It is no longer possible to treat the increasing killing and destruction carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip as mere violations of the ceasefire, after it has become a general pattern that analysts say consolidates the continuation of the war under the umbrella of US President Donald Trump’s plan.
Israel killed two Palestinians in the Sultan neighborhood in northern Gaza on Wednesday evening, despite announcing a return to a ceasefire after 12 hours of violent raids it launched on Tuesday night, during which it killed 104 Palestinians and wounded 153 others.
The Israeli occupation army also announced on Wednesday that it was working in a tunnel area in the city of Khan Yunis in the south, while an American official confirmed to Al Jazeera that work on the agreement had resumed in Gaza.
The official said that Washington is closely following the situation, and that it will send a delegation to Israel, while the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) accused the Israeli side of thwarting the agreement, and called on the mediators to pressure it to be adhered to.
But Trump said on Tuesday that Israel did not violate the agreement, that it was defending itself, and that Hamas must behave well so as not to be eliminated.
America is far from reality
This American position reflects the Trump administration’s failure to deal with the facts on the ground and its adoption of the Israeli narrative to justify the killing of Palestinians who are subjected to mass murder and field executions, says Dalal Erekat, professor of diplomacy and conflict resolution at the Arab American University.
The war – as Erekat said in the Track of Events program – is still continuing in Gaza under the umbrella of a ceasefire, while the Americans are making shuttle trips to Israel without visiting the occupied territories to find out what Israel is doing.
What is currently required of Trump – in Erekat’s opinion – is to return to the region and visit Palestine if he wants to play the role of a man of peace, as he says, and not to be satisfied with the entire agreement to restore the Israeli prisoners.
The United States, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey are also required to monitor the implementation of the agreement they signed, and to verify what the two parties are doing on the ground so that the occupation does not continue to impose collective punishment on the Palestinians under the umbrella of a ceasefire that does not actually exist, according to the expression of the Palestinian Academy.
If the United States wants to link the agreement to the bodies of occupation prisoners, it is also required to look into the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians that Israel has been holding for years as part of a policy that Erekat says is “criminal and systematic.”
It is unacceptable for more than 100 Palestinians to be killed – including 46 children and 20 women – as well as for entire residential blocks to be blown up in response to the killing of an Israeli soldier. The Israeli media did not provide a single piece of evidence that a Palestinian killed him, as the expert on Israeli affairs, Dr Mahmoud Yazbek.
Trump is responsible
This is the second time that Israel accuses the resistance of killing a soldier in the Rafah area, which is completely under the occupation forces, without providing evidence, which means – according to Yazbek – that it holds Palestinian civilians responsible for its failure to extend its control.
What is striking this time – as Yazbek says – is that Trump adopted the Israeli story that says a fighter came out of a tunnel and then killed a soldier, even though he refused to adopt the same story last week, and said that he could not hold the Palestinians responsible for the attack.
Despite the burial of the soldier whose killing the occupation spoke about, there is not a single piece of evidence that any Palestinian was involved in his killing, according to Yazbek, who said that the exaggerated Israeli reaction reflects that the largest killing tools in the world are placed in the hands of a weak army that cannot protect itself in areas it fully controls.
Even if the goal of the Israeli raids was to kill 7 or 8 Hamas leaders, as Israel says, killing this huge number of Palestinians around them “is nothing but an attempt to please Benjamin Netanyahu, who appeared very angry,” as the Palestinian analyst says.
Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, “wants to prove that he is in a position of strength, because everyone knows that he is in a position of weakness, and that he bears the bill for this weakness on the defenseless Palestinians,” according to Yazbak.
He added that Trump is responsible for this large number of victims, “because he did not verify what happened, and gave a green light for revenge without proof,” according to Yazbek.
Insistence on sabotaging the agreement
As for the director of the Palestinian Information Corporation, Ibrahim Al-Madhoun, he believes that Israel continues to create pretexts to sabotage the agreement, and that the mediators and the United States must take a decisive stance against this behavior.
Israel is using unverifiable reasons to kill Palestinians and destroy their homes while the agreement is in effect, while the United States gives it an opportunity to prove new rules of engagement that Al-Madhoun says will “keep the agreement in its first stage without moving to the rest of the stages, meaning the agreement will fail.”
The killing and destruction that occurred cannot be considered a reaction to the killing of an Israeli soldier, even if the Israeli story was correct, and this behavior will represent a major problem in Al-Madhoun’s opinion if the mediators do not take a position on it.
Netanyahu is trying to escape from his internal problems by killing the Palestinians, in addition to his efforts to reject the agreement in practice after he was unable to convince Trump to continue the war, which Al-Madhoun believes has not ended in practice.
On the other hand, former US State Department official Thomas Warrick says that what Israel did was coordinated with the United States, which supports Tel Aviv’s right to defend itself and respond to any attack without returning to war.
This is what made Israel launch rapid attacks on targets it had identified in advance, in coordination with the Americans, in order to strike them if they were exposed to any attack by Hamas, says Warrick.
Warrick held Hamas responsible for the killing of civilians, saying that its leaders “live in their homes and among their families, and it does not separate its fighters from civilians.”
The former American official acknowledged the difficulty of verifying who targeted the Israeli forces, but said that Tel Aviv holds Hamas responsible for violating the agreement, and is responding on this basis.