If Trump wants Gaza ceasefire, he must pressure Netanyahu, experts say
Washington, DC – The White House says Donald Trump’s “utmost priority” in the Middle East is to end the war in Gaza. But as the United States president hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, the two leaders have heaped praise on each other.
Meanwhile, Israel continues its assault on the Palestinian territory, where more than 57,575 people have been killed.
Analysts say that if Trump is truly seeking a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, he must leverage US military aid to Israel to pressure Netanyahu to agree to a deal.
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group nonprofit, drew a parallel between Trump’s mixed messaging and that of his predecessor, Joe Biden. Both men, he said, called for a ceasefire but showed unwillingness to press Israel to end the fighting.
“It’s like deja vu with the Biden administration, where you would hear similar pronouncements from the White House,” said Finucane.
“If a ceasefire is indeed the ‘utmost priority’ of the White House, it has the leverage to bring it about.”
The US provides Israel with billions of dollars in military assistance each year, on top of offering it diplomatic backing at international forums like the United Nations.
While US officials expressed optimism about reaching a 60-day truce this week that could lead to a permanent ceasefire, Netanyahu told reporters in Washington, DC, that Israel has “still to finish the job in Gaza” and eliminate the armed group Hamas.
Finucane, a former US State Department lawyer, described Netanyahu’s comments as “maximalist rhetoric” and “bluster”, stressing that Trump could push Israel to stop the war.
He said Trump could use the “threat of suspension of military support” to achieve the ceasefire, “which very much would be in the interest of the United States and the interest of the president himself in terms of scoring a diplomatic win”.
Trump and Netanyahu ‘in lockstep’
Netanyahu arrived in Washington, DC, on Monday and took a “victory lap” with Trump to celebrate their joint attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities during a 12-day war last month.
From the start, the Israeli prime minister appeared to play to Trump’s ego. As he sat down to a White House dinner on Monday night, Netanyahu announced he had nominated the US president for a Nobel Peace Prize.
The two leaders met again on Tuesday, with Trump saying that their talks would be all about Gaza and the truce proposal.
A day later, Netanyahu said he and Trump were “in lockstep” over Gaza.
“President Trump wants a deal, but not at any price,” the Israeli prime minister said. “I want a deal, but not at any price. Israel has security requirements and other requirements, and we’re working together to try to achieve it.”
But Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that Israel is the party standing in the way of a ceasefire. She noted that Hamas has already demanded a lasting end to the war, which is what the Trump administration says it is seeking.
“While we know Trump has said he wants a ceasefire, thus far, we’ve not seen Trump being willing to use America’s extensive leverage to actually get there,” Sheline told Al Jazeera.
Far from stopping the flow of arms to Israel, the Trump administration has taken pride in resuming the transfer of heavy bombs – the only weapons that Biden temporarily withheld during the war on Gaza.
Dire situation in Gaza
While truce talks are ongoing, the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza, which UN experts and rights groups have described as a genocide, are intensifying.
Hospitals are running out of fuel, cases of preventable diseases are on the rise, hunger is rampant, and hundreds of people have been killed by Israeli fire over the past weeks while trying to receive food at US-backed, privately-run aid distribution sites.
Nancy Okail, the president of the Center for International Policy, said that Trump appears to be interested in a Gaza ceasefire in part to boost his own image as a peacemaker and to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to bring peace to the world, seizing on Americans’ weariness of war after the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But so far, he has failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And he oversaw the outbreak of war between Israel and Iran, even ordering the US’s participation in it.
The US president took credit for a Gaza truce that came into effect in January, only to let it unravel as he supported Israel’s decision to resume the war in March.
Okail said the atrocities in Gaza could not be stopped with just verbal calls for a ceasefire.
“If it is not accompanied by action – as in the suspension of aid or suspension of arms to Israel – Netanyahu doesn’t have any reason to actually go forward seriously with the peace negotiations,” she told Al Jazeera.
Netanyahu pushes displacement
Even if a 60-day truce is reached, rights advocates are concerned that Israel may not only return to war afterwards, but it might also use the time to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and further entrench its occupation.
Hamas said on Wednesday that it had agreed to release 10 Israeli captives as part of the proposed deal, but the remaining sticking points are about the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and guarantees for a permanent ceasefire.
Before Netanyahu arrived in Washington, DC, Israeli Minister of Defence Israel Katz revealed a plan to create an internment camp for Palestinians in southern Gaza, according to the newspaper Haaretz.
The publication quoted Katz as saying that Israel would implement an “emigration plan” to remove Palestinians from Gaza, which rights groups say would amount to ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity.
The idea of depopulating Gaza is not new. Far-right Israeli ministers have been publicly championing it since the start of the war. But the international community started taking the idea seriously when Trump floated it in February as part of his desire to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Netanyahu brought it up again during his visit, saying that Palestinians in Gaza should be free to leave the territory if they choose.
‘Involuntary transfer’
While the Trump administration has not re-endorsed the ethnic cleansing scheme in Gaza this week, the White House still suggested that Palestinians cannot remain in the territory.
“This has become an uninhabitable place for human beings, and the president has a big heart,” Trump’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters.
“He wants this to be a prosperous, safe part of the region where people and families can thrive.”
Rights advocates have stressed that people under bombardment and with no access to basic necessities cannot have a “free” choice to stay or leave a place.
Sheline said that the international fears that Trump and Netanyahu are working to ethnically cleanse Gaza and displace its Palestinian residents elsewhere are warranted.
“There was a lot of discussion of the idea that maybe because the US helped Israel with its war on Iran, that would be the leverage used for a ceasefire in Gaza,” she said.
“But instead, it sort of seems to be something like: If Netanyahu agrees to a ceasefire, then the US will facilitate this involuntary transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza.”
For her part, Okail likened pushing people to leave Gaza under the threat of bombardment and starvation to shoving Palestinians out of the enclave at gunpoint.
“If expanding the occupation and ethnic cleansing is their approach to ceasefire, it means they want to kill any ceasefire attempt, not negotiate one,” she told Al Jazeera.
Source: Ali Harb
More than 100 premature babies in Gaza at risk as hospitals run out of fuel
Two of Gaza’s largest hospitals have issued desperate pleas for help, warning that fuel shortages caused by Israel’s siege could soon turn the medical centres into “silent graveyards”.
The warnings from al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza City and Nasser Hospital in southern Khan Younis came on Wednesday, as Israeli forces continued to bombard the Palestinian enclave, killing at least 74 people.
Muhammad Abu Salmiyah, the director of al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest facility, told reporters that the lives of more than 100 premature babies and some 350 dialysis patients were at risk.
“Oxygen stations will stop working. A hospital without oxygen is no longer a hospital. The lab and blood banks will shut down, and the blood units in the refrigerators will spoil,” Salmiyah said.
“The hospital will cease to be a place of healing and will become a graveyard for those inside,” he said.
Abu Salmiyah went on to accuse Israel of “trickle-feeding” fuel to Gaza’s hospitals, and said that al-Shifa’s dialysis department had already been shut down to conserve power for the intensive care unit and operating rooms, which cannot be without electricity for even a few minutes.
‘Final hours’
In Khan Younis, the Nasser Medical Complex said it, too, has entered “the crucial and final hours” due to the fuel shortages.
“With the fuel counter nearing zero, doctors have entered the battle to save lives in a race against time, death, and darkness,” the hospital said in a statement. “Medical teams fight to the last breath. They have only their conscience and hope in those who hear the call – save Nasser Medical Complex before it turns into a silent graveyard for patients who could have been saved.”
Mohammed Sakr, a spokesman for the hospital, told the Reuters news agency that the facility needs 4,500 litres (1,189 gallons) of fuel per day to function, but it now has only 3,000 litres (790 gallons) – enough to last 24 hours.
Sakr said doctors are performing surgeries without electricity or air conditioning, and the sweat from staff is dripping into patients’ wounds, risking infection.
A video from Nasser Hospital, posted on social media, shows doctors sweating profusely as they perform a surgery.
“Everything is turned off here. The air conditioning is turned off. No fans,” a doctor says in the video as he demonstrates conditions in the ward. “All the staff are exhausted, they are complaining [about the] high temperature.”
Israel’s relentless bombardment has decimated Gaza’s healthcare system in the 21 months since it launched its assault on the Palestinian enclave in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.
Since then, there have been more than 600 recorded attacks on health facilities in Gaza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). As of May this year, only 19 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain partially operational, with 94 percent of all hospitals damaged or destroyed.
Israeli forces have also killed more than 1,500 health workers in Gaza, and detained 185, according to official figures.
The WHO, meanwhile, has described Gaza’s health sector as being “on its knees”, with shortages of fuel, medical supplies and frequent arrivals of mass casualties from Israeli attacks.
Suffocating siege
Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that “hundreds” of people could die in the territory if fuel supplies are not brought in urgently.
This includes “dozens” of premature babies who could die within the next two days, he said. Dialysis and intensive care patients would also lose their lives, he said, adding that the injuries of the wounded were worsening amid deteriorating conditions, while diseases like meningitis were spreading.
UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who recently returned from Gaza, said, “You can have the best hospital staff on the planet”, but if they are denied medicine and fuel, operating a health facility “becomes an impossibility”.
Israel has imposed a suffocating siege on Gaza since early March.
Over the past weeks, it has allowed some food into Gaza to be distributed through a United States-backed group at sites where hundreds of aid seekers have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
But fuel has not entered the territory in more than four months.
“What little fuel remains is already being used to power the most essential operations – such as intensive care units and water desalination – but those supplies are running out fast, and there are virtually no additional accessible stocks left,” the UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA) said on Tuesday.
“Hospitals are rationing. Ambulances are stalling. Water systems are on the brink. The deaths this is likely causing could soon increase sharply unless the Israeli authorities allow new fuel in – urgently, regularly and in sufficient quantities.”
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 57,575 people and wounded 136,879, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023 attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.
Source: Al Jazeera