[News] Calculated deception: How Israel uses diplomacy to buy time for Gaza’s destruction

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Comments <https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/>
Calculated deception: How Israel uses diplomacy to buy time for Gaza’s
destruction
Mustafa Fetouri <https://english.palinfo.com/authors/Mustafa-Fetouri>

Friday 14-August-2026

Last week’s mass funeral of 112 people—including 44 children from two
closely related extended families—was not a new tragedy; it was the
agonizing, delayed accounting of a crime committed nearly three years ago.
The victims, all belonging to the Abu Sharia and Al-Hassayna clans, lived
in adjacent residential blocks in Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood when
Israeli airstrikes flattened their homes on 22nd and 23rd November 2023.
Entire bloodlines were wiped out in an instant: at least three
generations—grandparents, fathers, mothers, siblings, children, and
infants—buried side-by-side. Their bodies, recovered only recently from
under the rubble after a 17-day excavation or identified from temporary
mass graves amid the relentless siege, were finally laid to rest.

This grim scene serves as a harrowing microcosm of Israel’s war on Gaza: a
war that not only slaughters entire bloodlines in single strokes of
industrial scale of violence, but meticulously ensures that even the dead
are denied dignity, safety, or immediate peace.

On paper, Gaza was supposed to be entering a period of quiet following the
ceasefire framework announced in October 2025. In reality, peace never
arrived. Israeli forces have continued an unrelenting barrage of airstrikes
across the enclave, killing over 1,200 Palestinians—including more than 300
children—and injuring nearly 4,000 others since the agreement was signed.
With over 90 percent of Gaza’s population long since uprooted, families are
squeezed into ever-shrinking pockets of coastal sand dunes and makeshift
tent encampments. Yet even these rudimentary canvas shelters are not
spared: the Israeli military routinely strikes these designated “safe
zones,” targeting displaced civilians in their sleep.

The double standard of Israeli diplomacy has been laid bare once again by
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit rejection of the US-backed
15-point peace plan for Gaza. Unveiled by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace as
part of a framework to transition Gaza toward Palestinian administration
and eventual self-determination, the 15-point draft called for a phased
Israeli military withdrawal alongside disarmament of Hamas. An enthusiastic
President Trump, on 30th July, hailed the deal reached with Hamas as a
“monumental step” ” toward peace, with Hamas publicly committing itself to
implement the plan under international monitoring. Yet speaking ahead of a
cabinet meeting on 9th August, Netanyahu flatly declared that Israel “does
not accept the 15-point document,” shifting the goalposts by insisting that
the Israeli military will not pull out a single inch until the total,
immediate, and verifiable disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups
happens first. The rejection was entirely predictable.

Facing upcoming Israeli Knesset elections on 27th October 2026—and with his
right-wing coalition trailing opposition blocs in opinion polls—a leader
facing international criminal accountability and domestic political peril
was never going to make meaningful concessions.

Even as recent statements out of Netanyahu’s office spin these public
rejections as non-final while quiet talks with American officials continue,
the Trump administration’s tolerance of his maneuvering confirms that Tel
Aviv is being given full license to use ongoing diplomacy as a shield for
further delays. Generally speaking no major development on the Gaza peace
will happen before the October Israeli election, further eroding trust in
the Trump administration facing its own midterm election in November.

Hostage to his far-right coalition partners like Bezalel Smotrich and
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who demand complete military reoccupation of the Gaza
Strip, Netanyahu’s priority remains personal political survival. By walking
away from proposals touted by its closest ally in Washington, Tel Aviv has
demonstrated once more that its diplomatic promises are worthless and that
no peace framework will ever be honored when political self-preservation
dictates further bloodletting.

At the same time Israel continues to weaponize basic survival necessities
as central pillar to its strategy, going well beyond the political
signaling of rejected peace drafts. Under the 15-point proposal—and the
broader framework accepted in principle last year—the immediate,
unrestricted entry of food, life-saving medicines, medical supplies, and
fuel/electricity was explicitly required as an urgent baseline. By openly
repudiating this framework on 9th August, Netanyahu has not merely rejected
a troop withdrawal; he has formally torn up the humanitarian obligations
that were supposed to end Gaza’s enforced slow death.

On the ground, the consequences of this refusal are calculated and
absolute. Despite transient aid trickles, strict rationing ensures that no
Palestinian in Gaza receives adequate daily caloric or nutritional intake,
keeping the entire population on a daily search for food. According to UN
food security monitors, over 1.4 million people remain trapped in acute
food insecurity, forced to survive on severely restricted parcels that are
neither enough in quality nor quantity, alongside a severe lack of clean
water. By blocking the full restoration of power grids, fuel for water
desalination, and commercial trade, Israel ensures that calorie intake is
kept systematically below human sustenance thresholds.

The rejection of the 15 points makes Tel Aviv’s policy unmistakable:
engineered hunger and biological deprivation are not temporary tactical
measures, but permanent levers of control, according to the United Nations’
7th August report describing the situation in Gaza as still critical.

The explicit rejection of the 15-point plan is not a sudden policy shift;
it is the logical continuation of a campaign where physical destruction and
humanitarian attrition go side by side. By refusing to pullout troops and
reiterating that no Palestinian state will ever emerge under his watch,
Netanyahu has stripped away any lingering diplomatic pretense. His stance
makes it unmistakable: agreements, ceasefires, and international proposals
are merely tactical stalling mechanisms designed to absorb diplomatic
pressure while the slow work of starvation and military destruction
continues.

For the two million Palestinians trapped inside Gaza, this political
posturing translates into daily, agonizing violence. While diplomats debate
phased frameworks and disarmament thresholds, families are left to bury
their children after strikes on makeshift tent camps, all while surviving
on meager basic food and contaminated water. The mass funeral of the Abu
Sharia and Al-Hassayna families is not a tragic relic of 2023—it is a
preview of Gaza’s present and future if Tel Aviv’s strategy remains
unchecked.

Netanyahu’s rejection of the Trump peace plan only proves what Palestinians
have known for generations: Tel Aviv cannot be trusted as a partner in
peace. So long as personal political survival, far-right coalition math,
and impunity dictate policy, starvation will remain Israel’s strategy, and
Gaza’s deadlier phase will continue unabated.

*-Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic and freelance journalist. He is a
recipient of the EU’s Freedom of the Press prize. His article appeared in
MEMO.*
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