Trump plays with fire in Gaza

 

By James M. Dorsey

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US President Donald J. Trump’s Gaza plan could change the nature of the Gaza war and prolong rather than end the hostilities.

Amid calls for a unified Arab response to Mr. Trump’s plan to resettle or ethnically cleanse Gazan Palestinians, according to many Middle Easterners, officials, journalists, analysts, and social media activists are mulling options.

The options under discussion range from approaches that would give US companies a significant stake in Gaza’s reconstruction to the fuelling of a Hamas-led armed guerilla-style resistance.

Rather than welcoming ethnically cleansed Gazan Palestinians, US and Israeli officials and analysts fear that Egypt, the only Arab country bordering on Gaza, could serve as the funnel for the rearming and repositioning of Hamas as the resistance against the Israeli-backed Trump plan.

Hamas’ rebranding as a popular resistance movement would represent a stunning turnaround for a movement whose popularity had dropped to single digits.

Many Palestinians blamed the group for Israel’s devastation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

The rebranding would legitimise renewed Hamas rocket and missile attacks on Israeli cities.

Col. Shemer Raviv. Credit: Times of Israel

Col. Shemer Raviv, the commander of the Israeli brigade responsible for security on the 200-kilolmetre-long Egypt-Israel border, said smugglers’ drones carrying weapons and contraband into Israel posed the greatest cross-border threat.

Mr. Raviv said he worried smugglers and fighters could use explosives-laden drones and, eventually, unmanned aircraft large enough to transport people clandestinely across the border.

Rearming Hamas may be a last resort, if it is an option at all, but the fact that it is touted indicates the degree to which Arab governing elites view resettlement in Egypt and Jordan as a destabilising, existential threat.

The fact that Mr. Trump’s plan renders a successful negotiation of the Gaza ceasefire’s second phase even more unlikely than it already was before the president’s announcement enhances the threat of Hamas’ reemergence as the resistance against ethnic cleansing.

If the United States takes ownership of Gaza, negotiating an end to the war, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and the post-war administration of the Strip would be non-sensical given that the United States and Israel would have already resolved those issues as far as they are concerned.

Moreover, Hamas, despite moving forward with the agreed first-phase prisoner exchanges, may see no reason to agree to a second round of swaps if many of the freed Palestinian inmates are going to be either deported or resettled.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, speaking to senior administration officials and members of Congress after Mr. Trump dropped his bombshell, appeared to take on board the potential fallout of the president’s announcement as he laid out his conditions for an end to the Gaza war and suggested changes to the ceasefire’s terms.

Mr. Netanyahu had good reason to smugly grin as he stood this week in the White House alongside Mr. Trump when the president announced his Gaza plan.

 

Credit: Axios

Days before meeting Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu made sure that Steve Witkoff, the president’s straight-talking Middle East envoy, became not only the first senior US official to visit Gaza in 15 years but also the first administration representative to get an unvarnished view of the devastation Israel wreaked on the Strip.

Mr. Witkoff returned from Gaza, telling reporters, “It's physically impossible" for Palestinians to return to northern Gaza as envisioned in the ceasefire agreement. Israel laid siege to the north of Gaza in the last 3.5 months before the ceasefire came into effect on January 19.

“In any city in the USA, if you had damage that was 1/100th of what I saw in Gaza… nobody would be allowed to go back to their homes. That’s how dangerous it is. There are 30,000 unexploded munitions; there are buildings that could tip over at any moment; there are no utilities there whatsoever; no working water, electricity, gas — nothing. God knows what kind of disease might be festering there. I'm giving you a really granular view of the reality that exists there today," Mr. Witkoff said.

Putting on his ahistorical real estate glasses, Mr. Witkoff added in a Fox News interview that for Palestinians, “a better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space you are in.”

 

Gaza City. Credit: +972

Investigative reporting by Israeli sister media +972 and Local Call concluded that Gaza’s devastation was in part the product of bombing residential areas in the absence of knowing Hamas commanders’ precise location.

The just published investigation focussed on the use at times of of bombs containing byproducts designed to suffocate militants in underground tunnels and the military’s authorisation of high Palestinian casualty or collateral damage rates.

“Pinpointing a target inside a tunnel is hard, so you attack a (wide) radius… (of) tens and sometimes hundreds of meters” in bombings that collapse multiple apartment buildings, +972 and Local Call quoted an Israeli military intelligence source as saying.

In line with his approach to the war from day one, Mr. Netanyahu said he would agree to end hostilities if Hamas relinquished power and its leaders went into exile.

In exchange for what would amount to a surrender, Mr. Netanyahu said he would release "senior" Palestinian prisoners whom Israel refused to include in the swaps so far, provided Hamas agreed to their deportation.

He also suggested extending the first phase of the ceasefire to allow for the swapping of more Hamas-held hostages without ending the war, resolving the post-war governance issue, and agreeing on the terms of an Israeli withdrawal.

The ceasefire agreement envisioned the 42-day first-phase release in weekly stages of 33 of the 92 Hamas-held hostages in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons.

So far, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have swapped 16 hostages for hundreds of Palestinians.

Israel and Hamas have yet to negotiate the exchange rates for releasing the remaining 59 hostages in the ceasefire's second phase. Mr. Netanyahu suggested negotiating the terms for releasing several more hostages in an extended first phase.

Israeli officials doubted Hamas would accept any of Mr. Netanyahu’s terms. They said the impasse could spark the ceasefire’s collapse.

“We are still committed to the ceasefire and all the steps that were agreed upon, but it’s clear that until now, the Israelis have not fulfilled all that we agreed upon. They are till now preventing the essential needs for the Palestinians to go to Gaza…We have told the mediators that this will sabotage the whole process if the Israelis continue acting like this,” said Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan.

Credit: MEI

Egypt, a key Gaza war mediator, and other Middle Eastern states, although faced with a potential collapse and renewed hostilities in which Israel may feel it can forcibly expel Palestinians from their homeland, have good reasons for pursuing peaceful ways of countering Israel rather than violent forms of resistance.

Putting relations with the United States at risk, Egyptian support for an armed resistance against Israel would be the death knell for the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the first between an Arab country and the Jewish state.

This would jeopardize Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty and Israel’s more recent diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco.

Egypt has, by necessity, kept its lines open to Hamas, but there is no love lost between the group and the authorities in Cairo.

Egypt has long viewed Hamas as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has cracked down on the Brotherhood since overthrowing Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected leader, in a 2013 military coup.

For Egypt, potentially strengthening Hamas’ grip on Gaza would amount to an act of desperation.

Instead, Egypt and other Arab states are considering offering US companies significant reconstruction contracts in exchange for Mr. Trump abandoning the notion of resettlement.

The contracts could be the rebuilding of war-ravaged infrastructure across the Middle East and North Africa, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Gaza, or for Gaza only.

If for Gaza only, one suggestion would involve resettling Gazans to locations within the Strip while other areas are reconstructed.

Some sources suggested that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could use part of the US$600 billion he offered to invest in the United States during Mr. Trump’s four-year tenure as president to fund the reconstruction.

The problem is that time is not on the side of Egypt and other Arab states. The train would likely leave the station as the ceasefire collapses and the war resumes. Violence would loom large as reconstruction retreats into the background.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.