Trump Seeks A Gaza Mideast In His Own Image – OpEd
Benjamin Netanyahu’s new Middle East concept is being turned upside down thanks to the flamboyant US President Donald Trump. Kicking and screaming Netanyahu is being forced to accept a US vision not at all in line with what he painted for the Middle East region.
A few months ago Netanyahu would proudly boast that Israel is changing the face of the Middle East and putting his Jewish entity in the middle of it. Truth be told however, his Israeli army couldn’t destroy Hamas nor its armed wing Izz Al Din Al Qassam Brigades, nor the other Palestinian resistance groups despite the 200,000 bombs dropped on Gaza.
In comes Trump and his White House administration. They soon realized that Israel wouldn’t be able to destroy Hamas and took their own initiative being heralded by the fact that Netanyahu bombed Qatar in search of the Hamas leaders while deeply embarrassing Washington because of its deep relations with Doha and its military base there.
Trump soon realized he must act and soon came up with his 20-point plant to end Israel’s war on Gaza through virtually dictating to Netanyahu to stop. He wanted to continue the war on already destroyed Gaza till the end with American weaponry.
A week or so into the ceasefire deal, signed in Sharm Al Shiekh on 10 October and made the following day, Netanyahu wanted to muzzle out of the accord under the pretext the two Israeli soldiers were killed in Rafah through an outfit Hamas denounced and said it had no knowledge of.
In come the shock. After Israel started its war machined and conducted over 100 raids over different parts of the enclave, while killing scores of others, the US dictate was made: Netanyahu was told not to violate the ceasefire which Trump had heavily invested in and insisted upon apparently all for saving Israel’s face that by now had been muddied by many countries of the world.
Israel was stopped in its tracks with the message being made loud and clear that Netanyahu was not allowed to re-start the was. As a clear warning, US mediators Steve Witkoff and Gerard Kushner were dispatched to Tel Aviv along with The American Vice President JD Vance under strict Trump orders.
Through this move, Trump was moving the carpet from under Tel Aviv, Netanyahu and the Israeli army and which has created a big shock the Israeli political establishment is yet fathoming. Jewish newspapers and columnists are quickly saying Israel has become overnight a US protectorate and that its decisions on Gaza are slowly being taken and made in Washington by Trump and his team.
This is indeed the new Middle East Netanyahu never thought would happen or expected for Trump long made a deal with the Houthis not to strike US and world shipping in the Arabian and Red Seas, his attempt to fix Lebanon through envoy Tom Barrack, his persistence over Iran for another nuclear deal and overtures to Turkey’s Recep Tayyep Erdogan.
Although this is happening to the dislike of Netanyahu whose new Middle East, a weakened one based on normalization with the Arab world, is increasingly being turned into a Trump image where the Gaza ceasefire is only a first part leading to a historic Middle East where peace would be the rallying point for prosperity where everyone would benefit through transactional economics.
But it’s still early days for that because Hamas is still handing the remains of the dead Israeli hostages it kept in captivity over the past two years since 7 October, 2023. To the anger of Netanyahu and his extremist ministers who want the handover to be quicker and keep threatening of going back to war, Hamas says it’s finding it difficult to relocate the Israeli remains because of the mass bombardment that reduced Gaza about 60 million tons of wreckage and debris according to the UN which need to be sifted through and cleared.
Hamas has so far handed over 15 bodies to the Red Cross and 13 more are still in different parts of Gaza. Hamas states also that heavy machinery and technical know need to be brought from outside to be able to search for the bodies. Up till recently it had strictly forbidden their entry but some machinery and expertise were allowed from Egypt, however, there is a strong way to go.
Nevertheless Israel is keeping the pressure up through saber-rattling and bombing different parts of Gaza and done with the knowledge of the Americans who have set up a center outside northern Gaza with 200 soldiers whose role is to monitor the ceasefire. Vance recently said on his visit to Israel, no doubt to bring Netanyahu in line, that observance of the ceasefire by Israel and Hamas is going well in spite of the attempts to flaunt it.
And thus today Israeli guns are fired almost daily on different parts of Gaza but there is a general agreement on the maintenance of the ceasefire that is being enforced through the watchful eye of Trump. His interest in maintaining a ceasefire is to do with he fact that he wants to go down in history as solving what he terms a 3000-year-old conflict in the Middle East, hopefully get the Nobel peace prize and establish even better relations with the Arab world based on money and finance.
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