Netanyahu scuppers Gaza ceasefire to shore up his political survival

Henry Kissinger, the most powerful U.S. secretary of state during the Cold War, once wrote that Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic policy. Rarely has this phrase been more true than Tuesday, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unexpectedly shattered the ceasefire in Gaza, before it had even reached its second month, with a massive wave of bombing that left more than 400 people dead, including numerous children and women. In fact, two words explain what happened better than all the justifications presented throughout the day by Netanyahu or his defense and foreign ministers, Israel Katz and Gideon Sa’ar. They are “as promised,” and they were uttered by Bezalel Smotrich — the far-right finance minister who favors permanently maintaining troops in Gaza and reoccupying it — as he celebrated the resumption of large-scale attacks. Two months earlier, he claimed to have received “assurances” from Netanyahu, the cabinet, “and other sources” that the war would not end “in any way” without “the complete destruction of Hamas,” in exchange for Smotrich remaining in the government, despite his opposition to the ceasefire with Hamas.

In case it wasn’t clear, Smotrich then took to the media to warn Netanyahu (in a leaked 2022 recording, he is heard calling the prime minister a “total liar”) that he could live with the first phase of the ceasefire, because it involved the return of 33 Israeli hostages, but not with the second, the truly important one because it entails the end of the war. He added that, if Netanyahu broke his promise, he would not only remove his party, Religious Zionism, from the coalition, but would also “make sure” to bring it down. Netanyahu then appeared to repeat the word “temporary” when speaking of the ceasefire, and emphasized that he had the “full support” of former U.S. president Joe Biden and his immediate successor, Donald Trump, “to resume fighting” if Israel unilaterally concluded that the second-phase negotiations were going “nowhere.” Since Netanyahu has been blocking its entry into force for a month and a half, they haven’t gone anywhere. Or, as Smotrich proudly said Tuesday: “This is why we’re staying in the government.”

Everything that has happened since January suggests that Netanyahu never intended to implement the second phase of the truce, despite signing it. “There is no other way to explain it,” Amos Harel, a military affairs commentator for the Haaretz newspaper, summarized Tuesday. “Israel knowingly violated the ceasefire agreement with Hamas — with U.S. approval — because it did not want to fully comply with the terms it had committed to two months earlier.” The “true objective” of the offensive, he added, is “a perpetual war on multiple fronts” that will allow it to ensure “a gradual slide toward an authoritarian-style regime.”

Increasing pressure

This is the fact that emerges amid the noise of the cross-accusations. Netanyahu has been boycotting the continuation of the same truce agreement he signed, apparently as a gift to an unpredictable Trump so that he could return to power with the conflict at least muted. He has committed serious breaches and increasingly pressured Hamas (which has almost completely respected the terms of the pact), in a demonstration of the former’s strategic strength (the White House has held the Islamist militia “fully” responsible for the resumption of bombing), and the latter’s weakness.

In violation of the agreement, Israel did not withdraw its troops from the Gaza-Egypt border; it did not allow the entry of convoys to provide alternative housing for the many Gazans who have lost their homes, nor did it allow bulldozers to remove rubble; and it killed more than 100 people in targeted bombings, which it intensified as a negotiating pressure measure. Two weeks ago, it blocked the entry of humanitarian aid and cut off electricity to the water desalination plant, the only line it had maintained since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. But, above all, it never initiated negotiations to move to the second phase, which the agreement stipulated for February 6. Thus, two and a half weeks ago, the first phase ended, without moving to the second, nor including exchanges of hostages and prisoners.

Sa’ar justified the latest strikes precisely because negotiations had reached an “impasse” that he couldn’t accept. “If we had continued to wait, we would have remained motionless, and it reminds me a lot of the first 20 days, between October 7 and the ground invasion, when there was a willingness or hope that perhaps Hamas would come to its senses and reach an agreement before then. Until that happened, nothing happened [...] Hamas has to learn the hard way that it cannot bring Israel to its knees,” he said in an interview at a conference in the city of Dimona.

“A political decision”

For Andreas Krieg, an analyst of geopolitical risks in the Middle East and North Africa and an associate professor at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, the resumption of the war is “primarily a political decision” by Netanyahu’s government, rather than a military one, after two months of “doing everything possible to scupper” the agreement. It has been “pressuring Hamas to release the hostages without making concessions” or trying to corner it into a position where it would be forced to launch a response that would serve as a “pretext for escalation.” Hamas issued a challenge in February, announcing that it would not release hostages that week, in protest at the accumulation of previous Israeli violations, but eventually backed down amid threats from Trump to open the “gates of hell” if the party-militia did not release all the captives at once.

Krieg also points to a military factor. With Hezbollah weakened in Lebanon and after two months of taking advantage of the truce to gather new intelligence in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have “much greater capacity” to resume the war “at a much lower cost.” Added to this is the fact that the U.S. “lacks a strategy for Gaza,” with swings ranging from the unrealistic plan of ethnic cleansing to transform it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” to attempts to open a parallel negotiation track with Hamas or to separate the hostage issue from the end of the war.

For now, Netanyahu has achieved one of his goals: the return to the coalition government of Jewish Power, one of the two far-right partners that guarantee Likud a parliamentary majority, along with the ultra-Orthodox parties. Its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, on Tuesday applauded the return to “intense combat” and will soon regain the National Security portfolio he held from December 2022 until his resignation — more theatrical than effective — due to the ceasefire agreement. Netanyahu must submit the budget before the end of the month. And, although the prime minister doesn’t need the support of Jewish Power numerically, he does need that of the two far-right parties. Furthermore, the controversial announcement of the dismissal of Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal secret services, could complicate such a significant parliamentary vote.

Even Israelis, who have again placed Netanyahu’s Likud party as the favorite in the polls since last summer, also largely see political motivations in his decision to prolong the longest war in the country’s seven-decade history. Yair Golan, the leader of the Democrats (the party born last year from the merger of Labor and the pacifist Meretz), on Tuesday described “the soldiers on the front lines and the hostages in Gaza” as mere “cards in Netanyahu’s survival game,” fearing that the announced dismissal of the Shin Bet chief would provoke mass demonstrations. This is the phenomenon known in political science as a rally around the flag: in times of war, the people tend to unite around the leader, setting aside political differences.

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