International Crisis Group / March 21, 2025
On 18 March, Israel resumed bombing Gaza, upending a two-month ceasefire. Returning to war promises little but more death and destruction. The U.S. should insist on restoring the truce and endorse the Arab League plan for Gaza as the basis for a more permanent peace.
A ceasefire that brought welcome respite to war-torn Gaza has been broken. The truce marked a pause in Israel’s military assault on the strip, sparked by Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023. That attack and the subsequent war in Gaza have left at least 50,000 Palestinians and 1,600 Israelis dead. Gaza is in ruins, its 2.2 million surviving people enduring terrible poverty, hunger, disease, grief, uncertainty and fear. Though suffering far fewer casualties, Israelis remain traumatised by the shock of Hamas’s 7 October attack and the continuous anxiety of the hostages’ lengthy captivity. The war has also rocked much of the Middle East, as Iran itself and militant groups in the Tehran-backed “axis of resistance” fired at Israel on several fronts.
The now shattered ceasefire – part of a broader deal concluded on 19 January – came as a relief to everyone. Though Israel still made sporadic strikes, killing some 150 people, Palestinians in Gaza could at least begin to pick up the pieces of their lives. The sides exchanged captives, opening the possibility of an end to Israel’s hostage nightmare as well as the return of hundreds of nearly 10,000 Palestinians incarcerated by Israel, many on flimsy “security” pretexts. Discussions about what a peaceful dispensation for Gaza might look like gathered momentum. A plan formulated by Arab leaders on 4 March and welcomed by Britain, China, France, Germany and Italy, among dozens of other countries, suggested a path to a more lasting peace. The Houthis in Yemen, now the most potent of the “axis” groups, halted their attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes and Israel as the ceasefire took hold.
This window of opportunity closed with Israel’s return to war on 18 March. Seventeen days prior, Israel imposed a complete siege on the strip, denying entry of food and vital medicine for the first time since October 2023. It also cut power to one of Gaza’s few surviving desalination plants and threatened to turn off the last remaining pipe supplying drinking water from Israel. On the evening of 18 March, it ordered Palestinians to evacuate broad swathes of Gaza or face death. That night’s bombardment was some of the most ferocious of the war to date. Israeli leaders said these strikes, which killed a handful of Hamas-affiliated civil officials among over 400 others, including at least 174 children and 89 women, would be only the first in a sequence; further bombing since has killed another 200 people. The next day, Israeli ground troops moved back into areas of Gaza they had previously vacated, notably the Netzarim corridor which bisects the strip south of Gaza City – a clear warning of further incursions. The Israeli army has now expanded its operations to Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of them displaced several times over, have sought refuge.
Israeli officials said the Trump administration had greenlit its renewed offensive, which Washington has confirmed. That represents a dangerous departure from the commitment that U.S. President Donald Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff had shown in the run-up to the 19 January ceasefire deal. Then, Witkoff (acting in concert with the Biden administration during its last days in office) played a pivotal role in pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hard to reach an agreement. That deal and the Arab League plan, while far from perfect, still represent the best way forward. Trump and his administration, rather than seemingly blessing what looks set to be never-ending war in Gaza, should reverse course and insist on returning to the truce they helped broker. Absent that, Israel’s offensive will further render Gaza uninhabitable, increase the risk of famine and again raise the spectre of Palestinians’ forced displacement from the strip, with grave consequences for the region’s stability.
Anatomy of a broken deal
Israel’s breach of the ceasefire may have Washington’s support – at least for now – but it has provoked condemnation from European and other governments and from many Israelis. Civil society groups that represent the families of hostages still held by Hamas decried the move, saying Netanyahu has chosen to sacrifice their relatives to keep his governing coalition intact. Despite the prime minister’s repeated assertions that Hamas “rejected offer after offer” during the ceasefire period, the record suggests that Hamas largely stuck to the terms and spirit of the January deal, whereas the Israeli government opted out.
The ceasefire deal signed in January was to have three phases. In its first 42-day phase, Hamas was to free some 33 hostages in exchange for Israel releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and pulling its troops out of most of Gaza. Both sides essentially met their pledges on hostage-prisoner exchanges, but Israel reneged on other promises: it announced that it would not withdraw during the ceasefire’s second 42-day phase from a sliver of land, known as the Philadelphi corridor, separating Gaza from Egypt. Nor did it begin, as stipulated in the deal, talks on details of the second phase, which was to have entailed the return of all the remaining living hostages, in exchange for a complete stop to Israeli military operations in Gaza. The third phase was to have seen an extended truce, under international guarantees, and the start of reconstruction.
As the first phase drew to a close, Hamas negotiators insisted on moving on to phase two. Officials from Egypt, Qatar and the U.S. who had mediated the deal had anticipated that moving to the second phase would be tough, given the gulf between the parties on the issues in question. But instead of entering genuine talks, Netanyahu, on 2 March, introduced a new demand, namely that Hamas release the remaining hostages not in exchange for an end to the war, but simply to secure an extension of phase one. The Israeli premier thus appeared to unilaterally scrap the January agreement, substituting a much more limited deal, with no guarantee of a stop to the bloodshed after all the hostages were let go. This offer is the one that Hamas refused, despite apparent pressure from Washington to accept it.
While Netanyahu explained the escalation as a response to Hamas’s obstinacy, Israeli security sources posited a different reasoning. Official statements and Israeli press reports say the new offensive represents a more aggressive tactic designed to uproot Hamas completely and render Gaza ungovernable. Aside from the group’s military wing, Israel will target what it described as Hamas’s civil infrastructure, referring to the group’s role, which absent any alternative is still in effect, as the main local authority in Gaza, managing basic security and food distribution, for example. The killing of five Hamas officials on 18 March, who died along with their families and hundreds of other Palestinians in the initial wave of airstrikes, was held up as a success for this new plan.
Opponents of Netanyahu suggest that he ended the ceasefire for political, not military reasons. The prime minister faces converging pressures, including several corruption cases, General Security Service (Shin Bet) investigations into senior aides regarding ties to Qatar, charges that his government failed to prevent the 7 October 2023 attacks and popular fury at his refusal to set up a state commission of inquiry into this matter. He is also governing by a thin margin. In January, the ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party, led by security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, quit the government to protest the initial ceasefire deal. Netanyahu’s slim parliamentary edge has imperilled passage of a new Israeli state budget. Failure to pass that budget by the end of March would have triggered the dissolution of his government in preparation for snap elections. Several of the prime minister’s critics say these circumstances at least partly explain his decision to renew the war. Just hours after Israel broke the ceasefire, Ben-Gvir announced he would rejoin the coalition.
On 20 March, Netanyahu’s governing coalition voted to fire Shin Bet director Ronen Bar, after the prime minister announced he no longer trusted him. The move is unprecedented in Israeli history. It ignores the attorney general’s warnings that it is not legally sound, will likely face a challenge in the Supreme Court and has sparked large protests in Jerusalem. Bar has clashed with Netanyahu and his far-right ministers over hostage release negotiations and over some of the government’s West Bank policy. He accused Netanyahu in a letter of seeking “to prevent the pursuit of truth regarding both the events leading up to the [October 7] massacre and the serious affairs currently under investigation by the Shin Bet”.
The Trump factor
Even before taking office, members of the Trump administration were deeply engaged with the Gaza ceasefire talks. The president and his chief negotiator, Witkoff, were credited with pressing Netanyahu to agree to the original deal. To Israel’s consternation, the White House opened a direct line of talks with Hamas after it was sworn in. The official talking to Hamas, Adam Boehler, Trump’s hostage envoy, when questioned about that diplomacy, said the U.S. should not act as Israel’s agent, suggesting that at least some within the administration were ready to buck longstanding U.S. orthodoxy regarding Israel-Palestine (though blowback in Washington appears to have led the administration to remove the Hamas file from Boehler’s hands).
Yet, at the same time, Trump himself has told Hamas to release all hostages or risk “hell” and promoted the expulsion of Gaza’s people so that the U.S. could build a Middle Eastern “Riviera” in their place. Since the ceasefire’s first phase lapsed, the U.S. has acquiesced in Israel’s “maximum pressure” approach, in violation of the deal it helped bring to fruition, and despite mounting opposition from U.S. allies. Proclaiming that he acts under U.S. “cover”, Netanyahu says he plans to hit Gaza harder and harder. Already, his government has cut off food and medicine as a pressure tactic; without constraint, it could pursue even more extreme measures.
The forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza remains a plausible scenario, despite firm opposition from Israel’s neighbours. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and a deputy defence minister, is pursuing plans to establish an “emigration directorate” tasked with facilitating the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza to other countries. Such schemes seem in keeping with threats from Israel Katz, the defence minister, who on 19 March warned Palestinians in Gaza of “total destruction and ruin” unless they somehow get rid of Hamas and send home the hostages, after which “those who desire” could “[leave] for other places in the world”.
Arab states are determined to prevent such mass displacement. Egypt has reinforced its border; Israel and the U.S. reportedly approached Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland (a breakaway Somali region that declared independence in 1991) to receive Palestinians from Gaza, without success. The diplomatic cost to Israel of a sudden, sweeping expulsion would be enormous, with knock-on risks to the stability of neighbouring regimes in Cairo and Amman, with whom Israel has cool, but cooperative relations.
Removal, however, could take subtler forms: incremental processes stretching over months and years or moves to permanently empty certain areas, like the northern half of Gaza above the Netzarim corridor. Extending the current aid cutoff, or limiting it to smaller districts, would hasten the process. Israeli officials generally frame emigration as “voluntary”, but with so many of Gaza’s people living amid mounds of rubble without basic necessities, let alone prospects for a better life any time soon, the choice to leave cannot credibly be characterised as free.
Since the war’s outset, Israeli officials have vacillated in statements of their war aims between destroying Hamas and degrading its military capacity. Israel’s approach to this point – bombing, tightening the blockade and instituting periodic occupation followed by withdrawal – has achieved limited results. Hamas remains operational, though militarily degraded; it is still able to fire on Israel, as it did on 20 March. Airstrikes and ground incursions have rescued just seven hostages – far fewer than the 190 recovered through negotiations – and they have seemingly been responsible for at least some of the hostage deaths.
Israel hopes that turning up the pressure simultaneously on multiple fronts will lead Hamas to crack. Some officials have gone further, talking about reoccupying Gaza for years. Efforts on this level would certainly further reduce Hamas’s military capabilities. But they would not free the remaining captives or secure the release of the remains of those who have perished. Even then, the complete destruction of Hamas or its military wing remains an unrealistic goal. Israeli officials themselves confirm that the group has replenished its ranks of fighters. Besides, the social costs of a prolonged occupation of the strip are probably unsustainable for Israel. Palestinians are facing the true catastrophe, but Israel, too, is caught in a political dead end.
Seemingly uncritical U.S. support has allowed Netanyahu to abandon a negotiating process that commanded broad support among Israelis and throughout the region, and that Gaza desperately needed. Finding a way to govern and rehabilitate the strip will only become more difficult as its infrastructure and social fabric is further wiped away. Plus, the return to war heightens the danger of regional conflagration, particularly as the Houthis have resumed strikes in the Red Sea as well as firing missiles at Israel, leading to U.S. airstrikes on their positions in Yemen. Managing escalatory dynamics is resource-intensive and risks entangling the U.S. even further in the region’s wars.
Instead, the U.S. should revert to its earlier support for the ceasefire, pressing Netanyahu to return to the three-phase process all agreed to in January. That process could then be linked to the Arab League’s “day after” framework for administering, rebuilding and reintegrating Gaza into a more peaceful region. That plan certainly does not provide all the answers. It is particularly weak on security matters that Israel regards as core to any agreement, particularly disarming Hamas and other militias, and on protecting Gaza from further Israeli assault. But these imperatives ought to be a subject of negotiation, not a pretext for abandoning it. In the end, such a framework remains the best hope for saving Palestinian and Israeli lives, returning the hostages, bringing Hamas and its weapons under some form of Palestinian national or regional oversight, and restoring stability. Arab and other concerned states should use whatever leverage they have to convince the U.S., which remains Israel’s primary ally and influencer, to curtail Gaza’s agony and dial down the risk of further destabilising the region.
