Israel-Gaza briefing: Obstacles to peace seem larger than ever after six months of war

Six months after the Hamas attacks on Israel, war, disease, starvation and death ravage Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is deeply divided, as its prime minister struggles to keep his promise of total victory. The United States, Israel’s most essential ally, has turned against the way it is fighting the war.

With Iran vowing vengeance for Israel’s assassination of a leading Iranian general in Syria, and months of cross-border conflict with Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, the risks of an all-out Middle East war are increasing.

The statistics record the horrors of the past six months. More than 33,000 Gazans, a majority of whom were civilians, have been killed, according to the health ministry. According to Save the Children, 13,800 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed and over 12,009 wounded. Unicef reports at least 1,000 children have had one or both legs amputated.

More than 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed by Hamas on 7 October, and 253 people were taken into Gaza as hostages. Israel says that of 130 hostages still there, at least 34 are dead. A UN team reported in March that it had “clear and convincing information” that hostages had been subjected to sexual violence “including rape, sexualised torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”. It said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the violence against hostages was continuing.

Kibbutz Nir Oz is right on Israel’s border with Gaza. It feels like a time capsule still stuck in the horrors of 7 October 2023. Just after first light on that morning, Hamas broke through the wire. By the time the Israeli army arrived in the early afternoon, a quarter of the 400 or so Israelis who lived there had either been killed by Hamas or taken hostage.

Ron Bahat showed me around. He is a man in his 50s who grew up at Nir Oz. Ron survived with his family through good luck and arms strong enough to hold shut the door of the safe room when Hamas entered his house.

We walked along the neat lines of small houses, with gardens that are now overgrown. Many had bullet holes or were burnt out and had not been disturbed since the bodies of the dead were recovered. Ron pointed out the homes of friends and neighbours who were killed or taken as captives to Gaza. In one badly damaged house, a pile of neatly ironed children’s clothes had somehow survived the fire. The family who lived there did not.

One grim irony is that Nir Oz is part of a left-wing movement whose members traditionally support the idea of peace with the Palestinians. Six months after Hamas crossed into Nir Oz, Ron is not ready to make any concessions to Gaza.

“Look, I wish that there will be a leader to bring some prosperity there, because in the end we must have peace. But anyone who supports Hamas is an enemy. The moment they leave their weapons, the war will stop. The moment that Israel leaves its weapons, we will not exist. That’s the difference.”

In Nir Oz, broken glass still crunches underfoot and gutted houses smell of burnt wood and plastic. No-one is there to clean it up. A few of the surviving residents have come back on short visits, but most are staying away, living in hotels in central Israel.

Yamit Avital was back for a few hours, showing around a friend. On that morning in October, she had been staying in Tel Aviv. Her husband was at home and escaped with the children. His brother, living not far away, was killed. Yamit’s hands shook slightly when she was talking about coming back to live in Nir Oz again.

“I don’t know, it’s too early… Maybe only when the hostages come back we can start to think about it. We can’t think about it now. I have too many friends there, in Gaza.”

No-one has been able to show me around the ruins of Khan Younis or Gaza City, or the tents of around 1.4 million displaced civilians in Rafah, in the way Ron Bahat showed me Nir Oz. That’s because international journalists can’t report from Gaza, as Israel and Egypt, in control of the borders, have not allowed them in. The only exception has been invitation-only, highly supervised trips organised by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). I have been on one, to northern Gaza in early November. Only a month or so into the war, Israeli firepower had already reduced the area to a wasteland.

Evidence is accumulating that both Hamas and Israel may have committed war crimes. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is investigating Israel for “plausible” allegations of genocide against the Palestinians in a case brought by South Africa. The ICJ cannot try a case against Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the US and UK, and many others, as it is not a state.

Israel rejects the charge that it is guilty of genocide. For many of its citizens and supporters it is grotesque and offensive to allege that the state created after Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust is itself committing genocide. One of Israel’s lawyers, Tal Becker, told the justices in court in The Hague that “the appalling suffering of civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian, is first and foremost the result of Hamas’ strategy”.

Palestinians see the charges through a different lens, shaped by years of military occupation by Israel. Many Palestinians believe Israel has already created an apartheid state that denies them the most basic rights. In Jerusalem at Easter, a prominent Palestinian Christian political activist, Dimitri Diliani, told me that “killing children is killing children. It doesn’t matter who is the child that’s being killed. It doesn’t matter who is doing the killing”.

“I recognise the Holocaust, but that does not mean a green light for Israel to commit genocide against my people or any other people.”

The ICJ’s deliberations will take years and Israel’s accusers will have to prove intent to win their case. War and the deaths of civilians do not add up to genocide on their own. South Africa’s legal team argues that statements like the one made by Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant on 9 October show genocidal intent. “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said after visiting the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Israel was forced by international pressure, especially from Washington, to loosen aspects of the blockade that the minister envisaged. The amounts reaching Gaza were still grossly inadequate. Six months later, Gaza is facing imminent famine, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) a body backed by governments, the UN and aid groups to provide rigorous and apolitical information and analysis in a food emergency. Oxfam reports that 300,000 people trapped in the north have lived since January on an average of 245 calories a day – the equivalent of a tin of beans.

Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe has also been recorded in detail by Palestinian journalists, civilians posting on social media, and the international organisations running the aid operation, whose staff are allowed to enter the territory. Seven from the World Central Kitchen (WCK), which had been providing millions of meals, were killed by the Israeli army on 1 April.

Their deaths outraged President Biden and other Western leaders who are staunch allies of Israel. Their condemnation of the killings left Israel even more isolated. Israel expects no sympathy from much of the world. But it has come to expect support and understanding from powerful Western allies. Instead, they have rejected Israel’s claim it does not impede the movement of relief supplies.

President Biden extracted unusually rapid concessions from Israel, which promised greater humanitarian access to Gaza in a statement rushed out in the middle of the night here in Jerusalem. Perhaps he threatened to attach conditions to the use of American weapons in Gaza.

The killing of the WCK team seems to have been a tipping point for President Biden, whose backing for Israel has been a constant throughout his long career in politics. Supporting Israel is still his firm principle, but the US is no longer prepared to turn that into a safety net for Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition partners.

Palestinians ask, with some anger and frustration, why it took the deaths of seven aid workers, including six Westerners, to make a difference, after so many thousands of Gazans had been killed. Aid agencies operating in Gaza say the attack on the aid workers was not an isolated incident, but the result of an engrained disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians.

President Biden’s outrage might have been a long time coming but it could create a turning point in the war. Over the next month or so, one way of assessing change is simply to count whether Israel is killing fewer Palestinian civilians, or whether increased food and medical aid can save Gaza from famine. Another test will be whether Mr Netanyahu defies American opposition and goes ahead with a ground assault on Rafah, where Israel says the remaining organised units of Hamas must be destroyed. The US says that must not happen until Israel can find a way to protect the lives of almost 1.5 million Palestinians who have taken refuge there.

Benjamin Netanyahu has delivered the “mighty vengeance” he promised Israelis on 7 October. His other promises, of total victory, the destruction of Hamas, and the return of the hostages have not been achieved. Inside Israel, he faces severe political pressure. His approval ratings in opinion polls have plummeted.

In the past week in Jerusalem thousands of protestors waving Israeli flags blocked streets around the parliament demanding the resignation of the prime minister and new elections.

“Netanyahu has an interest to lengthen the war as much as he can, because as long as the war is still going on, he can say that now is not the time for new elections,” said Nava Rosalio, one of the leaders of the anti-Netanyahu movement. Her group is called Busha in Hebrew, which translates as Shame.

“He says now is not the time to look for who is responsible, which is he. So he prefers to keep the hostages in Gaza, and he prefers to lengthen the war.”

When Hamas attacked, Israel was deeply divided over his government’s right-wing policies and culture wars between secular and religious Israelis. In the shock that followed reservists who had suspended their military service as part of the protests rushed back into uniform. Demonstrations were paused in the interests of national unity.

Six months on, it is no longer considered unpatriotic to protest against the failure to end the war and free the hostages. Israel’s divisions are wide open once more.

Mr Netanyahu faces searing accusations that his priority is his own political survival. To stay in power, he must preserve his coalition, which is built around the support of ultranationalist Jewish parties. They do not only oppose the mass release of Palestinian security prisoners to buy the freedom of Israeli hostages, without which a ceasefire will not happen. Mr Netanyahu’s two main ultranationalist allies, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, go further. They both want Palestinians to leave Gaza so Jews can settle there instead.

The prime minister, renowned for his skills in the dark arts of politics, is performing a balancing act to keep them happy while denying that Mr Smotrich and Mr Ben-Gvir’s views reflect government policy.

Before October, Israel’s divisions must have made it look vulnerable to Hamas. Six months on, the same schisms within Israel about the present and the future are making it harder to win the war.

Capturing or killing Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, would give Israel a chance to declare victory. But he is still alive, sending his responses to proposals in successive rounds of ceasefire talks from wherever he is hiding. He is thought to be somewhere in the Hamas tunnel network, protected by bodyguards and a human shield of Israeli hostages.

Yahya Sinwar must be disappointed that Palestinians on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem have not risen up in support of Gaza. Some must be taking the long view, waiting to see how events unfold in Gaza and the wider Middle East. Others are struggling to feed their families now that thousands of Palestinians are no longer allowed to work in Israel. Some are scared.

Israel has launched many deadly raids against armed groups in the West Bank, killing innocent bystanders in the process and arresting thousands who are being held without trial. Some Palestinian farmers have been driven off their land after violent and sometimes deadly intimidation by extremist Jewish settlers.

Opinion polls show strong support among Palestinians for the attacks on 7 October, though many deny the evidence that Hamas committed atrocities. At a noisy demonstration against the Israelis in Ramallah in the West Bank, I asked Joharah Baker, a Palestinian activist, whether the Hamas attacks had moved the Palestinians any closer to independence from Israeli rule. She said that was not the point.

“What happened on 7 October is just one thing that happened in many long years of oppression… Our struggle will continue until we are free. That is what any people under occupation, under oppression, under colonial settlers will do.”

According to the leading Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, even those who dislike Hamas approve of the way its attacks have put the Palestinian desire for independence back on the political map of the Middle East. The war has accelerated a new way for that to happen. His latest polls indicate that younger Palestinians do not think the two-state solution of an independent Palestine alongside Israel will ever emerge.

Instead, he says, a plurality of under-30s want a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan, in which they believe they could fight and win democratic rights. They compare their fight with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and believe they have a Palestinian Nelson Mandela waiting in an Israeli jail. He is Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned since 2002 and serving five life sentences for murder. If he ran for president, the indications are that he would win easily. Even though he is a leader of the rival Palestinian faction, Fatah, Hamas put Marwan Barghouti’s name on the list of prisoners they want released in exchange for hostages.

It is impossible to see Jewish Israelis ever giving up the Jewish nature of their state. The fact that Palestinians see that as a possibility is another sign of the distance between them.

Six months into the war, there is no immediate sign that it is ending. Benjamin Netanyahu has avoided any specifics about how Gaza would be governed when this war ends, except for insisting that Israel must be in control – in other words, an occupation.

He has rejected America’s proposal to replace Israeli troops with a force from the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank. The Americans want a PA, revitalised, eventually to govern Gaza. That would most likely require new leadership. Current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is elderly and hugely unpopular. Palestinians say he has failed to fight corruption, failed to show sympathy for Gaza, and failed to order the Palestinian police to protect them from aggressive Jewish settlers while he continues security cooperation with Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu has also rejected Joe Biden’s idea of a grand bargain that would transform the Middle East. In return for allowing Palestinian independence, Israel would be recognised by Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis would get a NATO-style defence agreement with the US. Instead, the prime minister tells Israelis that he is the only man who can save them from the mortal hazard of a Palestinian state imposed by America. That is music for the ultranationalists in his government, who are much keener to keep the West Bank and all of Jerusalem than make a deal with Saudi Arabia.

Away from the conference rooms where leaders discuss the future, the war has created another enormous obstacle to peace. Palestinians and Israelis have not been as suspicious of each other since the turbulent decades of assassination, hijackings and war in the 1950s and 60s.

The pollster Khalil Shikaki identifies an accelerated mutual process of dehumanisation since 7 October.

“The Palestinians are not seen as partners for peace. They are not seen as people who deserve equality because of what they have done on 7 October. So, they [Israelis] question their humanity. We see similar developments, unfortunately, also among Palestinians, who see what is happening in Gaza.

“And they say those who are targeting women and children, deliberately killing entire families, demolishing entire neighbourhoods cannot be humans as well. So, they see them as monsters.

“This dehumanisation is absolutely disastrous for the future.”

Additional reporting by Oren Rosenfeld, Fred Scott and Kathy Long