Netanyahu’s insistence on stating that he will attack Rafah pushes away the truce agreement with Hamas

While an Israeli negotiating team remains in Cairo trying to reach a ceasefire agreement to exchange hostages with Hamas, the country’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Tal Hashomer military base in central Israel on Tuesday. More than in an army facility, the photos distributed by his office to the media made one think of a talk at an institute. His audience was military service recruits, most of them teenagers, who listened to Netanyahu once again commit to destroying all Hamas brigades, “including those in Rafah,” a new allusion to the southern city where 1.4 million people are crowded. displaced out of a total population of 2.2 million Gazans. This statement, which is added to the prime minister’s announcement the day before that this invasion already has a date, complicates the achievement of an agreement that Israel and Hamas are negotiating in the Egyptian capital.

The pact should not only allow a new exchange of some of the 133 Israeli hostages who remain, alive or dead, in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners, but also a ceasefire that Hamas wants definitive and which constitutes one of the main obstacles in the negotiations. This Tuesday, a spokesperson for the fundamentalist movement, Sami Abu Zahry, told the Al Jazeera network that Netanyahu’s threats have led them to raise “doubts about the purpose of resuming negotiations.” “The success of any negotiation depends on the end of the aggression (war) against our people,” Zahry said. The negotiators of the Palestinian fundamentalist movement in Cairo have also called the Israeli position “intransigent.” Hamas has said that the proposal they have received from Israel for a new truce does not meet any of their demands, although they have promised to study it, according to Reuters.

In his address to his young audience this Tuesday, Netanyahu had again advocated destroying Hamas: “We will complete the elimination of Hamas battalions, including in Rafah. No force in the world will stop us. There are many forces trying to do it, but it will be of no use because this enemy, after what he has done, will not do it again.” He then recalled the goals of the war for the Israeli government: “Return the hostages, eliminate Hamas, and ensure that Gaza is never again a threat to Israel.”

Netanyahu’s threats do not differ much from those he has been making for more than four weeks. His words can also be interpreted as an attempt to appease his bellicose far-right partners in the Government, who have threatened to withdraw their support if he does not attack Rafah. Another hypothesis is that this constant reminder that Israel does not renounce this invasion—which makes even its main ally, the United States, fear that it will cause a huge massacre—is a way to put pressure on Hamas in the face of negotiation.

A piece of news reported by the Israeli press has increased concern about the possibility that these threats may end up coming true. The Israeli Ministry of Defense has published a tender to acquire 40,000 tents with a capacity for 12 occupants each, which could accommodate 480,000 people. An Israeli official cited by the Associated Press confirmed that these tents are intended to house a portion of the Gazans who are now taking refuge in Rafah.

Netanyahu’s insistence on the invasion of Rafah has broken with the cautious optimism that prevailed on Monday regarding the agreement for a new truce with Hamas, especially after Israel announced on Sunday the withdrawal of all its ground troops from the southern Strip. .

At the crossroads of satisfying, on the one hand, his far-right partners and, on the other, the families of the hostages who demand the pact, the prime minister seems to have leaned towards the first option, which guarantees his short-term independence. political survival. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir had warned him on Monday that he “would have no mandate to continue serving as prime minister” if he “decided to end the war without an extensive attack on Rafah to defeat Hamas.” Shortly after, Netanyahu released the statement in which he alluded to the fact that the invasion of Rafah already has a date.

With that front contained at least for the moment, Netanyahu will face this afternoon the other one he has active: that of the families of the hostages and the broad popular support they arouse. These families have called for a rally this afternoon at the doors of the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, with a slogan: “The agreement must be approved.” They have even given the prime minister a deadline: “The hostages must be released before Passover, the liberation holiday.” That holiday, which commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, is celebrated this year between April 22 and 29. In the first and short-lived truce at the end of November, 105 hostages were freed in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners.

Relative pressure

Added to the pressure of the hostages is the always relative pressure of their main ally, the United States. Washington continues to provide all types of political and diplomatic support to Israel, and, above all, sends it the weapons that that country then uses in Gaza. Even so, in recent weeks, Joe Biden’s Administration has been slightly raising the tone against its protégé, especially after the attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers, one of them American, on April 1. Only after a tense conversation with Biden last Thursday did Netanyahu agree to allow more humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Hamas, for its part, comes to the negotiating table in Cairo with only one trump card: the hostages it has in its hands, and it will not easily give it up for a momentary ceasefire that gives way to the announced invasion of Rafah. The fundamentalist group also wants Israel to allow hundreds of thousands of Gazans to return to northern Gaza, a demand that the Israeli government refuses.

Meanwhile, the bombings continue in Gaza. Between Monday and Tuesday, airstrikes in several areas of the Palestinian enclave have killed 153 people, according to the official Palestinian agency Wafa. These deaths have raised the count of registered victims – others are under the rubble – of this war to more than 33,300, according to data from the Ministry of Health of the territory governed by Hamas. The airstrikes hit neighborhoods in Gaza City, Deir al Balah (center) and Rafah.

In their phone call on Tuesday, Netanyahu promised to allow more humanitarian aid for Gaza. This Monday, the Israeli military body in charge of authorizing the passage of the trucks that transport it announced that 419 of these vehicles had entered the besieged enclave. The main United Nations agency in Gaza, the one designed to assist Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, lowered that number to 223, much less than the around 500 a day that entered before the war. The UN has also assured that many of these trucks entered the Strip half empty, due to rigid Israeli inspection rules.