Well, let me give a little background on this. So, the Hamas attacks into southern Israel took place on October 7, 2023. Israel immediately commenced with its genocidal military campaign in the Gaza Strip. And there was no real pressure for any kind of cease-fire or suspension of hostilities during that initial period. There was, however, growing pressure not only from within Israeli society but also from foreign countries who had citizens among the captives in the Gaza Strip to reach some kind of agreement. And in November 2023, a temporary suspension of hostilities was reached. Quite a large number of captives, both Israeli and Palestinian, were released. And then on December 1, 2023, Israel unilaterally made the decision to resume full-scale hostilities because it refused to continue negotiating.

Between then and January of this year, the Biden administration placed zero pressure of any kind on Israel to reach a new agreement. For example, in May of last year, [Joe] Biden publicly announced a cease-fire proposal and claimed that it had essentially been authored by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

And in early July 2024, Hamas formally accepted it. Then, Israel introduced new conditions into that agreement, which Hamas did not accept. And in response, Biden, [former secretary of state Antony] Blinken, and the rest of them got up and said, well, the problem is Israel has accepted the terms of the cease-fire, but Hamas hasn’t. So, this idea that Israel was willing to reach a deal but Hamas wasn’t is, we now know, and in fact have known all along, the exact opposite of reality since late 2023.

This farce continued until January of this year when, before [Donald] Trump entered office, his envoy and the person who effectively serves as a his secretary of state, Steve Witkoff, in a single meeting with Netanyahu, compelled Israel to accept an agreement that was pretty much identical to the one that had been announced by Biden in May 2024. It was a three-stage agreement. The first stage included a suspension of hostilities, a limited exchange of captives, a limited Israeli withdrawal from territory it had seized in the Gaza Strip, and a surge in humanitarian supplies.

The second stage included a durable cease-fire. And part of that agreement was that so long as negotiations on the details of the second stage continued, neither party could legitimately renew hostilities. At the time, there were doubts about whether the United States was serious about resolving this issue or if Trump just wanted a diplomatic achievement because it would look good for him on the day of his inauguration.

In February of this year, Israel managed to persuade Trump and Witkoff to change the terms of the agreement that was already being implemented after being agreed to by both Israel and Hamas. Hamas, naturally enough, rejected this, and consequently the US authorized Israel to impose the most severe siege yet on the Gaza Strip on March 2 and March 18 of this year, renewing hostilities with a series of furious bombing raids that killed around four hundred people on their first day. Now there are negotiations about renewing an agreement which will, again, be a multistage agreement.

And basically, there are three outstanding issues. The first is Hamas’s demand that any temporary suspension of hostilities have a guaranteed pathway to a permanent end to the genocidal military campaign. In view of the US shifting the goal posts in February, this time the Palestinians are seeking more binding assurances on this issue. Basically, Hamas is now demanding that Trump personally and publicly proclaim that hostilities will not renew. Israel rejects these terms.

The second issue concerns the withdrawal of Israeli forces. The Palestinians are demanding that during the first phase, Israel withdraws to the positions it held before it renewed its genocidal military campaign on March 18 of this year. Israel has just released maps that show that, while it had previously maintained that it wished to hold positions up to 1,200 meters inside the Gaza Strip, in fact it plans to maintain its hold on up to 40 percent of the Gaza Strip — including the entire city of Rafah. Basically, everything east of the Salah al‑Din Road, which runs the length of the Gaza Strip from Beit Hanoun in the north to the Egyptian border in the south and bisects the strip. It also wants to remain in several east-west roads that further fragment the Gaza Strip.

And the third issue in contention is Hamas’s insistence that the management of humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip revert back to professional humanitarian agencies and aid organizations such as the specialized UN agencies, Norwegian Refugee Council, World Central Kitchen, and the like. And Israel is insisting that this remain in the hands of its partners in crime, the Orwellian named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [GHF]. So those are the three outstanding issues.

And I would just make the point that these issues are not going to be resolved by Israel and the Palestinians. It’s ultimately a decision for the United States to make, because if Washington tells Israel that it has to accept these terms then Israel will have no choice. So we are really waiting on Washington more than waiting on Israel.

The 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty limits the forces that Egypt is permitted to place in the Sinai Peninsula and also limits the forces Israel is allowed to place along both the Israeli Egyptian border and the boundary between Egyptian Sinai and the Gaza Strip, because at the time, the Gaza Strip was still under direct Israeli occupation.

Now, what has happened during the past decade in the context of Egypt’s campaign against the Sinai insurgency is that the Egyptians have exceeded their permitted quota of military forces in the Sinai Peninsula. But they have done this with Israeli approval. What we saw last year is that when Israeli forces stormed into this border zone, they did so unilaterally, without any consultation with Egypt, let alone approval. And this, of course, was seen by the Egyptians as a significant threat to their national security because they were concerned that Israel would use this control to begin expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt.

Israel has been launching a sustained campaign against the United Nations and particularly against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees [UNRWA]. Israel, after the attacks of October 7, more or less claimed that UNRWA participated in the attacks and that most of its Palestinian staff in the Gaza Strip are either Hamas fighters, members of Hamas, or have relatives in the movement. It conveniently left out that Israel rigorously vets every job applicant with UNRWA before she or he is hired by the agency, so that gives you an idea about the substance of their claims.

The Israeli Parliament more recently passed legislation designating UNRWA a terrorist organization and banning it from operating in territory under Israeli control. I’m not aware of anything similar having ever been done by another UN member state, and the matter is now before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

In the context of Israel’s reneging on the January agreement and renewing military hostilities, it basically prohibited all professional humanitarian aid agencies from bringing any supplies into the Gaza Strip — not a loaf of bread, not a drop of water, not a drop of fuel: nothing, not even an aspirin. And simultaneously, Israel, together with the United States, set up this organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which rather than providing aid exists for the purpose of weaponizing aid. And for this reason, every other aid organization has not only refused to cooperate with GHF but has publicly denounced it for violating every basic principle of humanitarian operations.

The normal procedure in a humanitarian emergency, such as you have in the Gaza Strip, is to flood the territory with aid. You bring the aid to the people who need it. And by providing sufficient amounts of aid, you also prevent issues such as looting and aid being resold at high prices on the black market and so on.

What GHF has done is to set up a number of so-called distribution centers, primarily in the south and center of the Gaza Strip. This means that anyone who wants to access this aid would have to travel to these centers, wait in line at these distribution centers, which were absolutely unfit for purpose and are not designed to provide sufficient amounts of aid to the tens of thousands of people who come to collect it. The purpose of these centers is to depopulate the northern Gaza Strip and concentrate the population in the southern Gaza Strip.

In addition to that, these distribution centers became kill zones. I mean, more desperate Palestinians seeking aid have been killed at these so-called distribution centers than the number of Israeli civilians killed on October 7, 2023. The organization is run by a fanatic Christian Zionist by the name of Reverend Johnnie Moore. If you look at his social media accounts you can see that he’s basically a carbon copy of Netanyahu or Mike Huckabee, the Christian Zionist fanatic who is currently the US ambassador to Israel.

GHF staff are primarily American mercenaries rather than aid professionals — people who effectively know nothing about aid distribution or the region they’re working in. Their only skill is killing people. The Associated Press, for example, has released videos of these people shooting at Palestinians and then celebrating direct hits, although most of the killing is being done by the Israelis, by snipers, by tanks.

And now we’ve learned even by shelling from naval vessels. So, you know, the purpose is to give the impression that there is aid, while using aid as a weapon to engage in demographic engineering and kill even more people. The pretext for this entire operation is that it prevents aid from being looted by Hamas. Yet, to date, and according to the professional aid agencies, Israel has never provided them with evidence Hamas is stealing their supplies. We do, however, have watertight evidence that militias established, armed, and supplied by Israel are looting aid and then selling it at exorbitant prices. So the problem is not Hamas, but Israel’s collaborators.

Well, what you need to understand about this is that while Gaza City is one of the oldest cities on Earth, Khan Yunis is a very old city and has been settled since ancient times, the Gaza Strip did not exist before 1948. The Gaza Strip came into existence as a result of the 1948 Palestine war.

During the Nakba, Israel not only ethnically cleansed the territory under its control but also successfully seized huge amounts of territory beyond the boundaries of the 1947 UN partition resolution. Apart from the West Bank, the only area of Mandatory Palestine that remained under Arab control, administered by Egypt, was a postage-stamp-sized strip of land, constituting a mere 1 percent of Palestine in its southwestern corner, known as Gaza Strip.

The pre-1948 war population of the Gaza Strip was about 80,000, which was then augmented virtually overnight by 200,000 uprooted and dispossessed refugees, primarily from southern Palestine south of Jaffa and west of Hebron. From the very outset, Israel has been very uncomfortable with the presence of these hundreds of thousands of destitute irredentist Palestinians seeking to return to their homes, which were often within spitting distance of the Gaza Strip. And indeed, the Gaza Strip has played an absolutely central role in the emergence of the contemporary Palestinian national movement.

What you see is that over the years, Israel has formulated or proposed a fairly large number of schemes to engage in what it calls thinning out the population of the Gaza Strip, basically seeking to reduce the refugee population of the Gaza Strip and the population of its refugee camps in particular. When this began in the 1950s, Israel proposed sending them to Libya or Egypt, sending them to Iraq and even sending them to Paraguay.

During the 1980s, these schemes became pretty much the preserve of the Israeli extreme right. And you wouldn’t hear it very much in mainstream discussions in Israel. On October 7, 2023, it immediately became not only government policy but national consensus within Israel that these people have to be permanently removed. And in fact, the former US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, went on a tour of Gulf states and other Arab states to market this idea, and it was summarily rejected. Then, of course, it was revived by Trump’s harebrained Gaza Riviera scheme, which, again, was individually, collectively, publicly, and firmly rejected by the Arab states who saw it as a direct threat to their national security, to their domestic stability, and to their regime legitimacy.

Now, in this latest iteration, basically you first have what I was earlier referring to regarding the weaponization of aid in order to concentrate the Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip. And in fact, it’s directly tied to this project, which was designed for Israel by the Boston Consulting Group. The proposals you have in mind were developed with the support of the Tony Blair Institute [for Global Change]. Tony Blair has apparently never encountered a war crime he doesn’t embrace.

And more recently, we’ve learned that that the GHF project is also proposing ways to send Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Cyprus. So, what we can conclude is that mass forcible expulsion under the rubric of voluntary relocation is official policy and that you have important think tanks, states, consulting firms, and so on directly assisting Israel in seeking to implement this.

That said, given Arab opposition to the plan, I consider its implementation unlikely. What is more likely is an Israeli strategy that makes the Gaza Strip ungovernable and uninhabitable, that Palestinians will seek to leave individually or in small groups by hook or by crook, and it will be called “voluntary transfer.” A process more akin to that of Syria during the civil war than the 1948 Nakba.

I’m not entirely on board with the premise of your question. As you’ll recall, when the first Trump administration entered office there was a meeting of minds between Washington, Israel, and conservative Arab states about renouncing the Iran nuclear agreement, replacing it with a policy of maximum pressure, and isolating Iran further in the region and internationally, which collectively would, they hoped, lead to regime change in Iran. What happened in the interim, or what happened since then, is Iran began to fight back and began to enrich uranium to increasingly high levels. It is now a nuclear threshold state.

But more importantly, Iran conducted a sophisticated and very successful attack on critical Aramco facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia in 2019, for which it didn’t take responsibility but was clearly its doing. The United States and Israel proved unable and unwilling to defend Saudi Arabia against these attacks. Simultaneously, you had growing drone and missile attacks from Yemen by Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, on Saudi Arabia and thereafter also on Emirati territory.

So, what you had during the Biden years, in fact, was the Gulf states — first the Emirates and then Saudi Arabia — normalizing relations with Iran. In the Saudi case, this process was mediated by China. The impetus for this normalization was that these governments realize that in any armed confrontation between the United States and Iran, they would be directly in the line of fire and they would be the main victims.

Now, it’s true that in 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. But the real prize in this initiative was Saudi Arabia. The problem here is that what is often presented as Saudi-Israeli normalization is really a Saudi-US agreement with normalization with Israel added on as a sweetener for Israel’s loyalists in the US Congress.

It consists of the US providing a formal security guarantee to Saudi Arabia and providing a civilian nuclear program, including a reactor, to Saudi Arabia. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would limit relations with China, Russia, and so on and become more closely tied to the United States.

Now, these American commitments require congressional approval. And normalization with Israel was supposed to help it get that approval. But I think even with that, it never really stood a chance. And it also required Israel to at least make some cosmetic gestures to the Palestinians to provide cover for Saudi Arabia. But this Israeli government, and the one before it, have reached such a level of extremism that they’re incapable of even making cosmetic gestures to the Palestinians to make this deal happen.

The Biden administration argued with Netanyahu about this. Basically, Biden’s people said to him that he should change his coalition and find partners that can make compromises. The problem is that the most eligible alternative coalition partner for Netanyahu was the opposition leader, Yair Lapid. But Lapid repeatedly proclaimed that he would never agree to any deal that involved US delivery of a nuclear reactor to Saudi Arabia. So it was essentially a nonstarter to begin with for this and other reasons.

What has happened since October 7 is that these kinds of cosmetic gestures that may have proven sufficient before 2023 are no longer enough. And Saudi Arabia is now demanding credible, concrete, irreversible steps toward an end of Israeli occupation and establishment of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state. Not the state itself but irrevocable progress toward that. At the same time, these Gulf states, particularly after the recent war against Iran, see Israel not so much as a security partner but as an arsonist determined to set the region aflame. While there’s no love lost between them and Iran — and they’re happy to see Iran weakened — they also don’t want Israel to be able to completely dominate the entire region.

Well, I think you could make the argument that a shift is already taking place. The view of Israel as a US proxy in the Middle East — as a stationary American aircraft carrier as it’s often been described — was essentially a Cold War phenomenon. And after the end of the Cold War, doubts were raised about the value of Israel as a proxy for US interests in the Middle East.

Israel recognized this. And that explains, in significant part, why it entered into the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians. Basically, this was an attempt to take the initiative itself before some agreement would be concocted from outside and imposed on it. And if you remember, during the Kuwait war not only did Israel not function as a US proxy but the US had to expend significant effort to keep Israel out of that war in order to keep its Arab coalition together.

While I do believe that Israel is still a proxy for the US and serves the US’s interests in the Middle East — just look at what it’s done to weaken Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Iran, and so on, who were all seen by the US as enemies — there is, as you suggested, also this other dynamic in which there are those in the US who believe that their country is being dragged into conflicts that are not necessarily in the US interest but are beneficial to Israel.

And we saw this very clearly with the war against Iran. A very significant part of the anti-interventionist constituency in the US is now part of the Trump personality cult. And what we saw in the Iran war was people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and others who have traditionally been very pro-Israeli now becoming quite harshly critical of Israel for dragging the US and Trump into another forever war, as they call it, in the Middle East.

I can’t answer your question with a yes or no because it depends on who you’re asking. There are those in the US — Israel loyalists, anti-Iran hawks, Christian Zionists, and so on — who think this is great. And then there are others who are like, “Well, what does this have to do with America First? Isn’t this a policy of Israel First?” But in the end, there are multiple reasons why the US and the West more broadly support Israel. But at the end of the day, they see it as a reliable proxy for Western interests in the Middle East.

I do think regime change has been a consistent US and Israeli ambition with regard to Iran since 1979. I think the difference now is that for Israel, the policy of regime change has amplified to one of seeking state collapse in Iran. And if you look at its initial campaign against Iran in March of this year, it went well beyond anything that could be seen as targeting Iran’s nuclear or ballistic missile programs. Basically, they were seeking to create the conditions for what they had deluded themselves into believing would be a mass popular uprising against the Islamic Republic that would result in the former shah’s son being installed in Tehran.

But what’s interesting here is that the US, I think, had a very different policy. While Trump was of course threatening to kill Iran’s leader, Ali Khamenei, and overthrow the Islamic Republic, if you look at what the US actually did during what was indisputably a war of aggression against Iran, it conducted three air raids against three specific targets directly associated with Iran’s nuclear program. They didn’t engage in any broader campaign to try to force a larger political change in Iran. I do believe, and I know there are many who disagree, that the United States would prefer a diplomatic agreement with Iran rather than a full-scale armed confrontation with it.

This partly has to do with what we were discussing earlier about constituencies within the Republican Party, which has been transformed into a Trump personality cult. But the problem, of course, is that the demands being put forward by the United States in these negotiations are demands that Iran can never, and will never, accept. And unless there is a change in that calculation, it would seem that further armed conflict is almost inevitable, particularly because Israel’s objection is not to a bad agreement, it’s to any agreement.

To get back to the first part of our discussion, one thing that’s being suggested now by several analysts — I don’t know to what extent it’s substantiated but it is one issue that may have been discussed during Netanyahu’s recent trip to Washington — is the possibility that Israel will give the United States a free hand in forging an agreement with Iran, and in exchange, the United States will give Israel a free hand to determine the future of the Gaza Strip and its population.

Well, it’s been really quite astounding. You would be very hard-pressed to find articles or comments or reporting in the mainstream Western press that would describe the war as an unprovoked war of aggression by Israel and the United States against Iran. You would also struggle to find articles in these outlets pointing out that the strike took place just as the Iranians were preparing to return to the Omani capital Muscat to continue negotiations with the US about a diplomatic agreement. Nor would you be able to read in these publications that it’s absolutely forbidden, strictly prohibited, to attack nuclear facilities that are under the supervision or monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

You read much of this news coverage and you’re left with the impression that Iran was hours away from constructing a nuclear weapon and dropping it on Tel Aviv, and that Israel was responding to an imminent and existential threat. The media coverage has been absolutely atrocious. And what’s telling about this is that we’re talking about a primarily liberal media that tends to be quite hostile to this current US administration. But when it comes to Israel, they all line up like good Germans behind whatever the latest Israeli narrative is.