Analyst: Israel’s Gaza Strategy Aims to Make Region “Unlivable” or Provoke Retaliation
A political analyst alleges that despite the ceasefire, Israel is conducting a "spectacular display of violence" to either collapse the truce or render Gaza permanently uninhabitable.
A leading political analyst has accused Israel of pursuing a deliberate two-part strategy in Gaza, designed to either make the territory permanently uninhabitable or to provoke a retaliation that would justify a full-scale resumption of hostilities.
According to Muhammad Shehada, a political analyst from Gaza and a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, Israel will not “relent easily” despite the current ceasefire. He described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan as ensuring the war does not truly stop.
“The picture that you have right now is [the US] has put Netanyahu on a dog leash. He’s not allowed to collapse the ceasefire explicitly, but that dog leash is very loose – it allows him to get away with a lot,” Shehada stated in an interview with Al Jazeera from Copenhagen.
Shehada argues that by carrying out attacks that kill dozens of Palestinians, Israel is attempting to provoke Hamas into retaliating. This retaliation, he says, would then be used as an excuse to resume what he termed a “genocide.”
The ultimate goal, according to the analyst, is to keep Gaza as a “refugee camp in ruins” that is designed to be “unlivable and uninhabitable,” or to collapse the ceasefire altogether.
Source: Al Jazeera
