[News] Is Israel About to Return to Genocide? Three Scenarios for What Comes Next

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/is-israel-about-to-return-to-genocide-three-scenarios-for-what-comes-next/>
Is Israel About to Return to Genocide? Three Scenarios for What Comes
NextDecember
30, 2025
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Israeli occupation forces continued to violate the ceasefire in Gaza.
(Photo: via QNN)

*By Robert Inlakesh
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/robert-inlakesh>*

With Tel Aviv openly rejecting withdrawal and insisting on disarmament, the
“ceasefire” risks sliding into either renewed mass killing or a slow-motion
attempt to impose control and displacement.

Debate rages on over what Phase Two of the Gaza Ceasefire will look like,
as US President Donald Trump demands the disarmament of the Palestinian
resistance. Meanwhile, Gaza refuses to hand over its weapons. Most analyses
are, however, missing the mark when it comes to reading Tel Aviv’s
calculations.

The so-called Gaza Ceasefire has proven itself to be little more than an
extended pause in the mass slaughter of civilians. While it is still
described as a ceasefire, there were three major changes to the predicament
on the ground that took hold during “Phase One,” as the war continued to
rage on.

The first major change, perhaps the most notable, was that the Israelis
committed to no longer killing an average of around 100 civilians on a
daily basis. The second was that more aid entered Gaza, although nowhere
near the amount required or agreed to. The third was a mutual prisoner
exchange.

Assessing the strength and direction of the ceasefire in its first phase is
important to reading what the second phase may have in store, if it is even
reached.

To the Israelis, the benefits of the partial implementation of Phase One
were numerous. To begin with, the least consequential element, they
relieved themselves of the burden of releasing their captives. This was
important for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in that he managed
to clear the topic of returning the captives, especially as he heads into a
new election cycle.

Then we have the other benefits for the Israelis. Gaza exited the
international headlines, as daily killings appeared too low to even
register as a major issue in the biased Western press. Meanwhile, Israeli
soldiers were able to continue doing the exact same work inside Gaza that
has constituted the majority of its military operations throughout the
genocide: building demolition work.

These demolition missions, for which a privatized Israeli workforce has
been employed to operate alongside the occupation army’s engineering units,
have constituted the vast majority of the military’s efforts on the ground.
Face-to-face combat on the ground has never been a notable feature of the
Israeli genocide; they simply refused to actually fight the Palestinian
resistance groups.

One thing that troubled the Israelis was that this demolition work, which
sometimes included destroying entrances to tunnels, came with a high risk
of running into armed ambushes. The Palestinian fighters would prepare
traps and set up ambush operations for their forces, especially when Israel
would invade or reinvade any new area they had not retained a permanent
presence in.

Phase One of the Gaza Ceasefire agreement, therefore, guaranteed that
soldiers were not going to be subjected to the same dangers as before, as
the Palestinian resistance groups would halt all operations against the
invading army.

It is important that this reality is established when analyzing Israel’s
decision-making, because what is being done to Gaza is a genocide, not a
conventional war. Israel’s intent is to wipe out Gaza, ensuring that it
becomes totally uninhabitable, with the intention of mass expulsion in
mind. This is also why they rarely targeted the armed wings of the
Palestinian factions, focusing on maximum damage to the civilian population
instead.

Any other way of framing this issue is misleading and whitewashes what the
Israeli regime has committed since October 7, 2023. It also robs any
analyst of his or her ability to assess Israel’s calculations critically.

With this in mind, consider that the Israelis have now had over two months
where their armed forces have still been working, but have had a break from
any fighting or the fear of being ambushed. Israeli tanks, armored
personnel carriers, and other equipment were also being repaired, as the
decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington designed new plans for their
fronts against Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.

They also needed fewer soldiers for security reasons, as a so-called
Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) took over in monitoring the
situation and helping shape the realities imposed on the ground. Every
country involved in the CMCC was therefore made complicit in the genocide.

This phase came with the additional benefit for the Israelis that they now
had the space to experiment with new approaches, conjure up more
conspiracies, and seek to find a way to ensure the ethnic cleansing of the
Gaza Strip occurs. As Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has explicitly
stated, his army has no intention of withdrawing from the besieged coastal
territory.
*Phase Two and What It Will Show Us*

If we establish the fact that the Israelis are adamant on achieving ethnic
cleansing, that their military operations have always sought to achieve
this goal, and that they are continuing to conspire to achieve this, then
we have arrived at the starting point from which to assess the
implementation of a so-called Phase Two.

During the first phase, the groundwork was laid for a new set of
conspiracies against the people of Gaza. The population was subjected to
countless pressures, which the criminal CMCC oversaw, including the
deprivation of sustainable living conditions, with only a handful of its
nongovernmental organizations even raising issues about it.

Despite the best efforts of the Hamas-affiliated government security forces
to restore order, they were dealing with an impossible situation. Over a
million people live in tents that are unstable or susceptible to dire
weather conditions, a lack of adequate medical supplies, sanitary supplies,
and many food items are even restricted. Amid this, most people don’t have
jobs, few have adequate salaries coming in, and even for those in a better
economic standing, they remain traumatized and unable to return to their
homes. Inevitably, this leads to social issues that no regular security
force can fully repel.

Meanwhile, the Israelis expand the so-called Yellow Line, behind which they
were supposed to remain, instead using this line to execute anyone who
comes within a few hundred meters of it, thus deterring them from returning
to their own homes or land, where they could possibly plant small crops.
Behind this ever-expanding occupying line, the Israeli military and private
contractors destroy more and more infrastructure. All of this is monitored
by the US-Israeli-led CMCC.

The plan is rather overt in its goals, but still vague in its precise
stages of implementation. Both US and Israeli officials have made it
crystal clear that they seek reconstruction only inside the
Israeli-controlled portion of the Gaza Strip, where five ISIS-linked death
squads are being strengthened by Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UN’s most shameful Resolution 2803, passed by the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC) in November, makes it apparent that the goal is to
implement a “Board of Peace” (BoP) and International Stabilization Force
(ISF). The BoP makes Donald Trump the de facto ruler of Gaza, and the ISF
is set to be a multinational invasion force tasked with fighting the
Palestinian resistance factions.

This Monday, the new spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades of Hamas, who has
also taken on the alias Abu Obeida, announced a staunch opposition to
disarmament, instead calling on the Israelis to disarm, as they are the
ones responsible for committing a genocide. All the Palestinian factions,
with the exception of the mainstream branch of Fatah, which controls the
Palestinian Authority (PA), are united on this issue.

The PA is in favor of Donald Trump’s plan for him to rule the Gaza Strip
and disarm the resistance by force, but it is irrelevant in terms of
representing Palestinians. This authority only continues to exist because
it is propped up by the Israelis, Americans, Saudis, and Europeans, and its
popularity, beyond its base of employees, is in the single digits among the
Palestinian people. It does not even represent the sentiments of the
majority of Fatah supporters anymore.

All of this is to say that if any Phase Two is going to be implemented,
neither side is going to be in agreement about it. Netanyahu’s government
demands disarmament, while the Palestinian factions demand Gaza’s
self-governance and will only disarm by handing over their weapons to a
newly established Palestinian state. Hamas is clear that it would allow a
technocratic administration to take over Gaza and is not demanding that it
remain as the government of Gaza.

Considering that neither side can agree upon the basis on which a Phase Two
can begin, keeping in mind that Israel and the US are the sides with
military dominance, there are three ways that this will unfold:

The US and Israel will proceed with aggressively implementing their plan,
as laid out in the shameful UNSC Resolution 2803. They will begin deploying
a regime change force and attempt to implement a number of schemes to start
a slow ethnic cleansing of the territory amid this.

Israel will restart its full-scale genocide.

The shaky ceasefire will continue, but remain in limbo. This will mean
periodic spats of violence, as the Israelis and the US attempt to slowly
and partially implement the ISF-BoP agenda. This will be a process during
which the people of Gaza will be subjected to more pressure, but not enough
to collapse the agreement altogether.
*An Aggressive Phase Two?*

The first means of implementing the next phase of the Gaza Ceasefire
initiative would likely buckle under the immense pressures destined to
befall it. If we look at the ISF alone, it is a recipe for total disaster.

Forcing the “International Stabilization Force” aggressively on the people
of Gaza means that it will start going after Palestinian resistance
factions. Two major issues will immediately pop up. The resistance will
certainly kill some of these foreign soldiers, who will return to their
home nations in body bags and cause domestic chaos. A heavy-handed approach
here would also likely result in civilians being killed, another major
debacle in its own right.

The Israelis are adamant that Türkiye, Qatar, and other Muslim-majority
nations they take issue with cannot deploy their armed forces in Gaza.
Whether they get their way or not, consider that this armed force would
mean gathering a few hundred soldiers from one country, a few thousand from
another, and so on.

If this kind of ISF was sent into Gaza aggressively, considering that so
far there has been no agreement concerning how to implement this invasion
initiative or which countries will participate, it will be thrust into a
complex urban warfare environment. They all speak different languages, work
off different military doctrines, are ill-prepared, likely ill-equipped for
their tasks, and, according to reports, will only number in the tens of
thousands.

Donald Trump recently boasted that the nations which, he says, are
participating in his so-called “peace plan” will work to destroy Hamas if
it refuses to disarm, even bragging that Israel would not be required to
act and that foreign invading forces would do all the work for them.

In order to conduct a regime change operation of this nature, the ISF would
have to be at least 250,000 men strong. Bear in mind that mobilizing a
multinational invasion force of this kind would take many months, an
enormous amount of funding, and the key feature would be that it actually
fights, unlike the Israeli army, which refused to go after the Palestinian
resistance factions on the ground.

If an ISF that numbers only in the tens of thousands is going to try and
defeat the Palestinian resistance, it will suffer heavier casualties than
the Israeli military did. Any Arab or Muslim-majority nation deploying
forces could experience mass protests or rebellions against their role in
the genocide. Without going into the fine details, it makes no sense and if
it is tried, it will quickly fail. Even the Egyptians, who along with
Israel will be the guarantors of the strategy, have been advocating for a
force equivalent to Lebanon’s UNIFIL to enter Gaza, which is not what UNSC
Resolution 2803 approved.
*Israel Collapses the Ceasefire*

The next way this can go is that Benjamin Netanyahu decides to collapse the
ceasefire altogether. Some argue this wouldn’t happen because the US is
committed to its “peace plan.” This is not a serious argument. Donald Trump
has demonstrated that he will go along with whatever the Israelis choose.
He isn’t a strong leader on this question and clearly possesses a level of
knowledge about the region that you would expect of a public high school
student who took history and didn’t really bother to listen.

There are only two circumstances under which the Israelis will collapse the
ceasefire in its entirety. They no longer believe that any of the schemes
they sought to implement under the so-called ceasefire will work, and there
is some kind of political benefit to returning to all-out combat. The
second reason is that they are scared that the Palestinian resistance may
launch some kind of offensive while the Israeli army is also battling
Hezbollah and Iran.

Collapsing the ceasefire demonstrates that the Israelis are without any
direction and lack a coherent plan to actually end the fighting on the Gaza
front. It means that they are simply reverting to all-out genocide, with
the hope that eventually an opportunity arises which will allow a mass
ethnic cleansing event, or a slow process of ethnic cleansing as they
exterminate tens of thousands more civilians.
*Stuck Between Phase One and Phase Two*

Another option is for the Israelis and Americans to stall the collapse of
the ceasefire. It would mean placing the situation in limbo, not allowing
its total collapse, but undergoing a process of trial and error, whereby it
slowly attempts to force elements of “Phase Two” into reality.

This is a very likely outcome, designed to keep the Gaza front closed while
focusing more on Iran, Lebanon, and perhaps even Yemen. We could therefore
expect to see the ISF deployed in a less meaningful capacity than is
currently envisaged in Washington, disastrous plots implemented involving
private military contractors and aid distribution, and attempts to
ethnically cleanse the population slowly here and there. All of these
schemes will fall flat on their faces, but not without inflicting suffering
on the civilian population of Gaza.

In the meantime, the US-Israeli alliance will have Tehran in its sights.
The thinking behind this would be to squeeze the civilian population of
Gaza, while prioritizing Iran and Hezbollah as their major strategic
threats.
*Israel’s Failure Hedges against Iran and Hezbollah*

The conspiracies of Washington and Tel Aviv against Gaza can be defeated,
but this hinges upon Hezbollah and Iran for the most part. If Iran and
Hezbollah manage to deal enormous blows to the Israelis, refusing to play
their game of fighting short defensive conflicts, then Israel will be
dragged into deep waters.

All that is required of Hezbollah and Iran is that they don’t stop firing,
no matter the degree of carnage exacted against their people. If Hezbollah
drags the Israeli military into Lebanese lands and refuses the calls for a
ceasefire, instead forcing the Israelis into a war that it intends to fight
for many months, and Iran does the same, the Israelis will be in a major
crisis.

The details of such conflicts are a topic for different pieces and many
outcomes could occur, yet it suffices to say that major moves from Lebanon
and Iran could put the Israelis in a very weak position, one that even
enables major action from Gaza also.

If Iran and Hezbollah are either defeated or taken out of the picture for
an even longer period after agreeing to meaningless ceasefires, after short
rounds of fighting, also suffering the assassinations of major figures,
this is the most favorable outcome for Benjamin Netanyahu. Victories in
these arenas will open the door to ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip,
even if slowly rather than in a stampede into the Sinai Peninsula. This is,
of course, assuming there are no other major fronts which suddenly open to
preoccupy them.

As things stand, the Israelis are in a very weak position, having failed to
defeat any of their enemies. The only exception is the fall of the previous
Syrian regime, which was not directly fighting Israel, but was a major land
bridge for the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. For now, Syria can be
considered a victim of Israel, but poses no immediate threat.

Ultimately, Israel has fought for over two years and failed to defeat the
Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Iran, or any of its other
adversaries, even after dealing varying degrees of blows against each of
them. Netanyahu’s long-sought-after “total victory” does not appear likely,
yet he still continues to double down on attempting to achieve this goal.
The primary reason for this is the refusal of the people of Gaza, and also
Lebanon, to give up.

*(The Palestine Chronicle)*


*– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He
focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this
article to The Palestine Chronicle. *
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