Netanyahu Is Preparing to Sabotage the Gaza Ceasefire…Again

From the moment Israel accepted the ceasefire deal, its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides have characterized it as a limited agreement aimed at securing the release of as many Israeli captives as possible and not a comprehensive plan to end the war. Now, emboldened by his recent meetings at the White House and riding a tsunami of giddiness over President Donald Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to seize control of Gaza, Netanyahu returned to Israel on Sunday ready to sabotage the already frangible agreement and expand his forces’ siege of the West Bank.

“This trip, and the conversations we held with the president of the United States, included additional incredible achievements that can guarantee the security of Israel for generations,” Netanyahu boasted. “I am not exaggerating. I’m not overstating. There are opportunities here for possibilities that I don’t think we ever dreamed of — or at least until the last few months, they didn’t seem possible, but they are possible.”

According to the terms of the ceasefire deal that went into effect January 19, Israel and Hamas were slated to begin negotiations over the details of a second 42-day phase of the ceasefire no later than 16 days into Phase 1. The second stage envisions the release of all remaining Israeli captives in exchange for substantial numbers of Palestinians held by Israel, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the beginning of a permanent ceasefire that would pave the way for a massive multi-billion-dollar reconstruction of the Strip. Three weeks into the deal, however, those negotiations have not yet begun. Netanyahu initially refused to send a delegation to Doha, Qatar for Phase 2 talks, but after intervention from the White House, he grudgingly dispatched a delegation empowered only to discuss ongoing technical details related to the current phase, not to negotiate next steps.

Netanyahu landed in Tel Aviv claiming that Israel had made a strategic agreement with Trump and his special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff about the positions Israel would assert in the next round of talks. Netanyahu said Monday he returned from Washington, D.C. with new plans for Gaza and that he and Trump “see eye to eye” on how to proceed. “You wanted a day after [plan]? You got one… It just doesn’t match the Oslo narrative… We won’t repeat that mistake… I’ve come back with a vision without Hamas and without the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu announced. Shaking his fist in a meeting at the Knesset, he declared, “We know what complete victory is and we will not give up on it.”

Soon after Netanyahu spoke, Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, announced that the group would be delaying the release of the next three Israelis scheduled for exchange on Saturday, citing Israeli violations of the ceasefire. “The leadership of the resistance has monitored the enemy’s violations and failure to abide by the terms of the agreement during the past three week,” he said, adding that their release “will be postponed until further notice, and until the occupation commits to and compensates for the entitlements of the past weeks retroactively, and we affirm our commitment to the terms of the agreement as long as the occupation commits to them.”

Since the ceasefire officially went into effect on January 19, Israel has continued to carry out targeted attacks inside the Gaza Strip on an almost daily basis. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 110 Palestinians have been killed in such attacks over the past three weeks. On Sunday, Israeli forces fired on Palestinians in northern Gaza whom Israel said got too close to Israeli territory. At least three were killed. “Nobody approaches the perimeter and nobody returns to the perimeter,” Netanyahu said. “We will enforce it, and we will enforce it firmly. We expect Hamas to fulfill all its obligations—and this is one of them.”

Hamas has accused Israel of playing “dirty games” by slowing or blocking the agreed upon delivery of aid into the Gaza Strip, including food, medicine, tents, generators and other necessities, as well as continuing to kill Palestinians in Gaza. “This could threaten the deal to collapse,” said Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau. “Netanyahu came back from the United States with all intentions to sabotage the deal.”

Israel’s cabinet is scheduled to meet Tuesday, at which point Netanyahu says he will formalize Israel’s demands that will be carried into the negotiations by the Israeli team. Among these, according to Israeli media reports, is the exiling of Hamas’s leadership and a total disarmament of its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. Last month, Netanyahu told the Israeli cabinet he had received side letters from both the outgoing Biden administration and Trump’s team ensuring that Israel could resume the war in Gaza with minimal justification. Now, it appears the support will extend beyond that.

“For a full year, we have been told that on the ‘day after’, the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, needs to be in the Strip. President Trump came with a completely different vision, much better for the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said. He called Trump’s proposed U.S. takeover of Gaza, “revolutionary, creative—and we’re discussing it. He is very determined to carry it out. It opens up many opportunities for us.” Netanyahu has also stated he will not fully withdraw Israeli forces from the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along Gaza’s border with Egypt and would be the Strip’s only access to the outside world not controlled by Israel. Under the agreement, Israeli forces are required to completely withdraw from the corridor no later than the 50th day after the signing of the ceasefire.

Requiring the full exile of Hamas’s Gaza leadership and a total disarmament of its armed wing would effectively block the agreement from moving to a second phase and instead creates a new status quo involving an indefinite Phase 1 where future prisoner exchanges would be done on an ad hoc basis with no larger guarantees about a permanent ceasefire or full withdrawal of Israeli forces. This is an extension of Netanyahu’s strategy throughout the war of presenting terms to Hamas he knows the group will reject so that Israel and the U.S. can accuse Hamas of obstruction. Such a configuration would allow Israel to continue, indefinitely, to conduct strikes inside the Gaza Strip under the auspices of enforcing the ceasefire while keeping Israeli troops inside southern Gaza, itself a contradiction of the agreement signed last month.

A recent poll shows the Israeli public overwhelmingly wants Phase 2 to move forward so that all the hostages are released. At the same time, an almost equal amount also support Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians.

Netanyahu has reiterated that one of Israel’s remaining central goals in Gaza is the total elimination of Hamas, and several of Trump’s advisors have said the U.S. supports that objective. On a practical level, experts say that destroying Hamas as a movement would be impossible even if Israel assassinates its entire leadership. While its popularity as a governing authority in Gaza has been in a state of decline since before the October 7 attacks, support for armed resistance against Israel has, in parallel, increased.

As the Trump administration has promoted its plan to seize Gaza, it has also suggested it would support Israel’s resumption of the war under the banner of eliminating Hamas. “Right now, the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, have had to go in and will continue to destroy Hamas if they do not honor the terms of this ceasefire,” said Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, Sunday on NBC.

Beyond that, the obsessive focus on Hamas ignores the fact that the group has already stated it does not intend to rule post-war Gaza. “Hamas told us more than once that they don’t want to be in the government or be the government, but the government has to be accepted by everybody,” said Mustafa Barghouti, president of the Palestinian National Initiative and a former presidential candidate and was elected to parliament in 2006, in a recent interview with Drop Site. Barghouti has emerged as a central figure in intra-Palestinian negotiations over the future governance of Gaza. “I agree with that,” he continued. “No government can function in Gaza unless it is accepted by all [Palestinian] parties.” He pointed out that not only has Israel sought to ban Hamas from governing Gaza, but wants “no place also for the Palestinian Authority and no place for a unity government.”

King Abdullah of Jordan is scheduled to meet Trump on Tuesday at the White House and meetings with Egypt’s president Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman are reportedly being worked out. “I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza,” Trump said Sunday. “As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it, other people may do it, through our auspices. But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back.”

Egypt and Jordan have maintained that despite Trump’s confident claims to the contrary, they will not accept the forced mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into their countries. When asked about widespread condemnation among Arab nations of Trump’s Gaza plan, Waltz, the national security advisor, said, “Then come to the table with your plan if you don’t like his plan.”

While Trump has grabbed international headlines and inspired rage across the Middle East over his plan, the idea of removing Palestinians from Gaza is hardly new. Soon after the October 7 attacks, as Israel began to unleash its full-spectrum war, the Biden administration embraced an Israeli pitch to force Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula under the auspices of a “humanitarian corridor.” The idea was based on an Israeli intelligence ministry proposal drafted a week after the Hamas-led attacks. In mid-November 2023, according to Harvard scholar Sara Roy, “a USAID official approached a colleague of mine and asked about the feasibility of building a tent city in the Sinai, which would be followed by a more permanent arrangement somewhere in the northern part of the peninsula.” Biden dispatched then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a tour of Washington’s closest Arab allies who promptly rejected the plan. Biden subsequently announced that the U.S. would not move forward with a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza. Instead, the administration ensured Israel could wage a bombing and ground campaign that internally displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza and left it in a state of rubble strewn with unexploded ordnances, much of which was provided by the U.S.

Trump has made no secret that he wants to preside over a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, though the kingdom has publicly insisted that no such deal will take place absent an irreversible, credible path to the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital. Sitting alongside a grinning Netanyahu in the Oval Office on February 4, Trump was asked if Saudi Arabia was demanding a Palestinian state. “No they’re not,” he said. “No.” On Thursday, Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel 14, “The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there.”

Saudi Arabia rejected the claims, saying it “will continue its relentless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state,” according to a statement from the foreign ministry. Saudi Arabia “will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that,” the statement added, saying that the kingdom’s position is “non-negotiable and not subject to compromises.” Egypt announced it will host a special session of the Arab League on February 27 in Cairo to discuss “new and dangerous developments,” primarily Trump’s threat to seize Gaza.

The Trump administration views a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel as the crown jewel of the Abraham Accords, which began during Trump’s first presidential term with normalization agreements reached with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Many analysts believe that if the Saudis move forward, it would open the door for other Muslim nations, including Indonesia, to follow suit. The Saudis’ primary agenda in such a deal is less about its relationship with Israel and more about securing a defense pact with the U.S. and Trump’s support for expanding Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear power program. In return, the U.S. would achieve greater influence over oil prices and energy policy and to place limitations on the relationship between the kingdom and China, which has ratcheted up its own diplomacy in the region substantially since Trump’s first term, including a March 2023 normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

As Israel gears up for a renewed campaign to undermine the ceasefire agreement, Hamas said its delegation is prepared for talks on implementing Phase 2. A source close to the Palestinian negotiators told Drop Site News that Hamas continues to push for the freedom of all Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences. Among these are Marwan Barghouti, a popular political leader many believe would win a democratic election in Palestine, and Ahmad Sadaat, Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As Drop Site previously reported, Israel blocked the release of the two men in the first phase of the deal, but according to the source, both names are on the list for exchanges in a second phase. Israel may still seek to veto their release, but Hamas has insisted that if Israel wants all of its soldiers freed from captivity, Barghouti, Sadaat, and other Palestinian lifers must be freed. In the cases of many high-value Palestinian political or resistance leaders, Israel has insisted on deporting the freed men.

The source close to the negotiations told Drop Site that the position of Hamas’s negotiators is that the group will not agree to any deportations unless they are first accepted by the individual Palestinian prisoner. In the first round of exchanges, two Palestinians refused deportation agreements, and in one case, Israel kept him in prison and swapped another prisoner for release, according to the source.

Under the original terms of the deal, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli captives in the first 42-day phase. To date, it has freed 16 of them in addition to five Thai nationals not included in the deal. Of the 17 other Israelis slated for release, nine of them, including a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, are believed to be alive. By the end of Phase 1, roughly 60 Israeli captives will remain in Gaza.

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