On September 22, two weeks before the anniversary of the commencement of the Gaza conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a serious escalation in the war on Hezbollah in Lebanon, reminding the militia of the “string of strikes that it didn’t imagine” and warning of further lethal attacks. The next day, Israel attacked about 1,300 Hezbollah targets with “extensive, precise strikes”. Lebanese sources said nearly 500 people were killed and several thousand injured. Meanwhile, Hezbollah responded with rocket attacks in northern Israel and said that these attacks would continue until a ceasefire was agreed to in Gaza. Israel claims that it wishes to end Hezbollah’s rocket attacks so that 60,000 Israelis displaced from northern Israel can return home.
From September 20, Israel had begun air attacks in Lebanon in which two senior Hezbollah commanders, Ibrahim Aqil and Mohammed Wahbi, were killed. A few days earlier, on September 17, Israel carried out a dramatic attack on Hezbollah: 3,000 pagers used by Hezbollah cadres exploded after a coded message was sent to them, killing 17 people and injuring over 2,000. Initial reports said that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers, produced in Budapest under licence from a Taiwan company, for internal communications purposes to evade Israeli location-trackers.
Although Israel has made no official claim of its involvement, US intelligence sources have confirmed that Israeli agents had inserted 3 grams of explosives into the devices during manufacture; these were activated simultaneously to strike a dramatic blow at Hezbollah. A day later, Israel carried out another attack on Hezbollah targets: at funerals for the victims of the earlier attack, walkie-talkie devices were exploded, which killed nearly 20 people and injured over 400. The attacks have struck a harsh blow to Hezbollah cadres and signalled Israel’s technological competence and its lethal outreach.
War in Gaza and the West Bank
The recent cycle of violence in West Asia began on October 7 last year with the attack on Israeli targets by Hamas in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and over 200 were taken hostage. In retaliatory attacks since then, over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with another 700 killed in the West Bank. As many as 70 per cent of those killed in Gaza have been women and children. More than 85 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been internally displaced.
The funeral procession of Ibrahim Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 22, two days after he was killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Beirut. | Photo Credit: AFP
In the West Bank, several among the 7,00,000 Israeli settlers have been attacking Palestinians over the past several months. This violence has increased since the start of the Gaza war: from October 7, about 1,250 settler attacks on Palestinians have taken place. The intention of the settlers is to drive out resident Palestinians from most, if not all, of the West Bank by attacking Palestinian villages and destroying infrastructure, water supplies, olive groves, and livestock. A report of the International Crisis Group pointed out: “Israeli settlers [are] harassing, terrorizing and killing Palestinians across the West Bank in greater numbers and with greater frequency and fervour.”
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In support of the settlers, from August 31, the Israeli armed forces began “Operation Summer Camps” in the West Bank, raiding diverse areas in the occupied territory on the pretext of conducting counterterrorism operations. Palestinians believe the real intention is to annex more territory to expand Jewish settlements. Over 10,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli security forces.
Israel’s ‘ring of fire’
From the beginning, the current conflict has not just been an Israel-Hamas confrontation; it has included the mobilisation of the Iran-led “axis of resistance” so that, according to Netanyahu, Israel faces a “seven-front” war, with hostile elements in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself. Israel sees this as a “ring of fire” around itself, consisting of militias armed with rockets and drones.
This axis, according to the Israeli commentator Yossi Alpher, constitutes “Iran-backed attempts to generate aggression against Israel from the east”. While this “aggression” is at present “hesitant and limited”, it has already displaced about 1,00,000 Israelis from their homes in the north (the border with Lebanon) and has also included direct military exchanges between Israel and Iran, as also Houthi attacks on Israel, all unprecedented events. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu has described Israel’s ongoing conflict as “an existential war against a stranglehold of terrorist armies and missiles that Iran would like to tighten round our neck”.
Ceasefire and the US role
After extending full support to Israel at the start of the current conflict and ensuring a steady supply of weaponry to meet Israel’s needs, the US has been concerned about the rising death toll, the burgeoning humanitarian crisis, and the possibility of a wider regional conflict perhaps even involving its own forces in a West Asian war. For several months, it has been pushing hard for a ceasefire, but President Joe Biden has found a formidable adversary in Netanyahu. Itamar Rabinovich wrote in a Brookings commentary that at the root of US-Israeli differences is “Netanyahu’s calculated willingness to confront rather than accommodate his American counterpart”.
Thus, the Israeli Prime Minister snubbed Biden when the latter announced, on May 31, a detailed Israeli proposal to obtain a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages. Netanyahu publicly demurred: he said he had instructed his negotiators that there could be no deal to end the war “before all goals had been achieved, including the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities in Gaza”.
Israeli security and rescue forces at the site of a building hit by a rocket fired from Lebanon, in Kiryat Bialik, northern Israel, on September 22. | Photo Credit: Gil Nechushtan/AP
Efforts to revive the ceasefire deal re-emerged at the end of August, but they again have gone nowhere; contrary to the earlier US understanding with Hamas and Egyptian and Qatari mediators, Netanyahu insisted that Israel would control the Philadelphi Corridor that is located along the Rafah crossing in south Gaza at the border with Egypt and is 14 km long and 100 metres wide.
Netanyahu insists on Israeli control in order to prevent the movement of arms and tunnel-drilling equipment into the enclave, referring to the corridor as Hamas’ “lifeline”. Netanyahu has not only upset Egypt, which patrols the corridor, but even the Israeli people have not been impressed: they have come out onto the streets in their thousands to condemn their Prime Minister and demand the ceasefire agreement to get the hostages back; however, Netanyahu has remained unmoved.
Critics believe the corridor issue is Netanyahu’s deliberate attempt to distract the Israeli public and avoid a scrutiny of his failures to protect his people from the Hamas attacks on October 7. As the ceasefire deal floundered, by early September another 4,000 Palestinians had been killed.
A wider regional conflict has so far been averted largely because of the US’ massive deployment of weaponry in the region, which has acted as a deterrent. However, with the US administration nearly paralysed and incapable of restraining Israel’s bloodlust, Netanyahu believes the present is a golden opportunity to mount attacks on Hezbollah as well.
Netanyahu’s aggressive approach has evoked sharp criticism from several quarters. Yossi Mekelberg, a commentator at Chatham House, noted that Netanyahu’s position on the ceasefire deal “is not derived from a considered and informed strategic examination of the security needs of Israel, but from his fear of losing support of the ultranationalist-messianic members of his own government”.
Highlights
- Israel attacked about 1,300 Hezbollah targets with “extensive, precise strikes”, resulting in nearly 500 deaths and several thousand injuries. Hezbollah responded with rocket attacks in northern Israel.
- Over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with another 700 killed in the West Bank since the cycle of violence began in West Asia on October 7. As many as 70 per cent of those killed in Gaza have been women and children.
- The US’s massive deployment of weaponry in the region has acted as a deterrent, but Netanyahu believes the present is a golden opportunity to mount attacks on Hezbollah.
‘Permanent conflict’
Israel’s declared war aims in Gaza include destroying Hamas; getting the hostages released; confronting Hezbollah and ensuring that no further attacks come from its forces; maintaining international support, particularly that of the US; and restoring popular confidence in the national security institutions.
A quick review of events over the past year suggests that these aims are hardly compatible and remain largely unrealised. Although certain Hamas leaders have been killed in high-profile attacks, there is no evidence that the movement itself has been decimated. In fact, a desperate Netanyahu has now made the killing of Hamas’ political and military leader, Yahya Sinwar, his principal war aim; only then, he believes, can he declare victory over Hamas. In the absence of a ceasefire deal, there has been no progress on the release of the hostages. Meanwhile, Netanyahu has continued to alienate the US, even as efforts to restore confidence in the country’s security institutions have not even begun.
Arab Americans hold a vigil at the Islamic Center of America for the victims of attacks in Lebanon, in Dearborn, Michigan, US, on September 20. | Photo Credit: Rebecca Cook/REUTERS
Most commentators, Israeli and foreign, have pointed out that over the past 12 months, beyond mass-murder in Gaza, there has been no evidence of an Israeli strategy in the ongoing conflict. Jason Silverman wrote in The Jerusalem Post that the Israeli government has not described any long-term strategic plans for the “day after” the war, and blames this on the lack of strategic vision and reluctance to discuss a long-term political settlement. Natan Sachs agrees that there is a “glaring lack of strategy in Israel’s operation in Gaza”. None of them takes seriously Netanyahu’s “day after” plan, presented in February, which included a revival of the blockade of Gaza.
These comments from critics reflect a misreading of Netanyahu’s thinking and intentions. In fact, the lack of strategy on the part of the Prime Minister is the strategy. Steve Inskeep, writing for National Public Radio last November, pointed out that Netanyahu adheres to the idea of a “long-lasting conflict” with the Arabs, a view that was first set out publicly by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Sharon believed that the Arabs “had never genuinely accepted the presence of Israel”, and hence, it would be futile to pursue a two-state solution. Sharon therefore accepted, in the words of the authors Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin in their book The Burning Land, quoted by Inskeep, that “the conflict is a permanent feature of life in the Middle East, part of the world they were born into, and part of the world they would leave behind”. Inskeep asserts that, on the same lines, Netanyahu too sees the conflict with Palestinians as “permanent” because there is no “solution” proposed from any quarter that could be acceptable to Israel. The most that Netanyahu has so far been willing to offer the Palestinians is management of local, municipal matters, with all issues relating to security remaining in Israeli hands.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian visits one of the victims injured by pager explosions across Lebanon, in a hospital in Tehran on September 20. | Photo Credit: HANDOUT VIA REUTERS
But Netanyahu’s longer-term agenda for the occupied territories goes far beyond the municipalisation of Palestinian matters; it is, in fact, an agenda that calls for the “final solution” of the Palestine issue through a thoroughgoing erasure not just of the idea of the State of Palestine but also the erasure of Palestinian identity.
The relentless assault on Gaza (and recently the West Bank) and the systematic annihilation of the Palestinian people and their infrastructure and institutions have all been carried out with no effective intervention from any section of the international community. As viewed from Tel Aviv, the world has done everything it possibly can to decry the Israeli carnage: UN resolutions from the Security Council and the General Assembly; pronouncements of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; statements from Arab leaders and Arab organisations but no initiative by any Arab state with diplomatic ties to formally end or even restrict these relations; the fairly limited and so far manageable expansion of the conflict in West Asia, with regional states exhibiting deep reluctance to confront Israel militarily; and, finally, limited and ultimately futile attempts by the US President to restrain Israeli violence, while refusing to deny, or even restrict, the supply of US weapons. None of these actions has ended or even impeded Israel’s war on the Palestinians.
The conclusion that Netanyahu and his right-wing cohorts have drawn from the global response to the Gaza war is that they can now freely and vigorously pursue their long-envisioned “final solution”—the physical removal of Palestinians from the occupied territories— in the full confidence that there will be no serious or effective blowback on them.
Israel’s ‘final solution’ for Palestine
The ground for ethnic cleansing has already been well-prepared. To consolidate its security control in Gaza, Israel is presently constructing the “Netzarim Corridor”. This corridor goes from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea and will cut Gaza into north and south zones. This will facilitate the quick deployment of troops wherever required in the enclave. It will also enable Israeli forces to control the flow of aid into Gaza.
After the war, Gaza, as Daniel Byman wrote in Foreign Affairs, “will remain a political and economic wasteland”: besides the 41,000 dead, 1.9 million people have been displaced, while 80 per cent of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. Byman concludes that Gaza “may end up like Somalia”; some version of a failed state is the most likely scenario in which Gaza will be unliveable. The only possible option for its people will be coerced migration. As Tariq Kenney-Shawa has noted in Los Angeles Times: “Israel does not need to kill Gaza’s entire population all at once. All it has to do is ensure the Gaza Strip is uninhabitable and the rest will follow.”
A similar approach to creating irretrievable facts on the ground, though less dramatically, is taking place in the West Bank. Rather than forcibly depopulate the entire area all at once and risk international opprobrium, Israel has over the years steadily expanded its settlements so that it now controls 60 per cent of the West Bank, while 3.6 million Palestinians live in several non-contiguous enclaves, called “Bantustans” by critics, and remain under constant threat of violence from settlers and Israeli security forces.
Palestinians raise their hands as they walk past Israeli forces during an Israeli raid in Qabatiya near Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on September 19. | Photo Credit: RANEEN SAWAFTA/REUTERS
The initiative to launch military operations in the West Bank in August, particularly on refugee camps, confirms that the Israeli government sees this as the opportune moment to exert further pressure on Palestinians and seize more of their land, possibly culminating in the formal annexation of the territory in the near future. There will be new pressures on Jordan to accept larger numbers of displaced Palestinians from the West Bank, as part of a long-standing Israeli plan to cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians.
The plans of the Israeli right wing for the resettlement of the Gaza population in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula are now being discussed openly in the country. In October last year, the Israeli Intelligence Ministry circulated a 10-page proposal for the permanent relocation of the Gaza population in the Sinai in three stages during which the tent cities housing the refugees would be gradually replaced by concrete townships. Gaza itself would then be opened for resettlement by Jewish communities, thus correcting the error of the earlier withdrawal in 2005. In commenting on this plan, The New York Times wrote that “it became apparent to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign”.
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Separately, in a paper from a right-wing think tank headed by Netanyahu’s former National Security Adviser, the proposal for relocation has been described as “a unique and rare opportunity” to cleanse Gaza of its Arab population. The author Amir Weitmann noted that Egypt has several million vacant houses that Israel can purchase for $5-8 billion to rehouse the Palestinians. Further development assistance can be provided to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to encourage him to accept the proposal, which he has firmly rejected so far. An Israeli critic of the idea sees it as “an Israeli form of the Final Solution of the Gaza problem”. The Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell has warned that what we are seeing in Israel is “not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages”.
Over the past several months, the sanctity and even the safety of the Al Aqsa Mosque has been under threat from Israel’s right-wing zealots, led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. They are calling for the demolition of the shrine and its replacement by the Jewish Third Temple. On September 15, an extremist Jewish group circulated a video showing the mosque on fire, causing widespread anger across the region.
It is against this background that Israel has now initiated an assault on its regional foes in the “seven-front” alliance, starting with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The explosions in the pagers and the walkie-talkies and the subsequent lethal air attacks are early alarm bells. A “long war” in the region has become a likely prospect, thus fulfilling Netanyahu’s acceptance of a “permanent conflict” that will also keep him power.
Thoughtful commentators have noted that opposition to a Palestine state is not just confined to the right wing; in a commentary for RAND, Raphael Cohen wrote in January 2024 that “support for the two-state solution among Israelis has been declining for a decade” and that such opposition would remain even if Netanyahu were to leave the political scene. Similarly, Ezra Hess noted in a Council on Foreign Relations article that Israeli society has moved further to the right in recent decades, with 62 per cent of the population identifying as being on the political Right. A Palestinian official already sees the present conflict as the start of “an all-out war on our people, our land, and our holy sites”.
Israel’s “final solution” for Palestinians emerges from these wellsprings.
Talmiz Ahmad is a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE. He has authored West Asia at War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games, which HarperCollins published in 2022. He holds the Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Pune.
