This isn't a 'war' — Israel is destroying a population
Starvation is just one weapon if eradicating 'the
enemy' is the Netanyahu government's ultimate objective
Jul 30, 2025
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/hamas-israel-starvation/
The prospects for negotiating a ceasefire and an end
to the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip appear as dim as ever. Israeli
and U.S. representatives walked out of talks with Hamas in Qatar that had been
mediated by the Qataris and Egyptians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu is talking about “alternative” means of achieving Israel’s
goals in the territory.
President Donald Trump, echoing Netanyahu’s levying of
blame on Hamas, asserted that “Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I
think they want to die.” Trump went on to mention a need to “finish the job,”
evidently referring to Israel’s continued devastating assault on the Strip and
its residents.
I have been thinking for a long time about the
negotiation of ceasefires. Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote a book, “Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining
Process,” which explored the diplomatic and military dynamics of how two
belligerents negotiate a peace while simultaneously fighting a war.
What is taking place in Gaza now is mostly not a war,
even though that term commonly is applied to the violence there. It is instead
a largely unilateral assault on a population and its means of living. It is a
situation in which one side, Israel, has — as Trump might put it — nearly all the cards.
The news stories emerging almost daily from Gaza are
not about pitched battles between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas
fighters. They are mostly not about battles at all. Instead, they are about the
latest large-scale killing by Israel of Gazans, mostly civilians, at a rate
that has averaged about 150 deaths per
day since the current
round of carnage began in late 2023. Civilians are killed largely with airstrikes but also more recently through getting shot while seeking ever-scarcer food.
Mass
starvation has
become perhaps the most gut-wrenching part of the Gaza catastrophe, and one
where Israel has again tried to shift blame onto Hamas. A longtime
Israeli accusation in endeavoring to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)—the principal international organization
with the mission of aiding Palestinian refugees, including in Gaza—is that
Hamas supposedly was stealing UNRWA-supplied food. Trump has echoed that accusation.
A study by the U.S. Agency for International
Development (before the Trump administration dismantled the agency) of reported incidents of
loss or theft of U.S.-supplied humanitarian assistance in Gaza found no evidence that Hamas has engaged in widespread diversion
of aid. More recent press
reporting shows that
the IDF itself has found no evidence of Hamas seizing or diverting aid.
Israel’s opposition to UNRWA has nothing to do with
Hamas or with theft of humanitarian aid. It instead concerns how UNRWA —
because it is a United Nations agency explicitly focused on Palestinians —
constitutes an international recognition that the Palestinians are a nation and
that many of them are refugees from their homeland.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza got worse once
Israel succeeded in pushing UNRWA aside. The U.S.-backed and Israeli-controlled
alternative aid scheme is not only woefully inadequate in meeting
immediate needs but also designed as an adjunct to Israel’s ethnic
cleansing objectives.
The limitation of aid to a few distribution points facilitates the forced
relocation of surviving Gazans into what amounts to a concentration
camp, as a possible
prelude to removal from the Gaza Strip altogether.
Some aid has recently been dropped into Gaza by air.
Airdrops are an ineffective
and inefficient way
of trying to relieve the starvation. The amounts delivered are a tiny fraction
of what is needed. The cost of delivery is far higher than by land. As
demonstrated by an earlier U.S. effort to deliver aid this way, some of the
supplies are lost because they fall into the sea or, even worse, kill people
crushed by falling pallets. But for some donors, an airdrop serves as a
visually dramatic conscience-calming gesture.
For Israel, it serves as a distraction from the fact
that the biggest impediment to getting humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip is
Israel’s continued land blockade of the territory. Valuing that distraction,
Israel itself has joined in the airdrop gesture. At the same time,
however, Israel continues to allow only a trickle of aid to cross the land border, with many
hundreds of truckloads left to spoil and be destroyed by the IDF.
In my decades-old book, I identified a type of war
ending that is an alternative to a negotiated settlement as
“extermination/expulsion,” meaning that the militarily dominant side physically
obliterates its opponent or pushes it out of contested territory.
Extermination/expulsion of the opponent is an appropriate label for Israel’s
objective in Gaza.
The prevailing Israeli conception of the opponent, or
enemy, in Gaza is the entire Palestinian population, an attitude that was
already well rooted on the Israeli Right before the Hamas attack in
October 2023 and has grown even stronger and
wider since then.
The deaths already inflicted, directly or indirectly, by the IDF have significantly advanced the extermination objective. The expulsion part has mostly been
the stuff of internal
Israeli deliberations,
although it came more into the open when Trump gave Netanyahu’s government the
gift of endorsing the ethnic cleansing with his Riviera-in-Gaza proposal.
Insofar as Hamas is defined as the enemy, the Israeli
objective of extermination has been more explicit. The Trump administration has
declared its support for Israel’s repeatedly stated objective of “eradicating” Hamas. Netanyahu, speaking to an internal IDF
audience last year, said that “we will kill the Hamas leadership” and
that this killing as well as acting “in all areas in the Gaza Strip” was part
of “total victory” that would be needed before military operations would end.
The objective of extermination/expulsion is an obvious
deal-killer. It makes no sense to expect the other party to a conflict to
negotiate its own eradication.
Netanyahu also has other personal and political
reasons to keep Israeli military operations going indefinitely. These include
delaying his full reckoning with corruption
charges and keeping
intact his coalition with right-wing extremists who are especially vehement
about eliminating or expelling Palestinians from Gaza and who strongly
oppose a ceasefire.
For Netanyahu’s government, any talk of a ceasefire
has little to do with getting closer to peace in Gaza. Instead, it is only a
temporary pause in operations that this government finds expedient for whatever
reason, be it logistical resupply, relief from diplomatic pressure, or
something else. As with the ceasefire earlier this year, the Israelis will
feel free to break
it whenever they no
longer find it expedient.
Hamas has wanted a ceasefire for some time, and why
shouldn’t it? Much of its leadership has indeed been killed, and its ability to resist further Israeli attacks is
badly battered though not eliminated. The longer the suffering
of the Gazan population continues, the more that Hamas may lose
support among those
who blame it for triggering the devastation with its 2023 attack. The group has
nothing to gain, and only more to lose, as the violence continues.
Throughout off-and-on ceasefire talks since last year,
the main sticking point has been that Hamas wants a clear route to a
permanent end to hostilities while Israel wants to retain the ability to resume
its attacks. Hamas also has tried to use what few cards it has to gain relief
for the civilian population of Gaza, by calling for unimpeded humanitarian aid and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from densely populated areas
so that residents can return to their homes. In addition, it has sought freedom
for some of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Press reporting based on internal documents from the recent
round of talks in Qatar shows that the Hamas negotiators worked closely and
carefully with the Qatari and Egyptian mediators to try to craft a viable
ceasefire agreement. Hamas had already agreed to the great majority of the content in a
framework document that the mediators said Israel had accepted.
The amendments Hamas sought were mostly focused on
relief for Palestinian civilians and aimed at getting greater precision and
clarity in the framework agreement. For example, regarding withdrawals of
Israeli troops, instead of the draft’s vague language about withdrawal to lines
“close” to what was in the January 2025
ceasefire agreement,
Hamas insisted that the negotiators talk in detail about specific lines on
maps. The Hamas negotiators offered their own proposals that made some
refinements of only 100 or 200 meters from the maps they finally were given.
Regarding release of Palestinian prisoners, in
response to the vague framework language, the Hamas representatives wanted to
negotiate specific numbers, to match the specific numbers of Israeli hostages
to be released in the framework. On humanitarian aid, Hamas wanted a return to
United Nations administration of aid distribution and a reopening of the Rafah
crossing with Egypt.
Having negotiated seriously on these and other points,
the Hamas representatives were taken aback by the subsequent U.S. and Israeli
walkout and by Trump’s accusations about Hamas’s alleged responsibility for the
breakdown.
Trump’s assertion that Hamas “didn’t really want to
make a deal” and instead wanted “to die” is nonsense. The talks in Qatar ended
because Netanyahu’s government decided it did not want to make a deal at this
time. As with most things involving Israel, the Trump administration fell in
line behind Netanyahu.
Blaming Hamas for continuation of the Gaza catastrophe
is another instance of treating a Palestinian resistance group—whether it is
Hamas or any other, and there have been many of them—as the cause of violence associated with
the subjugation of Palestinians and occupation of their homelands, rather than
as an effect of the subjugation and occupation.
Netanyahu in the past has found it expedient to treat
Hamas as something other than the evil incarnate that Israel portrays it as
today. Netanyahu earlier facilitated Qatari payments to Hamas as a way of building up
the group as a counterweight to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.
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