After his trip to the US, Israel’s prime minister returns home in an apparently strong position.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reached the end of his latest trip to the United States and appears to have gained what he wants from President Donald Trump.
Trump hailed Netanyahu after their meeting on Monday, calling him a “hero” and saying Israel – and by extension its prime minister – had “lived up to the plan 100 percent” in reference to the US president’s signature Gaza ceasefire.
That is despite reports emerging last week that US officials were growing frustrated over Netanyahu’s apparent “slow walking” of the 20-point ceasefire plan – imposed by the US administration in October – suspecting that the Israeli prime minister might be hoping to keep the door open to resuming hostilities against the Palestinian group Hamas at a time of his choosing.
Under the terms of that agreement – after the exchange of all captives held in Gaza, living and dead, aid deliveries into the enclave and the freezing of all front lines – Gaza would move towards phase two, which includes negotiations on establishing a technocratic “board of peace” to administer the enclave and the deployment of an international security force to safeguard it.
So far, Netanyahu has not allowed in all of the required aid that Gaza desperately needs and is also maintaining that phase two cannot be entered into until Hamas returns the body of the last remaining captive. He has also demanded that Hamas disarms before Israel withdraws its forces, a suggestion fully endorsed by Trump after Monday’s meeting.
Hamas has repeatedly rejected disarmament being forced upon it by Israel, and officials have said that the question of arms was an internal Palestinian matter to be discussed between Palestinian factions.
So is Netanyahu deliberately trying to avoid entering the second phase of the agreement, and why would that be the case?
Here are four reasons why Netanyahu might be happy with things just as they are:
Netanyahu’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has also shown little enthusiasm for honouring the deal his country committed to in October. Speaking at a ceremony to mark the expansion of the latest of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, Katz claimed that Israel’s forces would remain in Gaza, eventually clearing the way for further settlements.
Katz later walked his comments back, reportedly after coming under pressure from the US.
Allowing an international force to deploy to Gaza would limit Israel’s operational freedom, constraining its military’s ability to re-enter Gaza, conduct targeted strikes or pursue Hamas remnants within the enclave.
So far, despite the ceasefire, Israeli forces have killed more than 400 people in the enclave since agreeing to halt fighting on October 10.
Politically, agreeing to an international stabilisation force, particularly one drawn from neighbouring states, would broaden what Israel has often seen as a domestic war into an international conflict with many of the strategic, diplomatic and political decisions over that conflict being made by actors outside of its control.
He’s under pressure from his right
It could also be framed domestically as a concession forced by the US and international community, undermining Netanyahu’s repeated claims of maintaining Israeli sovereignty and strategic independence.
“If Netanyahu allows a foreign military force into Gaza, he immediately denies himself a large degree of his freedom to operate,” Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said from Berlin. “Ideally, he needs things to remain exactly where they are but without alienating Trump.”
Netanyahu, however, has been arguing against a two-state solution since at least 2015 when he campaigned on the issue.
More recently, at the United Nations in September, he branded the decision to recognise a Palestinian state “insane” and claimed that Israel would not accept the establishment of a Palestinian homeland.
Israeli ministers have also been at work ensuring that the two-state solution remains a practical impossibility. Israel’s plan to establish a series of new settlements severing occupied East Jerusalem – long considered the future capital of any Palestinian state – from the West Bank would make the establishment of a feasible state impossible.
This isn’t just an unfortunate consequence of geography. Announcing the plans for the new settlements in August, Smotrich said the project would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Netanyahu faces numerous domestic threats, from his own corruption trial to the potentially explosive issue of forcing conscription on Israel’s ultra-religious students. There is also the public reckoning he faces for his own failures before and during the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, all of which will fall within a critical election year for the prime minister.
Each of these challenges risks fracturing his coalition and weakening his hold on power. All of them, however, could be derailed – or at least politically blurred – by a new conflict either with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon or possibly even with Iran.
Renewed fighting would allow him to once more present himself as a wartime leader, limit criticism and rally both his allies and adversaries around the well-worn flag of “national emergency”.
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