ON MONDAY Hamas reported that the group had agreed terms for a ceasefire plan for Gaza that calls for a 60-day pause in fighting and the release of half of Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would make a decision on whether his regime would sign up to it on Friday.
While Netanyahu is said to be ‘examining’ this plan it was announced that he had met earlier on Monday with the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) leaders to discuss the plans for the military to takeover Gaza City ‘and the completion of our mission’.
The mission of the Zionist regime is to destroy Gaza City, drive out or kill the one million Palestinians who live there and take complete military control of the largest city in Gaza, as a prelude for the plan to ethnically cleanse the entire Gaza Strip of over 2 million Palestinians.
Luciano Zaccara, a research professor at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera that while the ceasefire talks are ongoing, Israel’s wider objectives remain unchanged.
He said: ‘This plan has been on the table for a long time.’ He noted that ‘settlements have already begun to be implemented as part of a wider plan, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank’, adding a ceasefire could prove ‘very temporary’ and serve only as a step towards the full occupation of the land.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Netanyahu had clashed with Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir who told Netanyahu he was creating a ‘trap in Gaza’ for the IOF and could cause ‘erosion in the army’.
Zamir appears to have been whipped into line, and this week the IOF announced that it was calling up around 60,000 reservists over the next two weeks in preparation for a ground offensive to occupy all of Gaza City.
This latest call-up of reservists will only accelerate the ‘erosion’ of the military that Zamir fears. According to reports in Israeli media, over 100,000 Israelis have reportedly stopped showing up for reserve duty.
On April 11, the +972 magazine reported that ‘The Israeli army is facing its biggest refusal crisis in decades’, and that while precise numbers are kept a strict secret, Israel’s national broadcaster Kan said the true rate of refusal was close to 60%.
This was in April, and the latest call up demanding Israelis leave their homes and jobs for yet another term serving in a genocidal war that many Israelis are demanding an end to can only lead to an even bigger crisis for the IOF.
A sign of the severe shortages was revealed yesterday when British MPs warned that the Labour government must not allow British nationals to fight for the Israeli military after it emerged that Israel is considering recruiting Jewish youths from abroad to fight in its genocidal war.
Scottish National Party MP Chris Law told Middle East Eye: ‘The UK government must warn against enlistment and ensure that anyone who ignores these warnings and does enlist is subsequently held accountable to international law.’
With the IOF facing its biggest crisis and around one million Israelis demonstrating on Sunday for an end to the war in Gaza and for a deal to return captives, it is clear that Netanyahu’s Zionist regime is splitting apart on the eve of carrying out a massive campaign of slaughter and occupation in Gaza.
The Israeli state is split and divided, with Netanyahu’s regime only kept going and able to carry on its genocidal war through the support and complicity of US imperialism and its allies in the governments in the UK and Europe.
At the same time, tens of millions of workers and youth are splitting from their Zionist supporting government and demanding real action, not words, to end imperialist backed genocide.
The working class has the power to end the genocidal war by forcing the trade union leaders to call general strikes in the US, UK and Europe to bring down governments that enable Zionist genocide and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
This is the way forward.
