Benjamin Netanyahu was handed an exit from Gaza, but he chose an election instead, ensuring his stay in power outlasts both war and peace in Gaza.
Silence, Then Surrender to the Right
He found out on August 9. At a cabinet meeting, under sustained pressure from far-right partners who oppose any Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Netanyahu reversed course: “I want to be precise here: Israel rejects the 15-point document,” he told ministers, adding that forces would “not withdraw at all until Hamas is genuinely disarmed”. The distance between those two moments — eight days of studied ambiguity followed by an abrupt, hard-edged rejection — is the clearest evidence available that this decision was engineered for a domestic audience, not dictated by strategic necessity.
Israel is heading to the polls on October 27, its first election since the October 7, 2023, attack reshaped the country’s politics, and Netanyahu is defending a coalition that current polling suggests may not win the majority. Netanyahu’s calculation is to persuade wavering right-wing voters that he remains the only committed Israeli leader who will stop Hamas, not only a permanent basis but also on terms set by Israel only. Rejecting a Trump-backed peace framework, however historic Trump himself called it, serves that narrative far better than signing it would. Taking the stand against the US and Trump, Israel’s strongest ally, is something that Netanyahu can sell to his domestic audiences and win huge applause.
What makes this more than ordinary political maneuvering is the gap between what Netanyahu says and what Israel is actually doing on the ground. Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have largely stopped since August 3, even as sporadic gunfire continues to be reported by Gazan authorities. A prime minister who genuinely believed the roadmap endangered Israeli security would not be quietly observing one of its central terms while publicly denouncing the document itself. That combination — public rejection, private compliance — is not the behavior of principle. It is the behavior of a politician trying to have his cake and eat it too!
A Gift to Hamas, and a Chip Held for Iran
The consequences of this hedging have already surfaced, and they cut against the very goal Netanyahu claims to be protecting. Hamas, under its newly elevated leader Khalil al-Hayya, endorsed the disarmament framework almost immediately. Hamas’ support for Trump’s proposal allows it to cast itself as the compliant party and Israel as the obstacle, since mediators can now say Hamas has committed and Israel has not. It clearly shifts the diplomatic pressure away from the group.
That is the paradox at the center of Netanyahu’s decision: a rejection framed as toughness on Hamas has instead relieved Hamas of the obligation to prove anything. Two years into a war fought explicitly to prevent Hamas from regenerating as a political and military force, Netanyahu has handed the group a public-relations opening it could not have engineered on its own.
There is a second, more transactional explanation circulating among Israeli security analysts, and it deserves scrutiny precisely because it is less flattering than either “principled hawk” or “cornered politician.” Former Israeli defense ministry analyst Ehud Eilam has suggested that for Netanyahu, Gaza is not actually the most urgent file — Iran is — and that Israel may eventually make concessions on the Gaza roadmap specifically to secure renewed American cooperation against Tehran. If that reading holds, then the current rejection is not a fixed position at all. It is inventory: a negotiating asset being held rather than spent, to be cashed in later when it buys something Netanyahu wants more.
That should trouble anyone inclined to take the rejection at face value as a security judgment. A war that has devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of people is not, in this framing, a crisis to be resolved. Rather, it is a lever to be pulled at the moment of maximum strategic advantage. Whatever one thinks of Israel’s disarmament-first demand on its own merits, treating the war’s endgame as leverage for a separate confrontation with Iran is a fundamentally different kind of decision-making than the security doctrine Netanyahu has publicly claimed to be defending.
The Coalition’s Clock Is Shorter Than the War’s
One could argue that Netanyahu wants Hamas to disarm first because he does not trust the group, or that he fears Hamas could use the process to rearm. But the manner of this rejection — the delay, the reversal only after far-right pressure, the quiet compliance with terms being publicly denounced — separates a genuine red line from a politically convenient one. Leaders defending real strategic principles do not typically need a week of silence and a coalition revolt to discover where they stand and what works, or doesn’t work, for them.
The more consequential question now is what happens after October 27. If Netanyahu’s coalition survives, the incentive to keep managing Gaza policy around far-right sensitivities will only intensify, since it will have been vindicated at the ballot box. If it collapses regardless of how he handles Gaza, the political logic currently governing Israeli decision-making evaporates overnight. Whoever negotiates next inherits a very different set of constraints, potentially freer to trade the disarmament-sequencing fight for an actual settlement, since the domestic cost of doing so would belong to someone else. Either way, Hamas has already absorbed the lesson that public commitment without action can still shift blame onto Israel, a tactic it is unlikely to abandon regardless of who occupies the prime minister’s office. The next chapter of this War and Peace saga will be written less by strategists than by whoever wins an election that has already reshaped how it is being fought.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
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