Several recent incidents have increased the pressure on Israel to end its war on Gaza.
There are serious signs that the Israeli government, under pressure from the U.S., is now moving towards an intermediate ceasefire state that all sides may be able to live with – at least for a while. The decision to do that however has split the Netanyahoo government and may well end the coalition which supports it.
After six month of operations in Gaza the Israeli government has reached none of its announced aims. Neither is Hamas defeated, nor have the hostages been released. There is no viable plan who, if not Hamas, will in future rule the Gaza strip.
Israeli settlers, who have been living near the Gaza strip and the northern border, are still not willing to return to their homes as the government lacks a plan to guarantee their security.
Pressure on the Israeli government comes from several sides.
The war has been extremely costly for Israel's economy. The called up reservists have been missing in their work places. The tourism business is down on its knees. Providing for those hundreds of thousands who have fled from their homes is costly.
Large protest have erupted within Israel demanding the return of the hostages.
International criticism of Israel has risen to unprecedented levels. Several UN resolutions have condemned it for its war crimes in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has ruled against it.
Only the support from the United States had allowed Israel to continue. But two recent incidents have jeopardized it.
The first was Israel's assassination of seven people who had been working for World Central Kitchen, a U.S. based charity with good connections to Congress. Forty members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, have since spoken out against further unconditional support for Israel. The U.S. government under Joe Biden had to acknowledge that. It finally threatened to end its support for the Israeli government.
Following U.S. threats Israel immediately increased the provision of food to the starving population in Gaza:
The Defense Ministry body that coordinates Israeli activity in Palestinian territories said that 322 aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip on Sunday, the highest one-day total since the beginning of the war.
The second game changing incident was the Israeli attack on an Iranian embassy building in Damascus. A hit on any embassy is a serious crime that concerns all governments in this world. Iran would be fully within its rights to retaliated for such a strike.
The U.S. was extremely concerned over this as any Iranian response might well hit the many U.S. installation in the Middle East and could escalate into a wider war with severe consequences for all sides.
This had to be averted. Iranian media report now that a deal has been made in negotiations between Iran and the U.S. Iran will refrain from a direct attack on Israel if the U.S. guarantees a ceasefire in Gaza:
Iran informed the US that it would refrain from responding to the airstrike in which senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders were killed in Damascus if a ceasefire in Gaza is reached, Jadeh Iran reported on Sunday.
The news outlet cited an anonymous Arab diplomatic source, saying the source spoke to the news outlet two days ago. The source added that "If America succeeds in containing the situation, it will be a great success for the Biden administration and we can build on that."
The report comes as negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal resume between Israel and Hamas in Cairo and as Israel continues preparations for a possible response to the Damascus airstrike that Syria and Iran blamed on Israel.
For the first time in six months ceasefire negotiations have suddenly become serious:
The state-linked Al-Qahera reported that Qatari and Hamas delegations had left Cairo and were expected to return “within two days to finalize the terms of the agreement.”
US and Israeli delegations were due to leave the Egyptian capital “in the next few hours” and consultations were expected to continue over the next 48 hours, the outlet added.
The report, which was not confirmed by any of the parties in the talks, came after Israeli officials had indicated cautious optimism on the chances for a deal in comments carried by Hebrew-language media, with Jerusalem giving its delegation wider leeway to make concessions toward an agreement.
“This time is different, we are the closest we’ve been in months to a deal,” Channel 12 news quoted a source close to the talks saying.
Yesterday Israel withdrew its last but one brigade from Gaza. Many in Israel interpreted this as an admittance of defeat:
Is this how the war ends? Not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with the IDF pulling its ground forces out of Khan Younis, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant asserting, in defiance of reality, that Hamas has “stopped functioning as a military organization throughout the Gaza Strip,” contradicting himself in the next breath, and clarifying a few hours later?
As Israel on Sunday marked six months since the October 7 massacre, the two prime declared goals of the war — destroying Hamas’s military capabilities and bringing home the remaining 129 hostages abducted that day — are patently unfulfilled.
…
Channel 12 TV’s military correspondent Nir Dvori, reading from his notes during the primetime evening news, presumably after a military briefing, echoed the assessment: “We have moved from war to fighting. The high-intensity [ground] maneuver is finished everywhere in Gaza. The operation in Khan Younis is done. [The IDF] is moving to the system of [more narrowly focused] raids.” Such raids were already being implemented in the north of Gaza, and now they would become the modus operandi in the south as well, he assessed.Making no effort to conceal his dismay at the material he was conveying, Dvori declared that “the hunt for [Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya] Sinwar now moves essentially to the realm of intel. And Israel, as we see, has given up on [its] two major points of leverage: both military pressure and humanitarian [aid].”
“After half a year,” Dvori unhappily summed up, “Israel remains with three big problems: how to return the hostages; how to bring the residents back home in the south and north [who were evacuated due to the fighting]; and how to set up an alternative to Hamas” to administer the Strip. “If Israel cannot achieve a framework for this, and I don’t know of one, then we are entering a very big problem for Israel,” he concluded.
The radicals in Israel's government also interpret this as a defeat of their aims. They are threatening to blow up their coalition with Netanyahoo over this:
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich issues a statement calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to immediately convene the security cabinet to discuss the state of the war in Gaza, after the army pulled forces out of the southern Strip.
“The only forum authorized to make significant decisions in war is the full [security] cabinet, but unfortunately this is not how things are happening, and we are seeing decisions being made in the smaller [war] cabinet without approval, without updating the full cabinet, under international pressure that is harming the war’s momentum and our security interests,” he says.
The Netanyahoo government had gotten too cooky. Its army's attack on U.S. supported charity workers and its attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus finally pushed the U.S. government to withdraw its support for the war.
Without support from the U.S. there is no way for Israel to continue a fight. Netanyahoo had to give up and did so.
We thus may now move towards a new balance of a lesser war which may sustain for a while but which can no be permanent.
The aim of Hamas' Al Aqsa Flood operation was to shatter the feeling of security and invincibility with he Zionist population of Israel. In has been successful in this.
The Israeli government has yet found no way to compensate for it.