaganda media but local Israelis of course know better from history.
After the 1967 War, having seized Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, Israel found its main arms supplier France pulling out.
Israel had then vowed to build their own military prowess and they indeed worked very hard at it.
But then in the 1973 War, exactly six years later, it found its machine guns were no match to the ones supplied by the Soviets to its enemies, Egypt and Syria.
It was only when the United States stepped in that Israel could turn the war enough to have a favourable deal.
A War Run On Debt
Supplies of weapons from abroad is one thing.
The situation at home is no less explosive.
An Israeli government is bound by law to have its budget passed in October of every year — or the government falls.
This time the budget hasn’t yet been tabled in Knesset though overdue by three months.
In the budget drafts accessed by the media, tens of billions of dollars are proposed to be spent on beefing up Israel’s military capability.
Yet, Israel doesn’t have this kind of money.
This entire war of last 15 months has been run on debt.
The Trump Factor
So if Netanyahu quits in face of these impossible challenges, he ends up in gallows with the executioner’s noose in sight.
The only thing which could save him is if the Ceasefire deal fails.
It would imply defying the US president Donald Trump who one is not too sure would take it too badly.
Trump doesn’t want to fight Netanyahu’s wars.
Funding and arming Israel would only be enabling him.
Yet if he pulls plug on Israel, and it is no more, Abraham Accords and all that goes down the drain.
The United States would only have Gulf monarchies to play with in the Middle East.
But as we know, just the Houthis were good enough for them in the Civil War.
Iran and Turkey would then have an outsized influence in the Middle East.
The numerous US bases in Middle East would neither be safe nor profitable.
China would be closer to realizing its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and would grow in too big a size for the United States to encircle it.
So it is in the US and Trump’s interest that Israel continues to exist.
And that Ceasefire goes through and guns fall silent in the Middle East.
As said, the only hindrance is Netanyahu who somehow ought to be persuaded or deposed —both not beyond Trump’s reach.
Trump hasn’t hidden his dislike for Netanyahu by not inviting him in his inauguration ceremony.
What Next by Hamas
Beyond Netanyahu and Trump, there is this matter of Gazans, one of history’s most tragic people, who face death sooner or later.
They have a choice to join the tens of thousands of their fellows dead or keep resisting till Israel doesn’t remain a factor in Middle East politics.
For this resistance alone has brought Israel to its knees.
Or an October 7 would again erupt in future and this barbaric cycle of genocide would continue.
Israel has had countless Ceasefires and Accords since the one in Camp David in 1979: And none of it has Israel ever honoured.
Hamas surely knows it as so too the battered Palestinians.
Israel is in its softest spot in decades and Trump has just confirmed it.
It’s time for the Axis of Resistance to double down rather than let be moved around the Middle East chessboard by Netanyahu and Trump.
The enormous price of lives lost and Hamas weakened would amount to little if Israel recovers its breath and genocide resumes.
As it is, Israel is repeating the genocide dose on Palestinians in West Bank since Ceasefire deal.
the Two-State solution is simply not possible between the two.
Israel giving up on its Greater Israel dream? That too to “sub-human” as they call the Palestinians? No chance.
No government in Israel would survive if it goes against the very core Zionist ideology.
Thus more than Netanyahu, it’s in Hamas and Palestinians’ interest that the Ceasefire fails.
Or if it goes through, look to settle the Israeli question once for all.
