Israel faces “considerable pressure” to halt the war in Gaza, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vowed to eliminate Hamas despite an uncertain political and diplomatic path in Israel and the United States.
“There is considerable pressure on Israel at home and abroad to stop the war before we achieve all of its goals, including a deal at any price to free the hostages,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. “We are committed to continuing the war until we achieve all of its goals: Eliminating Hamas, releasing all of the hostages, and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel.”
Netanyahu insisted that “there is no pressure, none, that can change this,” even as the Biden administration seeks to balance a twin-track diplomatic effort to guard Israel against pressure from the U.N. Security Council even while trying to broker a temporary ceasefire as part of a deal to release the scores of hostages still held by Hamas. That fraught process has stoked private disputes and public misgivings within and between the U.S. and Israeli security establishments.
“I am seeing some strategic confusion on all sides,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Vice President Jonathan Schanzer told the Washington Examiner. “The Israelis and the United States have, I think, a lot of shared objectives. … The question is how to get there and how to message properly, to their own political constituents, what they’re doing in order to get there.”
Those cross-pressures have come to the surface in both countries in recent weeks as the Israel Defense Forces prepare for an expected assault of Rafah in the southern end of the Gaza Strip. That city stands as the last major stronghold of Hamas, but it also has functioned as a relatively safe haven for Palestinian civilians in the months since IDF forces began their assault in Gaza City.
“We believe that any major operation in Rafah, under the current circumstances — without a credible and operable plan to look after, to ensure the safety and security of the … innocent Palestinians that took refuge in Rafah because of the fighting up north — would be a disaster,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday. “We have conveyed that privately to our Israeli counterparts.”
Kirby emphasized that President Joe Biden has dispatched a senior White House official to discuss prospective ceasefire proposals in a diplomatic tour of the Middle East. In parallel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have demanded an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.
“A vote in favor of this draft resolution is a support to the Palestinians’ right to life; conversely, voting against it implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon them,” Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama asserted Tuesday. “The Council must not merely call for a ceasefire. It must ensure steadfast adherence by all parties.”
Their debate took place against an uncomfortable political backdrop for Biden, whose 2024 reelection campaign needs the support of the Arab-American voters concentrated in the crucial swing state of Michigan.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who cast the lone vote against the Algerian resolution, sought to justify the veto in part on the grounds that an errant step by the council would “extend the dire humanitarian crisis Palestinians are facing in Gaza” by closing a path to negotiations that might produce a viable deal.
“Demanding an immediate, unconditional ceasefire without an agreement requiring Hamas to release the hostages will not bring about a durable peace,” Thomas-Greenfield said, telling the Security Council that the U.S. is drafting a resolution to advance those goals and also warn Israel “that under current circumstances, a major ground offensive into Rafah should not proceed.”
Thomas-Greenfield suggested that “some on the Council did not actually want a resolution to pass,” arguing after the vote that Algerians rebuffed edits of the draft proposed by American diplomats.
“They also call for an immediate ceasefire, which would give Hamas the cover of not releasing the hostages,” she told reporters. “And it was our concern that it would send the wrong message to Hamas, that this resolution would actually give them something that they have asked for without requiring them to do something in return, [which] would have meant that the fighting would have continued. Because without the hostage releases, we know that the fighting is going to continue.”
While Netanyahu maintains that he will “finish the job,” other officials have signaled that the threat of a Rafah campaign functions as leverage to try to secure the hostage release deal.
“The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know — if by Ramadan our hostages are not home, the fighting will continue everywhere, including the Rafah area,” Benny Gantz, Israeli war Cabinet minister, said Sunday.
Yet Israeli Finance Minister Eli Smotrich, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s coalition government, suggested Tuesday that the release of the hostages is “very important but not the most important thing” in the war. “Why make it a competition? Why is it so important at the moment?” Smotrich told an Israeli broadcaster. “We need to destroy Hamas. That is very important.”
That remark drew a rebuke from Gantz and also the hostages’ relatives, who fear that Netanyahu is not making a good faith effort to secure the release of their loved ones.
“Let them kidnap your children and I will shout in the street, ‘It’s not the most important thing!’” Eli Albag, whose teenage daughter was kidnapped by Hamas during the Oct. 7 rampage that ignited the war, said Tuesday. “They are abandoning us above. They are laughing at us, dragging their feet. They are not going to negotiate. I say to you citizens, take to the streets because today it is us, and tomorrow it will be you.”
Netanyahu, for all his hard-line rhetoric, also signaled on Tuesday that he would support some type of hostage release deal.
“We very much want to achieve another release, and we are prepared to go far, but we are not prepared to pay any price,” he said. “Certainly not the delusional prices that Hamas is demanding of us, the meaning of which is the defeat of the state of Israel.”
Schanzer, the FDD analyst, suggested that Israeli security leaders want to avoid an intense fight during Ramadan, an Islamic religious season that begins March 10 and often brings the risk of tensions in other sectors, and also need time to develop a plan for Palestinian civilians to leave Rafah.
“Moving 1.4 million people is not a simple matter, and it will take time to solve for that, and so the Israelis are, I think, wrestling with that,” he said. “But you definitely see political will on their side. … They need to move the civilians, and then they need to conduct ground maneuvers.”
A deal that secures a short-term ceasefire and hostage release might advance those objectives from the Israeli perspective, but it would also raise international hopes of halting the war entirely.
“The way to stop the fighting, and potentially stop it from restarting, is to begin with a pause to get hostages out and aid in. That is what we are calling for,” British Ambassador Barbara Woodward said Tuesday to explain why her government abstained from the vote on the Algerian resolution. “It could end the fighting now.”
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In that case, the deal that U.S. officials are working to orchestrate could set the stage for more intense disagreements with Netanyahu if Schanzer’s logic holds.
“There is no way that Israel can’t go into Rafah [eventually] if their goal is to defeat Hamas,” Schanzer said. “This is likely where something like 6,000 of the remaining Hamas fighters are holed up … and there are battles that need to be fought. There’s [Hamas] leaders who need to be found, from Israel’s perspective.”
