Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the decisions regarding the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip on Saturday in a "panicked and hasty manner," more than four months after violating the ceasefire with Hamas and resuming the war. "Israel was forced to admit that it had put itself in a dead end," Amos Harel, a military analyst for Haaretz, reported Sunday.
He noted that the ceasefire and prisoner exchange negotiations "completely faltered. Hamas realized it had the upper hand due to global outrage against Israel," due to the mounting Palestinian death toll and scenes of famine in Gaza, which led Hamas to "insist on its positions in the negotiations."
Harel added that after Israel and the United States announced the suspension of negotiations in Doha and pledged to explore other ways to advance the negotiations, "they did not lead to anything practical. The international community is now preoccupied with finding quick ways to alleviate the suffering in Gaza and pressure Israel to stop the war. Perhaps the Netanyahu government has come to realize that this is not the right time for a military attack."
He pointed out that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Netanyahu's mouthpieces in the media "ignored warnings about the inability of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to achieve its ambitious goals, given that it has only a few distribution centers (of aid) in the southern Gaza Strip. They knew that the road to these centers is dangerous and that there is terrible chaos on the ground, much of it caused by Israeli military operations, but they focused on the dream of complete Israeli control over the Strip and the aid, which would ultimately lead to the 'voluntary migration' of Palestinians from Gaza via Sinai."
Harel emphasized that Netanyahu is "centrally responsible. He knows that there is no military way to rescue the kidnapped soldiers alive, that Hamas is not concerned or responsible for the fate of the civilians, and that the current Israeli operations are merely prolonging the war without any purpose or benefit."
"Since the beginning of this year, Netanyahu has ignored the chances of ending the war because the fate of his coalition was more important. Now the prime minister is concocting solutions under mounting international pressure. It may be too late. Hamas will entrench itself even more deeply in its positions, thanks to international support for the Palestinians, and the Israeli government will face a dilemma between a futile escalation of military operations and surrendering to the dictates of a ceasefire imposed on it without succeeding in returning the 20 kidnapped alive and the 30 killed by Hamas," he added.
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Israeli analyst: Unprecedented international pressure puts Israel at a dead end in Gaza