Latest news with #EliaAyoub
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Clearly an excuse': Does Netanyahu really want Hamas gone?
Israel's war on Gaza rumbles on, even as international condemnation grows. Hamas has expressed that it is ready for a deal to end the war, even offering to turn over the administration of Gaza to a technocratic government. United Nations Security Council members have overwhelmingly voted in favour of a ceasefire, a resolution blocked from passing only by a United States veto. But Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is adamant in its refusal of any agreement that does not include what it calls the 'defeat of Hamas', even if that means endangering the Israeli captives still held in Gaza. 'Hamas is already the weakest it's ever been, and there's nothing they can do that is remotely comparable to what Israel possesses,' writer and researcher on Israel-Palestine and founder of The Fire These Times podcast Elia Ayoub told Al Jazeera. 'There's ample evidence by now that the only reason this genocide is ongoing is because Netanyahu wants it to continue. It's clearly just an excuse to keep the war going.' But why would Netanyahu want the war – which is Israel's longest since 1948, and is causing economic crisis – to continue? One answer is that the war provides a distraction from Netanyahu's own longest-serving prime minister has well-documented legal troubles; he is being tried for corruption. And, aside from that, should a permanent ceasefire be realised, some analysts believe Israeli society will hold Netanyahu accountable for security shortcomings that led to October 7. 'He's afraid once it's done, eyes will rightfully turn to him over corruption and the failures of October 7,' Diana Buttu, a legal scholar and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, said. And so, Netanyahu has two main tasks. The first is to prolong the war, allowing him to continue using it as an excuse to avoid accountability. The second is to prevent the breakup of his government, while somehow setting himself up for another successful election, which must happen before October 2026. Netanyahu has been 'reliant upon Hamas throughout the war', Mairav Zonszein, an expert on Israel and Palestine for the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera. 'The far right and Netanyahu have consistently used Hamas as an excuse not to negotiate or plan for a day after,' she said. The Israeli refusal to negotiate a final end to the war stands in stark contrast to Hamas's willingness to hand over all captives held in the last 20 months, much of Hamas's leadership has been killed. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's political leader, was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, and Yahya Sinwar, his successor, was killed in Gaza on October 16. Israel is now claiming it killed Sinwar's successor and younger brother, Mohammed, though Hamas has yet to confirm his death. Militarily, analysts say, Hamas is estimated to have lost significant strength. It is still conducting some attacks, but fewer and further between than the ambushes it was able to carry out earlier in the war. In a sign that Hamas perhaps understands that it is no longer in a position to rule Gaza, it has also offered to step down from the administration of the Palestinian territory, which it has controlled since 2006, and hand over to a technocratic government. 'The technocrat offer is not new,' Hamzé Attar, a Luxembourg-based defence analyst from Gaza, said. 'It was on the table since before the invasion of Rafah [which occurred on May 6, 2024]. They want Hamas to give up their arms and give up everything, and Hamas has responded by saying: 'We're stepping aside.'' That has been firmly rejected by Israel, which has not endorsed any vision for post-war over the last nearly 20 months, Israel has killed more than 54,300 Palestinians and wounded more than 124,000 in Gaza, according to the territory's Health Ministry. In addition, Gaza is now 'the hungriest place on Earth', according to the UN, all its inhabitants at risk of famine after Israel strangled aid delivery throughout its war, then completely blocked it from March 2 until May 27. Israel has also turned 70 percent of the enclave into no-go zones. All the while, Israel's bombing of Gaza continues. Discounting the pretext of destroying Hamas and returning the captives, some analysts believe there is a deeper goal: pushing Palestinians out of Gaza. 'Neither Hamas nor the hostages are the targets,' Meron Rappaport, an editor at Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site, said. 'The goal is to push the people of Gaza into very few, small and closed areas where food will be delivered scarcely, hoping that the pressure on them will get them to ask to leave the Strip.' 'Israel is no longer fighting Hamas,' he said in late May that Israel would control the entirety of Gaza by the end of its latest offensive, while many foreign officials and experts have warned either directly or implicitly that Israel's actions amount to ethnically cleansing Gaza. A recent report in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, cited 82 percent of Jewish Israelis supporting the expulsion of the people in Gaza. To do so would have a historic impact, Buttu said, one that Netanyahu might feel he can portray as protecting Israel from a Palestinian state – something he has repeatedly promised to prevent. 'He recognises he will be the fall guy or the hero,' Buttu said. 'If he is the one who ethnically cleanses Gaza, he becomes the hero.' Until that happens, analysts believe, Palestinians will continue to die at the hands of the Israeli military. Hamas is the pretext and their willingness to negotiate or succumb is of secondary importance. 'Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of ending this war,' Zonszein said. 'It doesn't matter what Hamas offers. They can offer to return all the hostages or give up governance. 'This war is going to continue until Netanyahu is forced to stop it, and that can only come from Trump.' Additional reporting by Simon Speakman Cordall
Al Jazeera
09-04-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Israel pushes on with strategy to keep neighbours weak in Lebanon and Syria
Beirut, Lebanon – Israel's continuing attacks intend to keep its neighbours unstable, weak and fragmented, analysts say, and are contributing to the derailing of governing projects in Lebanon and Syria. Conversations with experts, analysts, and diplomats reveal a belief that Israel wants to keep the two states weak and fractured, maintaining Israel as the strongest regional power. 'The Israelis believe that having weaker neighbors, as in states that aren't really able to function, is beneficial for them because, in that context, they're the strongest actor,' Elia Ayoub, writer, researcher, and founder of The Fire These Times podcast, told Al Jazeera. Lebanon and Syria, the targets of Israel's forays, have largely not retaliated against the Israelis, who outpower them militarily, financially and technologically. Lebanon and Syria are both in a fragile condition. Lebanon has been in dire economic straits for at least six years, with bouts of political paralysis, and has just emerged from a prolonged Israeli assault that killed more than 4,000 people and destroyed swaths of the country. That war, which also badly damaged the armed movemen tHezbollah, a major domestic actor in Lebanon since the 1980s, ostensibly ended with the November 27 ceasefire. Syria, meanwhile, recently emerged from a nearly 14-year-long war that displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. The transitional government is working to unify armed factions, stabilise the economy and gain international recognition. Along with Lebanon, which is led by its first functioning cabinet in years, Syria has new leadership that wants to turn a page on recent history but, analysts told Al Jazeera, Israel seems intent on preventing that. Israel has been violating the ceasefire with Lebanon since it was signed, justifying each breach by claiming it had hit 'Hezbollah targets'. The situation is particularly gruesome along Lebanon's southern border, where some villages were obliterated during the war and others were completely razed since the ceasefire was agreed on. 'There are a lot of violations,' a member of Lebanon's civil defense force, who asked to not be named, told Al Jazeera from the battered southern town of Meiss el-Jabal, adding, 'There's nothing we can do about it.' Israel has also refused to fully withdraw from Lebanon, as the ceasefire stipulates, instead, leaving its forces in five points that experts say are likely being held for future negotiations over delineating the Lebanon-Israel border. 'The very clear path ahead is that Israel has no limits in its operations within Lebanon,' Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told Al Jazeera. 'The only distinction made is in firepower and destruction, which is reserved for disproportionate responses to attacks on northern towns in Israel.' In Syria's chaos following the Assad regime's overthrow on December 8, Israel launched attacks on military infrastructure around the country, focusing on the south and creeping its forces further into Syrian territory. Syria's transitional government has said it has no interest in regional war. Instead it has said that it has no intention to attack Israel and would respect the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement between the two countries. But the Syrian government's overtures fell on deaf ears, and the attacks have continued. The Israeli government immediately revealed its position towards the new Syrian government following President Bashar al-Assad's overthrow, calling it 'a terror group from Idlib that took Damascus by force'. Israel has since repeatedly bombed Syria, and seized territory along the frontier between the occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria. 'Israel has made a bet that Syria will fail and will be fragmented,' Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International, told Al Jazeera. 'What they're doing is trying to position themselves in that scenario, as a push to have sway over the south and keep it unthreatening to them and protect their now almost unlimited freedom of manoeuvre in their airspace.' In March, Israeli air strikes on Syria increased and expanded to new areas, with ground incursions increasing by 30 percent, including into the southern areas of Deraa and al-Quneitra. 'The impact on civilians has been increasingly deadly,' Muaz al-Abdullah, ACLED's Middle East Research manager, said in a statement. 'To defend themselves, residents in the village of Kuya, in Deraa, fired warning shots to deter Israeli forces from advancing into the village on March 25. The response by Israeli forces was an air strike and shelling of the village, and at least six civilians were killed.' Imad al-Baysiri, from Deraa, told Al Jazeera about a similar incident in Nawa, 34km (21 miles) north of Deraa city. The Israeli army 'tried to advance to all the large squares in Nawa so some young men started running and the Israeli army started shooting at them', he said, adding that locals confronted the army and forced them to retreat. 'They brought in helicopters and drones and for around four hours bombed the area,' he said. 'Warplanes and helicopters also bombarded the city of Nawa with missiles from helicopters and drones.' Analysts can see little that would stop Israel's near-daily attacks on Lebanon and Syria. 'They listen to Americans, but only to a certain extent,' a Western diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera. Hezbollah's arsenal may once have acted as a deterrent, but the latest war has changed that calculus. 'All deterrence has been lost,' Hage Ali said. Without any diplomatic or military pressure in its way, Israel seems set on disrupting any progress in Lebanon and Syria and keeping them mired in chaos. 'That's how Israel views its best-case scenarios in the region,' Ayoub said. 'It speaks to a deep cynicism at the heart of Israeli politics, and one that comes from decades-long militarism that has become a normalised part of day-to-day Israeli political culture.' Many analysts have spoken of Israel needing a 'forever war' in the region, something that it would be 'quite comfortable' in, according to Natasha Hall, senior fellow at the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaking at the American University of Beirut on April 8. Or, as the diplomatic source told Al Jazeera: 'This [Israeli] government has shown that it knows how to make war. But it has yet to show that it knows how to make peace.'
