Thread: It's hard to believe that Israel can afford to snub the US sponsored cease-fire proposal that Hamas has accepted. While this remains a very real possibility given Israel's increasingly irrational behaviour, another scenario is also possible 1/
It could well be that Netanyahu is scrambling to save face with a war-hungry Israeli public and burnish his genocidal credentials with his far-right partners, before he is forced into a humiliating cease-fire deal. Pounding Rafah and maximising civilian casualties while seizing key humanitarian crossings could well be a last ditch attempt to compensate for Israel's military failures 2/
There are precedents for this, such as in August 2006 when Israel reserved some of its heaviest bombardment of Lebanon in the last 24 hours before UN Resolution 1701, which ended hostilities, came into effect. Former Israeli PM, Ehud Barak, said at the time "It's time to do all we can to destroy as much as we can of the infrastructure in the next 12 or 13 hours." 3/
If however, Israel has indeed decided to defy the US' apparent wishes to end the war, we may well be entering a very critical stage of the conflict, where the likelihood of regional conflagration increases dramatically. This is especially the case if the Resistance Axis concludes that the US lacks either the will or the ability to restrain Israel's actions in Gaza 4/
For 7 months, the working assumption among members of the Axis has been that at some undefined but not too distant point, the US is going to force Israel to submit to a cease-fire. If the timeline for this war is seen as indefinite, then the red lines—the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and a significant weakening of Hamas —become imminent. 5/
Moreover, if the US is viewed as lacking either the will or the ability to restrain Israel's actions in Gaza, this will raise concerns that it will not restrain its actions in Lebanon either, making an Israeli attack on Lebanon also imminent. This could well spell an end to Hizbullah's "sub-threshold" response strategy 6/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
