https://arab.news/gz656
Benjamin Netanyahu is once again playing with fire — only this time it threatens not just Gaza, but Israel itself, the broader region, and what remains of a fragile international order. The Israeli leader’s reckless scheme to reoccupy Gaza is not merely shortsighted; it is criminal in intent, catastrophic in consequence, and dripping with the arrogance of a man who believes he can bend history to his will.
Let us be clear: The idea of reoccupying Gaza is not about security. It is not about peace. It is about one thing and one thing only: Netanyahu’s desperate bid to cling to power, evade accountability for his corruption charges, and present himself to the Israeli public as a strongman at a time when his leadership is defined by chaos, failure, and bloodshed. Gaza, once again, is being used as a pawn in his political survival game.
Netanyahu sells the illusion that sending Israeli tanks back into Gaza will somehow bring security to Israel. But history has already written the verdict: Occupation breeds resistance. The decades-long suffocation of Gaza has done nothing but radicalize new generations who see no horizon, no dignity, no life worth living under perpetual siege.
Does Netanyahu truly believe that by reoccupying Gaza, by tightening the noose around 2 million people, he will extinguish their will to resist? On the contrary, he will ignite a firestorm of resistance fiercer than ever before. The Israeli military may occupy land, but it cannot occupy hearts. And the more brutal the occupation, the deeper the rage, the stronger the determination, the longer the conflict burns.
Security built on the graves of starving children and bombed-out families is not security; it is barbarism masquerading as defense.
What makes Netanyahu’s plan especially vile is his willingness to weaponize humanitarian suffering. Gaza today is already enduring famine conditions. Children are wasting away as food and medicine are deliberately withheld. Hospitals are reduced to rubble. Entire neighborhoods are flattened. And still, Netanyahu talks of “managing” Gaza, as though human beings can be managed like cattle.
What he proposes is not management; it is subjugation. It is the calculated use of hunger, displacement, and despair to force a population into submission. It is collective punishment on a scale that meets every definition of a war crime.
Justice will never emerge from the barrel of an occupying tank.
Hani Hazaimeh
The Israeli leader dares to cloak his scheme in the language of “stability.” But whose stability? Certainly not Gaza’s. Not the region’s. It is only the stability of his grip on power that he seeks.
The tragedy is not Netanyahu alone. It is the silence — or, worse, the complicity — of the so-called international community. Washington mumbles about “restraint,” but continues to bankroll the very bombs raining down on Gaza. Europe, forever haunted by its own guilt, lectures about “two states,” while rewarding Israel with trade deals and diplomatic cover.
A reoccupation of Gaza would be the match that lights this regional powder keg. Israel may think itself powerful, but no army, however advanced, can withstand the cumulative fury of millions pushed to desperation.
What Netanyahu offers is not a vision but a nightmare. He would reduce Gaza to an open-air prison policed directly by the Israeli army, stripped of any semblance of autonomy, permanently dependent on Israel’s whims for survival. He would condemn generations of Palestinians to lives of humiliation and despair, and in so doing, guarantee that Israelis themselves would never know peace. Because peace is not built on domination. It is built on justice. And justice will never emerge from the barrel of an occupying tank.
The world must not allow this scheme to succeed. To reoccupy Gaza would be not only a moral abomination but also a strategic disaster that ensures endless conflict. Those who claim to stand for human rights must prove it now, by cutting the weapons shipments, conditioning aid, holding Israel accountable in international courts, and refusing to normalize relations with a government that tramples every principle of humanity.
And for the Israeli people, the question is this: How long will you allow one man’s delusions to drag your nation into perpetual war? Netanyahu does not act for your security. He acts for himself. The blood that will be spilled — Palestinian and Israeli alike — will stain his hands, but history will not forget the silence of those who allowed him to carry on.
Netanyahu’s plan is not just a policy, it is a declaration of perpetual war. It is an attempt to suffocate a people into nonexistence. And it is a gamble that will fail, as every attempt to crush the Palestinian spirit has failed before.
But the cost of his failure will not be borne by him alone. It will be borne by the starving children of Gaza, the grieving families of Israel, and the stability of an entire region already teetering on the edge.
This is the hour of reckoning. Netanyahu’s delusions must be confronted with clarity, courage, and unyielding resistance — political, legal, and moral. The world has a choice: to stand by as Gaza is dragged back into the abyss of occupation, or to draw a line and say, enough.
For the sake of justice, peace, and our shared humanity — enough.
• Hani Hazaimeh is a senior editor based in Amman. X: @hanihazaimeh