The ceasefire agreement, which came under the pressure and sponsorship of U.S. President Donald Trump, was not the end of the war on Gaza, but rather a rearrangement of how it is managed. Benjamin Netanyahu did not view the agreement as an opportunity to end the war or to enter into a genuine political process, but as a means to regain the initiative domestically. While the world welcomed what was seen as a step towards calm, Netanyahu was preparing for a new phase of continued war, quieter in appearance but harsher in its effects.
In the humanitarian scene, the tragedy did not stop. The destruction left by the war made Gaza an unlivable place: hundreds of thousands of destroyed homes, devastated hospitals, and hundreds of thousands of displaced families facing crises of housing, hunger, disease, and shortages of water and electricity. At the same time that the occupying state speaks of a "ceasefire," it continues to impose a suffocating blockade that prevents aid from entering and hinders reconstruction. The direct war has transformed into a new form of collective punishment — less bombing with calculated targets, but more starvation and systematic tightening on every detail of life.
Netanyahu exploited Trump's agreement to reapply what can be called the "Lebanese model" in Gaza: occupying large parts of the territory (estimated at about 58% of its area) and controlling it from a distance, deterrence from the sky, and keeping the territory in a state of constant suffocation without the need for large-scale invasions or internal human costs. At the same time, this approach allowed him to appear before the international community as a "reasonable" leader who agreed to calm, while he was practically managing a war by other means — blockade, prevention, and sanctions. With this policy, he managed to reduce the cost of war from a military and economic perspective, without offering any political or humanitarian concessions.
The recent Israeli violation and the intense bombing, or what can be termed "organized randomness," that preceded security consultations in Netanyahu's office, showed that the agreement was merely a temporary facade. Just hours after those meetings, Netanyahu ordered the army to launch "intense attacks" in Gaza, announcing his intention to expand what is known as the "yellow line" controlled by the army within the territory. In those attacks, more than a hundred Palestinians were martyred, including dozens of children and women. Although the pretext was the killing of an Israeli soldier, the scale of the massacre reveals that the bombing was premeditated and planned in advance.
This coincided with Israeli accusations against Hamas of negligence in delivering the bodies of Israeli prisoners, despite the participation of Egyptian teams and others from the Red Cross in the search operations. Although Washington was aware of the difficulty of this task due to the massive destruction, Trump himself joined the chorus of pressure, granting Netanyahu new political cover to resume attacks under the pretext of "response." However, Israel itself was obstructing the search, having refused to allow Turkish and Egyptian expert teams, as stipulated in the agreement, to participate, in a move that reveals a clear intention to drain the agreement of its humanitarian content.
And although Israel later announced the "resumption of commitment to the ceasefire," this does not mean that the war has actually stopped. Netanyahu continues to carry out sporadic attacks, and he is exploiting the state of "relative calm" to reduce the cost of war: partial demobilization of reserve forces, reduction in ammunition use, and transferring some units to other fronts such as the West Bank and the Lebanese border. This is a policy of "economic warfare" — continuing aggression but with a more precise financial and political calculation, so that Gaza remains under fire without him paying a significant internal or international price.
Internally in Israel, Netanyahu does not face real opposition. The Israeli society, for the most part, lives in a state of national Zionist consensus. It does not oppose the killing of Palestinians, nor does it see what is happening in Gaza as a crime, but rather as a "legitimate response" to the attack of October 7 two years ago. Even the few voices that rise against this course remain confined to limited academic and cultural circles, while the right-wing mass base remains solidly behind Netanyahu, driven by a more vengeful national sentiment than a political one.
The "Trump Agreement" was nothing more than a military pause for Netanyahu, which he exploited to repair his internal image, focus on preparing for the upcoming elections, and alleviate international pressure, without changing anything in the essence of Israeli policy towards Gaza. The heavy bombing stopped, but the blockade intensified, and the killing merely changed its form: from direct bombing to slow starvation. Thus, the form of war changes, but its essence remains the
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Netanyahu and Trump's Agreement: An Old New Tactic for Continuing the Killing by Various Means