In the midst of fragile ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, Israel is escalating its military aggressions in the region, begging the question: is Israel experiencing a moment of unprecedented force, or is it afraid of betraying unprecedented weakness?
February 28, 2025
MONDOWEISS

MONDOWEISS

February 23, 2025, Jenin, West Bank, Palestine: People watch as Israeli military tanks participate in the military operation on the city and its camp. The Israeli Minister of Defense said that its forces will remain in the refugee camps for the next year and announced extensive military operations that include the deployment of tanks after the displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians. (Credit Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire APA Images)
In the midst of two fragile ceasefires, one in Gaza and one in Lebanon, Israel continues to escalate militarily on all fronts. Earlier this week, Israeli warplanes conducted airstrikes in southern Syria on the surroundings of the Syrian towns of Izrea and Ain al-Beida, while Israeli ground troops pushed deeper into Syrian territory and entered the administrative limits of the governorates of Deraa and Quneitera.
The week before, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a speech at a graduation ceremony for Israeli officers that Israel would not leave the territories it occupied in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime last December. Netanyahu also said that Israel would not allow Syria’s new army south of Damascus.
In Lebanon, Israel said that it will maintain control over five positions in the country’s southern border. During the funeral of Hezbollah leaders Hasan Nasrallah and Hashem Safiyuddin, Israeli fighter jets flew over the ceremony in Beirut at low altitude as a show of force, while simultaneously bombing several locations in the Bekaa Valley and the south.
In the northern West Bank, Israel has continued to expand its “Iron Wall” offensive, reaching new Palestinian refugee camps and towns. 40,000 people have been expelled from their homes in the northern West Bank since the start of the onslaught last month. Israeli war minister Israel Katz said that Israel would not allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes for at least a year, adding that no time limit had been attached to the offensive.
All this has been taking place in the background while Israel has systematically violated its tenuous ceasefire agreement with Hamas during its first phase. Meanwhile, Israel has been dragging its feet in moving on to the second phase of the ceasefire deal, which would include negotiations regarding the end of the war, and hardline Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has continued to threaten an even harsher attack on Gaza in the past few days.
In other words, Israel is projecting military force on all fronts while showing recalcitrance on the diplomatic level. It is doing so at a moment when it seems to feel all-powerful and unchecked after having weakened its northern foe, Hezbollah, and gaining a free rein to do what it wants in the West Bank.
But the reality is that Israel has come out of a year and a half of an unprecedented war, having unleashed unprecedented levels of violence, engaged in an unprecedented degree of military mobilization, and dragged it out for 15 months — the longest war in its history. Yet it has done all of that without achieving the goals it had publicly set out to achieve: the elimination of Hamas. Now, it is negotiating with the Palestinian movement, having been unable to retrieve the majority of Israeli captives through force. But it is aiming to prolong the first phase of the ceasefire so that it can release more captives without granting any more concessions to Hamas.
Moreover, in the final three months of the war before the ceasefire, Israel was unable to achieve its implicit goal of ethnically cleansing northern Gaza; it accepted to see the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the north as a price for the prisoner swap. And although it has been able to weaken Hezbollah, it hasn’t been able to eliminate it or eliminate its capacity to rebuild its force — let alone neutralize Yemen’s Ansar Allah (commonly known as the “Houthis”), who only halted their attacks on Israel when the ceasefire was announced and continue to threaten to resume military action if Israel returns to war.
Even more, internal accountability for the security failure of October 7 hasn’t even begun, although the Israeli army probe into those failures has. Netanyahu has been struggling to gain control of the investigation process concerning these failures, which strongly indicates his own fear of being held accountable. Netanyahu’s government is also holding on by a thread, cornered as it is between appeasing the sectors of Israeli society that want to proceed with the ceasefire, including the military establishment, and his extremist allies, who threaten to quit the government and thereby precipitate its collapse in the event that Netanyahu doesn’t resume the war.
In light of these seemingly opposing facts, it is difficult to judge if Israel’s continued military escalations is an expression of force, overconfidence, or an attempt to prolong the state of war in order to avoid facing the consequences of its failure. Is Israel experiencing a moment of unprecedented force, or is it afraid of betraying unprecedented weakness?
The green light that didn’t deliver
A year after October 7, 2023, the Biden administration’s envoy to the Middle East, Amos Hochstein, who played a key role in securing the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, denied that the U.S. had given Israel a green light to attack Lebanon, adding that media reports suggesting as much were “irresponsible.” However, Israel had been waging its campaign on Gaza and Lebanon for a full year with U.S. weapons. According to Brown University’s “Costs of War” project, the U.S. has spent at least 17.9 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel since October 7, which is more than U.S. military assistance to Israel in any year since the U.S. began to assist Israel militarily.
U.S. support for Israel’s war was not limited to military aid either. From day one, Washington adopted the Israeli narrative about what happened on October 7 and on the war itself. And it vetoed a ceasefire resolution three times at the UN Security Council, against the will of a majority of member states.
But this seemingly limitless endorsement had a goal: wiping out Hamas and the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza, which would pave the way for creating a new political environment in the region that would allow the proceeding of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries. It would create the atmosphere for new business deals involving Gaza (including its recently-discovered natural gas fields) unburdened by the Palestine question.
Israel was unable to deliver. The Palestinian cause has taken center stage once again and become impossible to overlook internationally. Saudi Arabia, which was expected to proceed with a normalization agreement with Israel before October 7, now conditions its normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel upon reopening a political process to establish a Palestinian state.
Israel itself is being investigated for charges of genocide, while its Prime Minister and former war minister have international arrest warrants against them. This alone is a major shift in the international treatment of Palestine and Israel. For the first time ever, the international system takes steps toward holding Israel accountable.
The International Court of Justice’s ruling in July of last year that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights was unlawful ended a decades-long debate over the legal foundation of the occupation, clearing away the ambiguity on which Israel depended to secure international support, and at least, international tolerance of its occupation policies. These developments won’t end the occupation, or even U.S. and Western support for it, but they make it impossible to hide the occupation, forcing Israel and its allies to square the dilemma of whether it is willing to put limits to its behavior.
Force facing reality
This dilemma hasn’t grown enough to produce a radical change, but it has begun to manifest in different forms. One of them is the fact that the Trump administration, the least diplomatic U.S. administration in recent memory — especially when it comes to supporting Israel — practically imposed the ceasefire on Netanyahu’s government.
For the U.S. and Trump, the Middle East agenda is much larger than Gaza, and even more than Israel and its wars. For Trump, business comes first, and as his first presidency proved, business in the region comes through normalization and stability, not war. Israel had 15 months to prepare the scene for Trump’s project in the Middle East without Palestine on the table, and it failed. Now, Trump’s envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, is handling the ceasefire negotiations, taking away Netanyahu’s absolute control over it amidst Israeli attempts to change the terms and escape the commitments it had signed onto.
However, the U.S. and the Trump administration is far from breaking the traditional U.S. stance of full support for Israel. On the contrary, it has completely dropped the traditional appearances of trying to reach a deal with Palestinians based on a two-state solution, giving priority to Israel’s “security” concerns. In all his declarations, Trump has reaffirmed his support for Israel’s choices, including in resuming the war on Gaza, and even endorsed the Israeli ambition of ethnically cleansing Gaza, adding to it a Trumpian flavor by vowing to create a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Despite all this, Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in expanding the war, much less fighting Iran. Aside from Trump’s over-the-top declarations about Gaza, his right hand for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is only focusing on saving the ceasefire deal and removing the obstacles that Netanyahu has been placing in front of it.
Trump is also realizing that not everyone responds positively to the U.S.’s bullying. The collective rejection of Trump’s displacement plan for Gaza by Arab, European, and other governments, made it clear that some constants can’t be moved so easily. Donald Trump himself walked back his Gaza plan, stating last week that he was “surprised” by the region’s rejection of it, adding that he “won’t impose it.” The limits of what the U.S.-Israeli force-based alliance can achieve have begun to appear.
In the midst of two fragile ceasefires, one in Gaza and one in Lebanon, Israel continues to escalate militarily on all fronts. Earlier this week, Israeli warplanes conducted airstrikes in southern Syria on the surroundings of the Syrian towns of Izrea and Ain al-Beida, while Israeli ground troops pushed deeper into Syrian territory and entered the administrative limits of the governorates of Deraa and Quneitera.
The week before, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a speech at a graduation ceremony for Israeli officers that Israel would not leave the territories it occupied in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime last December. Netanyahu also said that Israel would not allow Syria’s new army south of Damascus.
In Lebanon, Israel said that it will maintain control over five positions in the country’s southern border. During the funeral of Hezbollah leaders Hasan Nasrallah and Hashem Safiyuddin, Israeli fighter jets flew over the ceremony in Beirut at low altitude as a show of force, while simultaneously bombing several locations in the Bekaa Valley and the south.
In the northern West Bank, Israel has continued to expand its “Iron Wall” offensive, reaching new Palestinian refugee camps and towns. 40,000 people have been expelled from their homes in the northern West Bank since the start of the onslaught last month. Israeli war minister Israel Katz said that Israel would not allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes for at least a year, adding that no time limit had been attached to the offensive.
All this has been taking place in the background while Israel has systematically violated its tenuous ceasefire agreement with Hamas during its first phase. Meanwhile, Israel has been dragging its feet in moving on to the second phase of the ceasefire deal, which would include negotiations regarding the end of the war, and hardline Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has continued to threaten an even harsher attack on Gaza in the past few days.
In other words, Israel is projecting military force on all fronts while showing recalcitrance on the diplomatic level. It is doing so at a moment when it seems to feel all-powerful and unchecked after having weakened its northern foe, Hezbollah, and gaining a free rein to do what it wants in the West Bank.
But the reality is that Israel has come out of a year and a half of an unprecedented war, having unleashed unprecedented levels of violence, engaged in an unprecedented degree of military mobilization, and dragged it out for 15 months — the longest war in its history. Yet it has done all of that without achieving the goals it had publicly set out to achieve: the elimination of Hamas. Now, it is negotiating with the Palestinian movement, having been unable to retrieve the majority of Israeli captives through force. But it is aiming to prolong the first phase of the ceasefire so that it can release more captives without granting any more concessions to Hamas.
Moreover, in the final three months of the war before the ceasefire, Israel was unable to achieve its implicit goal of ethnically cleansing northern Gaza; it accepted to see the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the north as a price for the prisoner swap. And although it has been able to weaken Hezbollah, it hasn’t been able to eliminate it or eliminate its capacity to rebuild its force — let alone neutralize Yemen’s Ansar Allah (commonly known as the “Houthis”), who only halted their attacks on Israel when the ceasefire was announced and continue to threaten to resume military action if Israel returns to war.
Even more, internal accountability for the security failure of October 7 hasn’t even begun, although the Israeli army probe into those failures has. Netanyahu has been struggling to gain control of the investigation process concerning these failures, which strongly indicates his own fear of being held accountable. Netanyahu’s government is also holding on by a thread, cornered as it is between appeasing the sectors of Israeli society that want to proceed with the ceasefire, including the military establishment, and his extremist allies, who threaten to quit the government and thereby precipitate its collapse in the event that Netanyahu doesn’t resume the war.
In light of these seemingly opposing facts, it is difficult to judge if Israel’s continued military escalations is an expression of force, overconfidence, or an attempt to prolong the state of war in order to avoid facing the consequences of its failure. Is Israel experiencing a moment of unprecedented force, or is it afraid of betraying unprecedented weakness?
The green light that didn’t deliver
A year after October 7, 2023, the Biden administration’s envoy to the Middle East, Amos Hochstein, who played a key role in securing the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, denied that the U.S. had given Israel a green light to attack Lebanon, adding that media reports suggesting as much were “irresponsible.” However, Israel had been waging its campaign on Gaza and Lebanon for a full year with U.S. weapons. According to Brown University’s “Costs of War” project, the U.S. has spent at least 17.9 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel since October 7, which is more than U.S. military assistance to Israel in any year since the U.S. began to assist Israel militarily.
U.S. support for Israel’s war was not limited to military aid either. From day one, Washington adopted the Israeli narrative about what happened on October 7 and on the war itself. And it vetoed a ceasefire resolution three times at the UN Security Council, against the will of a majority of member states.
But this seemingly limitless endorsement had a goal: wiping out Hamas and the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza, which would pave the way for creating a new political environment in the region that would allow the proceeding of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries. It would create the atmosphere for new business deals involving Gaza (including its recently-discovered natural gas fields) unburdened by the Palestine question.
Israel was unable to deliver. The Palestinian cause has taken center stage once again and become impossible to overlook internationally. Saudi Arabia, which was expected to proceed with a normalization agreement with Israel before October 7, now conditions its normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel upon reopening a political process to establish a Palestinian state.
Israel itself is being investigated for charges of genocide, while its Prime Minister and former war minister have international arrest warrants against them. This alone is a major shift in the international treatment of Palestine and Israel. For the first time ever, the international system takes steps toward holding Israel accountable.
The International Court of Justice’s ruling in July of last year that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights was unlawful ended a decades-long debate over the legal foundation of the occupation, clearing away the ambiguity on which Israel depended to secure international support, and at least, international tolerance of its occupation policies. These developments won’t end the occupation, or even U.S. and Western support for it, but they make it impossible to hide the occupation, forcing Israel and its allies to square the dilemma of whether it is willing to put limits to its behavior.
Force facing reality
This dilemma hasn’t grown enough to produce a radical change, but it has begun to manifest in different forms. One of them is the fact that the Trump administration, the least diplomatic U.S. administration in recent memory — especially when it comes to supporting Israel — practically imposed the ceasefire on Netanyahu’s government.
For the U.S. and Trump, the Middle East agenda is much larger than Gaza, and even more than Israel and its wars. For Trump, business comes first, and as his first presidency proved, business in the region comes through normalization and stability, not war. Israel had 15 months to prepare the scene for Trump’s project in the Middle East without Palestine on the table, and it failed. Now, Trump’s envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, is handling the ceasefire negotiations, taking away Netanyahu’s absolute control over it amidst Israeli attempts to change the terms and escape the commitments it had signed onto.
However, the U.S. and the Trump administration is far from breaking the traditional U.S. stance of full support for Israel. On the contrary, it has completely dropped the traditional appearances of trying to reach a deal with Palestinians based on a two-state solution, giving priority to Israel’s “security” concerns. In all his declarations, Trump has reaffirmed his support for Israel’s choices, including in resuming the war on Gaza, and even endorsed the Israeli ambition of ethnically cleansing Gaza, adding to it a Trumpian flavor by vowing to create a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Despite all this, Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in expanding the war, much less fighting Iran. Aside from Trump’s over-the-top declarations about Gaza, his right hand for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is only focusing on saving the ceasefire deal and removing the obstacles that Netanyahu has been placing in front of it.
Trump is also realizing that not everyone responds positively to the U.S.’s bullying. The collective rejection of Trump’s displacement plan for Gaza by Arab, European, and other governments, made it clear that some constants can’t be moved so easily. Donald Trump himself walked back his Gaza plan, stating last week that he was “surprised” by the region’s rejection of it, adding that he “won’t impose it.” The limits of what the U.S.-Israeli force-based alliance can achieve have begun to appear.
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