The Netanyahu VI government is under enormous pressure after the attempt to accelerate Joe Biden’s ceasefire negotiations: far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich coordinated two posts on X — published one minute apart — in which they announce that if the government were to decide to sign a ceasefire agreement similar to the one presented by Biden, they would leave the majority, causing the government to fall. Ben-Gvir went so far as to brand the agreement as “absolute defeat”: “We will not allow the war to end without the complete elimination of Hamas.” According to Smotrich, an unspecified “completely different security reality” is needed not only in Gaza but also “in Lebanon.” In fact, the Prime Minister’s office had already rejected the deal. On Saturday evening, around 120 thousand people returned to the streets of Tel Aviv to demand an agreement for the release of prisoners and for early elections. As with previous protests, the Israeli police responded to the demonstration with excessive violence, using water and sonic cannons. At the end of the day two people were arrested. The spokesperson for the Forum of Israeli Families Relatives of Prisoners declared that “there is a minority that is blackmailing Netanyahu and threatening the agreement,” and therefore “we must support the agreement and not leave the arena to the extremists.”
The United States, Egypt and Qatar issued a joint statement calling “on both Hamas and Israel to finalize the agreement according to the principles described by President Biden.” But the situation is even more complex, if possible: in Egyptian defense circles, resentment is growing towards the United States for the Biden administration’s unconditional support for the aggression in Gaza, in particular following the IDF conquest of the Philadelphia Route, the corridor of territory that marks the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. At the same time, a background of Walla reveals that the White House had anticipated the contents of Biden’s speech to ministers Gantz and Gallant – evidently seen as allied voices within the Netanyahu VI government, often in open opposition in the war cabinet to the Prime Minister. US officials would have been disappointed by the reaction of Gantz in particular, who has not yet made any statement on the possibility of reaching a ceasefire. Blinken himself spoke on the phone with Gantz on Saturday, but apparently without obtaining the desired result.
Meanwhile, the aggression in the Gaza Strip continues: both the city of Gaza and Rafah have been hit again by bombings and artillery attacks. At the time of writing, the number of deaths is not yet clear, but in Gaza the area of the Sabra neighborhood around the university was hit, and in Rafah several houses were demolished. In the West Bank, a group of Israeli settlers set fire to cultivated fields of olive trees and wheat crops in the town of Duma, then preventing citizens from reaching the cultivated land to put out the fire. It is the second time in two months that settlers have set fires in the area, subsequently preventing the fire from being put out.
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