THE FATE OF GAZA: "IT ALL DEPENDS ON TRUMP" / THE FINANCIAL TIMES BIG READ

The fate of Gaza: ‘It all depends on Trump’

Heavy casualties and the risk of widespread starvation have led to new pressure on Israel to halt its offensive. But US influence will be decisive

James Shotter in Jerusalem, Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut, Heba Saleh in Cairo and Guy Chazan in New York

Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with Donald Trump, who has shown few signs of exerting pressure on the Israeli prime minister over the war in Gaza   © FT montage/Bloomberg/Zuma press

Ahmed al-Wadiyeh knows how his brother died because every night this week he has sat in a hospital chair and listened while his five-year-old niece Haneen talks about it in her sleep.

About how she woke to find the school near Gaza City where her family was sheltering transformed into an inferno by an Israeli strike. 

How she walked through the flames and saw her mother and father and little sister Maria burning. 

How Maria was asking for their mother. 

How she watched her mother die. 

And then stumbled out from the ruins, her tiny body scorched by the fire.

Haneen’s family had sought shelter in the school after two months of moving between the street and borrowed tents, having been displaced from their home in Gaza City. 

But as he waits in the hospital where Haneen is being treated for burns, Wadiyeh has no idea where they will go next, or how he will help his niece cope with the loss of her entire close family.

“There are no tents, no shelters. 

Someone explain to me: where should I go?” he asks. 

“How are we going to be able to feed her, and bring her up, and help her be able to forget what she has seen?”

The strike on Monday — which Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence said killed 31 people including 24 women and children, and the Israeli military said targeted militants — was part of a renewed offensive ordered by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government that has pushed the humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian enclave to new depths of horror.

Palestinians inspect the rubble of the Fehmi al-Jerjawi school in Gaza after an Israeli air strike that killed 31 people, according to Gaza’s civil defence, including Haneen’s family © Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Twenty months on from Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war, Gaza is shattered. 

Like Wadiyeh’s, families have been decimated, and displaced time and again. 

Almost all homes have been damaged or destroyed. 

A UN panel warned this month that Israel’s restrictions on aid had left half a million Palestinians facing starvation.

The desperate conditions have sparked a diplomatic backlash, with the UK freezing talks on a new trade deal with Israel, the EU reviewing its existing trade arrangements, and even staunch allies condemning the escalation. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday he could “frankly no longer understand the goal of what the Israeli army is doing” in Gaza.

But diplomats say that without greater pressure from Israel’s most important ally, the US — which this week put forward its latest proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza — Netanyahu’s government is unlikely to change course. 

In recent weeks, the veteran prime minister and his allies have been as defiant as ever, vowing to continue fighting until Hamas is destroyed, and openly talking of displacing Gaza’s population, fuelling suspicions for Palestinians and others around the world that they have no intention of permanently ending the war and are bent instead on making the strip uninhabitable.

“The real question is at what point does Donald Trump find Netanyahu’s behaviour interferes with his own priorities,” says Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who served in the US state department for more than two decades.

“The Trump administration has put the notion of ‘no daylight’ [between the US and Israel] under stress . . . 

But whether any of this adds up to what normal humans would regard as the use of serious leverage, and the imposition of costs and consequences in the real world, remains to be seen.”

UN officials and aid agencies have been warning for weeks that Israel’s renewed offensive, which began in March and has escalated steadily since, is taking a devastating toll on Gaza’s civilians. 

According to the UN, more than 630,000 people have been displaced — again — by the renewed fighting. 

In total, Israel’s assault has now killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, according to local officials, and injured tens of thousands more.

But UN officials are equally concerned about Israeli restrictions on aid that have sent hunger levels soaring and left Gazans relying on the most basic rations to survive. 

Shifaa Okeily, a widow and mother of four from Gaza City, says her family now eats only lentils because they cannot afford food from markets, where flour costs 100 shekels ($28) per kilo. 

To cook without fuel, she “burns all you can imagine; plastic, nylon, cardboard if I find it, or wood when available”.

Palestinian refugees gather to receive food in Khan Younis, Gaza. According to the UN, more than 630,000 people have been displaced by the war, while local officials say 54,000 Palestinians have been killed © Haitham Imad/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

“I cook lentils, and I also grind lentils and mix the powder with warm water so it becomes a dough that I can cook in a pan and we eat it instead of bread,” she says. 

“The children don’t like it at all because the taste is bad, but when they get hungry at night they are compelled to eat it.”

After imposing a total ban on aid to Gaza for more than two months, Israel this week allowed the establishment of a controversial new system, under which the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a previously unknown private company, will deliver aid via a handful of distribution centres in the enclave.

But the introduction of the system, which Israel argues is an attempt to prevent aid being diverted to Hamas, has been chaotic, with huge crowds of desperate Palestinians overwhelming one of GHF’s centres soon after it opened. 

Indeed, the entire approach has been widely condemned by UN officials, who argue it has less to do with feeding Gazans than facilitating Israel’s goal of displacing them.

“[This] is more than just the control of aid. It is engineered scarcity,” Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s humanitarian arm, OCHA, in occupied Palestinian territory, said in a briefing on Wednesday. 

“[It] cannot possibly meet Gaza’s needs.”

Israeli military vehicles drive into Gaza. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert has said Israel is now engaged in a ‘war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel’ © Amir Cohen/Reuters

Beyond the UK and the EU, other European countries have also threatened action against Israel over the humanitarian crisis. 

President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that France, which is weighing recognising Palestine at a conference next month, could impose more sanctions on Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. 

Ireland is working on legislation to ban trade in goods with Israeli businesses in occupied Palestinian territories.

Diplomats said several factors, from consternation at the humanitarian crisis to anger at Israel’s contemptuous treatment of the international community, had driven the shift. 

But they said the final straw had been the renewed offensive and talk of expelling Palestinians.

“Gideon’s Chariots [the new offensive] and the level of civilian casualties are the turning point,” says one diplomat. 

“The longer the war keeps going, the more extreme the objectives are getting to justify its continuation.”

Domestic critics of the war have also become more vocal. 

Yair Golan, the head of Israel’s leftwing opposition party, the Democrats, warned Israel risked becoming a “pariah state” if it did not change course. 

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote in the newspaper Haaretz that Israel was now engaged in a “war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians”.

“We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit,” he wrote. 

“Rather, it’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. 

Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

But despite the increasingly forceful criticism, Netanyahu’s government — which insists it is complying with international law in Gaza and that its approach is the only way to free the 58 hostages still held by Hamas — has shown no signs of changing tack.

Humanitarian aid destined for Gaza sits at a border crossing in southern Israel. A UN panel has warned that Israel’s restrictions on aid had left half a million Palestinians facing starvation © Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

On Thursday, it said it would establish 22 new settlements — which are illegal under international law — in the West Bank in an effort to strengthen Israel’s grip on the Palestinian territory. 

Diplomats say Israeli officials have also threatened retaliatory steps, as well as further punitive actions against the Palestinians, such as annexing the West Bank, if more countries recognise Palestine.

“The EU is a huge trading partner. 

Many Israelis like to see themselves as being part of the European community and European values . . . so [the recent shift by some EU countries] definitely hurts,” says one coalition politician. 

“Having said that, what is happening in Washington DC is much more important on every practical level.”

In recent weeks, there have been signs of daylight between Trump and Netanyahu on various issues, with Trump opening talks on a nuclear deal with Iran despite fierce Israeli opposition, ending US strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen without them agreeing to stop firing missiles at Israel, and touring the Middle East without visiting Israel.

But the US president — who came to power pledging to end the war, before proposing emptying Gaza of all its inhabitants in a move seized on by Netanyahu’s far-right allies — has so far shown far less inclination to exert pressure on Netanyahu, at least publicly, over Gaza. 

Asked by a reporter on Wednesday whether he was “frustrated” by the Israeli prime minister’s handling of the situation in the enclave, Trump replied: “No.”

“We’re dealing with the whole situation in Gaza, we’re getting food to the people of Gaza,” he said. 

He then switched to Hamas’s October 7 attack, during which militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and took 250 hostage. 

“It was a horrible day and people aren’t going to forget that either,” he said.

Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. The veteran prime minister and his allies have been as defiant as ever, vowing to continue fighting until Hamas is destroyed, and openly talking of displacing Gaza’s population © Ronan Zvulun/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Indeed, diplomats said the US’s latest ceasefire proposal — which Hamas on Friday indicated it was likely to reject as it did not guarantee that the truce would lead to an end to the war — was far easier for Israel than Hamas to swallow.

“The problem right now is Hamas wants to end the war and Israel does not. 

It’s not about prisoner releases or aid into Gaza, things where they could be compromises or a middle ground,” says a person briefed on the talks. 

“One side requires the war to end and the other refuses to end it, there is no middle ground or compromise.”

The person adds: “Even if Hamas released all the hostages, Israel will not end it. 

I’m not saying either side is right, this is just where we are right now. 

And the way the last deal was broken it’s hard to see Hamas agreeing to anything that does not guarantee a permanent ceasefire.”

But barring a sea change in Israeli public opinion, or a premature collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition, diplomats and former officials see little hope of ending the fighting without greater US pressure.

“The bottom line is it all depends on one person, on Donald Trump,” Olmert tells the FT, adding that if even a deal for a fragile truce and hostage release can be reached, it can help create “a certain momentum” towards ending the war. 

“But if there is no exchange, we will slide down [towards an even worse situation].”

Additional reporting by Andrew England