By David Herast

20/03/2025

Benjamin Netanyahu’s horrific resumption of the war on Gaza shows that no US-backed ceasefire deal is worth the paper it is printed on

At 2:20am on Tuesday local time in the Gaza Strip, Washington inaugurated a new era in world politics. This was the moment Israel timed its attacks on dozens of targets in the enclave to coincide with suhoor, the predawn meal eaten by Muslims in preparation for a day of fasting.

The timing was designed to inflict maximum civilian casualties, as families across Gaza gathered to eat and pray during the holy month of Ramadan, even if they had little or no food to consume.

The mass simultaneous attacks on 100 separate locations achieved their objective, making it one of the worst acts of wanton butchery by Israeli forces during the 15-month war on Gaza.

More than 400 Palestinians were killed, including more than 170 children, according to Gaza health officials. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought and got a green light from Washington before launching these attacks.

US President Donald Trump thus signalled a new era in global affairs by giving his consent for a wave of attacks that broke every aspect of the ceasefire deal, signed in the presence of international guarantors. In one act, Trump turned the West that his nation claims to lead into the Wild West.

From this moment on, no treaty, ceasefire or international agreement that the US signs is worth the paper it is printed on.

A US president who persuaded the credulous imams of Michigan that he was a man of peace, and even the next potential recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, now uses the label Palestinian” as a political slur against Jewish Democratic politicians.

The president who vowed to stop all wars has launched or permitted air strikes in Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria simultaneously, and is promising that all hell will break loose on Iran if it does not submit to his demands.

A US president who told the families of the hostages that he would do everything in his power to get them back alive, has allowed Israel to effectively apply its Hannibal Directive to the two dozen who, before Tuesday morning’s attacks, were believed to be living. If Israel behaves like this, what incentive does it now give Hamas to keep the remaining hostages alive?

‘Army of God’s vengeance’

For Netanyahu, the timing of these attacks was everything, for quite different reasons.

On Tuesday, he was due to appear in court on multiple corruption charges, which as the case progresses, are tightening a noose around his political neck. The renewed war gave him an excuse to tell the court he could not attend.

As Ahmad Tibi, a Knesset member and chairman of the Taal party, writes in Middle East Eye: It is no coincidence that Tuesday’s bombardment comes just before a key budget vote, with ultra-Orthodox lawmakers threatening to topple the government if a law excluding their community from conscription is not passed, and former National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir issuing ultimatums.”

Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s finance minister and leader of the extremist Religious Zionist Party, was right all along when he assured the world that Netanyahu would resume the war in Gaza.

On Tuesday, Smotrich said the hostage families had been heard too much”, during a clash at the Knesset with Ayala Metzger, the daughter-in-law of slain captive Yoram Metzger. We thought that we were serving in the [Israeli army] and not the army of God’s vengeance,” she said. In these very moments, we are murdering hostages, and there is a deal on the table.”

But for the Religious Zionists, who now form the single most powerful group in Israel, the army of God’s vengeance is exactly what the Gaza campaign is all about.

They have done everything in their power to make a dispute over land into a religious war. For years, they have pushed police to attack worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, directly prompting the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, which the group dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries.

Even the bitterest of foes can agree to stop fighting during religious festivals. But Israel on Tuesday morning did not just renege on a ceasefire deal it had signed; it specifically targeted worshippers gathered to perform a religious ritual.

If Israel is a small, settler-colonial beachhead in a region entirely surrounded by Muslims, this attempt to turn the conflict into a religious one represents folly of suicidal proportions. The flame it has lit in all Muslim hearts will be hard to extinguish.

It will be equally hard, if not impossible, for the survivors of this attack to consider a common future with Israeli Jews in either two states or one state.

Force of terror

Despite its actions on 7 October 2023, Hamas remains, in the view of most military analysts, a disciplined militia that sticks to the agreements it signs. It is Israel that is acting like an undisciplined force of terror, violating an internationally recognised deal multiple times.

Even before Tuesday’s attack, Israel had killed more than 150 Palestinians in Gaza during the ceasefire. It failed to start talks regarding stage two on the 16th day of stage one, as prescribed in the deal. It failed to fulfil its commitment to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor. It delayed the release of Palestinian prisoners for a week.

Israel has behaved like a mafia, attempting to bully Gaza into a different deal altogether. It formulated a proposal, which it put in the mouth of Steve Witkoff, although there was no word of endorsement from Trump’s envoy, and demanded that Hamas release 11 living hostages and half of the dead in return for a 50-day ceasefire. This would have been a completely different deal from the one negotiated by Qatari and Egyptian mediators over months.

As Maariv reported, Tuesday’s surprise attacks had been long in the planning by the army and Shin Bet. The aim was to target as many members of Hamas as possible in the first strike, much in the same way it had disabled the senior command of Hezbollah at the outset of its war in Lebanon.

Gaza, like much of the Muslim world, had changed its clocks in recent days for Ramadan, which aided the mission, according to Maariv.

The Shin Bet and military intelligence prepared the locations where Hamas members were expected to be present and hold suhoor meals. The Shin Bet and Israeli Air Force’s mission was for dozens of aircraft and combat vehicles in the first wave of attacks to drop hundreds of bombs simultaneously on targets where Hamas members were located in Gaza,” the report noted. At 2:20am, the order was given.”

It is not yet known how many Hamas leaders were killed in the air strikes, but an attack like this is unlikely to work.

Rite of passage

Hamas is not Hezbollah, and has a strong institutional collective identity in which leaders are quickly replaced. Even the attack on Hezbollah’s leadership had no known effect on its ability to resist Israel’s ground invasion, and its ability to peg Israel’s elite forces to within a few kilometres of the border.

Hamas has no known problems with recruitment and can replace fighters quicker than they are killed by the Israeli army. This ability has been acknowledged by Israeli generals themselves. If anything, an attack like this is the biggest recruitment drive Hamas could wish for – so a resumption of the war will not likely represent a killer blow to the organisation as a whole.

Nor will it, on current evidence, change the determination of Palestinians in Gaza to stay on their land.

One young mother woke up to find her children and husband dead. My children died hungry,” she said. I swear by God, my children refused to have suhoor. God is sufficient for me and He is the best disposer of affairs against you, Netanyahu. May God hold you responsible … I am a mother whose heart is burning with grief. May God make your heart burn for your children, Netanyahu. Where are the Arabs? They are just watching us.”

Palestine’s Arab neighbours are not the only ones sitting on their hands.

A Europe and UK so keen to defy Trump’s developing plan to carve up Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin are doing absolutely nothing to stop the slaughter in Gaza.

Indeed, for Keir Starmer, Gaza is emerging as a rite of passage essential for his prime ministerial credentials.

At two major junctures since the 7 October attack, Starmer defied the opinions of his cabinet, as voiced by the soft left – David Lammy, Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy – and key members of the Labour right, like Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting, who came within a few hundred votes of losing his seat in the last election.

Journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund chronicle both events in their book Get In, which charts the influence of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Machiavellian Irish-born fixer in the Labour leader’s rise to power.

Double standards

In the first instance, Starmer refused to publicly apologise for his LBC interview with Nick Ferrari, in which he said Israel had the right to withhold water and electricity from Gaza. He eventually issued a clarification, saying he was answering a question about Israel’s right to defend itself.

In the second, Starmer turned against his own kitchen cabinet, including such figures as Philippe Sands and Richard Hermer, both honourable jurists committed to the sanctity of international law. They are also Jewish.

As the destruction in Gaza deepened, Lammy, Cooper, Nandy, Mahmood and Streeting lobbied Starmer to change his tune, according to Maguire and Pogrund.

Mahmood diagnosed in the leader’s office a debilitating case of double standards, suspecting privately that they believed that opposition to Israel’s actions was driven by antisemitism,” the authors write. Starmer’s advisers looked on impassively … McSweeney had always embraced the possibility that Labour might lose millions of voters who had been willing to support the party under [Jeremy] Corbyn.”

Describing the view in Starmer’s office, one unnamed shadow cabinet member told the authors: They see Palestinian activism as a creature of the far left.”

This view persists to this day. On Tuesday, Starmer publicly overruled his foreign secretary after Lammy accused Israel of violating international law through the imposition of a full blockade, which has cut water and electricity to 2.3 million people in Gaza.

British complicity

Had Netanyahu not launched his surprise attack, Starmer would have welcomed Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar to the UK with open arms – even after Israel acted with contempt towards Emily Thornberry, the chair of parliament’s foreign affairs select committee. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, secretly filmed her and posted the footage to Instagram.

Saar was a member of the cabinet that voted to cut water and electricity to Gaza. He is also an avowed opponent of a Palestinian state, saying last November that creating a Palestinian state today would be tantamount to creating a Hamas state”.

Starmer’s Britain is fully complicit in allowing Israel to commit genocide in Gaza. The sanctity of international law no longer means anything to the former barrister who made his name in human rights.

But this is far from the end of the story, nor indeed the end of the story of Starmer’s rise and fall from power. Neither Hamas, nor more importantly the Palestinians of Gaza, will fade away quickly and conveniently.

Gaza could yet prove to be for Starmer what the Iraq War proved to be for his guide and mentor, Tony Blair – the coup de grace of his premiership.

Both Labour leaders used war in a Muslim country as a show of political cojones. Both believed that war-mongering meant automatic entry into the elite club of world leaders. But for Starmer, as for Blair, war will be his undoing.

For whoever picks up the pieces from the rubble left by the Trump era, the West’s role as the moral leader of the world is gone for good. It has wilfully abrogated that role, at the cost of thousands more Palestinian and Muslim lives.

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