{"id":796762,"date":"2026-08-01T04:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T04:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/796762\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T04:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T04:44:11","slug":"is-israel-really-ready-to-withdraw-from-gaza-israel-palestine-conflict-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/796762\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Israel really ready to withdraw from Gaza? | Israel-Palestine conflict News"},"content":{"rendered":"

United States President Donald Trump has been triumphal since the announcement that Palestinian group Hamas had agreed to hand over its weaponry in Gaza.<\/p>\n

But the terms of Thursday\u2019s disarmament agreement<\/a> also stipulate that Israel should withdraw from the Palestinian enclave, and gradually transfer power to a Palestinian administration \u2013 conditions that have been met with a frosty reception<\/a> by Israeli politicians and in the Israeli press.<\/p>\n

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The Israeli government has yet to officially comment, but\u00a0one unnamed senior Israeli official told reporters on Friday that, despite \u201cvarious publications\u201d reporting \u201cdiplomatic progress in the Gaza Strip\u201d, there would be no withdrawal from Israel\u2019s current positions within Gaza before what it determines to be \u201cthe genuine disarmament of Hamas\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump, for his part, has said that Israel was \u201cvery happy\u201d with the deal.<\/p>\n

Electoral suicide<\/p>\n

Many Israelis continue to espouse a hard line towards Palestinians in Gaza after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, which was launched from the territory. That is despite Israel subsequently conducting a genocidal war on Gaza, killing more than 73,000 Palestinians and destroying the enclave.<\/p>\n

A May poll found that 82 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents supported the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Gaza \u2013 the same poll found that 56 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel from their homes too.<\/p>\n

Another poll, a month later, found that 64 percent of those surveyed believed there were \u201cno innocents\u201d among the Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n

And many Israeli politicians \u2013 including government ministers<\/a> \u2013 have said that illegal Jewish settlements, akin to the ones dividing the occupied West Bank, will soon come to Gaza.<\/p>\n

The prospect, therefore, of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and steps towards the enclave\u2019s reconstruction are unpalatable to many Israelis, with politicians quick to condemn the disarmament agreement.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir denounced it as \u201cunacceptable\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cA commitment to stop the assassinations of [Hamas\u2019s] murderers is tantamount to agreeing to Hamas organising for the next massacre,\u201d Ben-Gvir wrote on social media. \u201cThe assassinations in Gaza must continue, the encouragement of emigration must happen. Israel must win.\u201d<\/p>\n

The term \u201cencouragement of emigration\u201d is widely regarded<\/a> as referring to ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

Politicians regarded as centrists, such as former chief of staff and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s leading rival in the coming election, Gadi Eisenkot, were equally sceptical. He said that any deal that stopped short of the war\u2019s objectives \u2013 the destruction of Hamas\u2019s military-political power \u2013 was a total failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cNearly three years have passed since the morning of October 7,\u201d Eisenkot wrote, \u201cand Hamas has renewed its strength with a number of terrorists similar to the evening of October 6.\u201d<\/p>\n

Politics of peace<\/p>\n

Netanyahu has yet to comment, but US-Israeli pollster and consultant Dahlia Scheindlin suggested the stakes are high for the prime minister with an election only a few months away.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu\u2019s likely best chance of avoiding a jail sentence<\/a> if he is found guilty of numerous corruption charges rests on him winning the October elections.<\/p>\n

But the opposition are currently leading in many polls, and may be able to gain enough seats to form a government.<\/p>\n

\"FormerFormer Israeli chief of staff and Netanyahu rival Gadi Eisenkot has called any agreement that stops short of Hamas\u2019s destruction a \u2018total failure\u2019 [File: Clodagh Kilcoyne\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

\u201cNetanyahu\u2019s considerations have nothing to do with public trauma [from the October 7 attack],\u201d Scheindlin said, and everything to do with politics. \u201cHe will care primarily \u2013 probably exclusively \u2013 about what his current coalition partners think.\u201d<\/p>\n

Withdrawing from Gaza was out of the question, Scheindlin said, adding that whatever gambit Netanyahu undertook to maintain his coalition and encourage right-wing voters to support him had to be accomplished without further alienating his allies in the US, who appear to have grown increasingly frustrated with him.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Netanyahu] will not want to be seen by Trump and the Americans as undermining any possible moves towards implementing this agreement. And so, therefore, he might manage some very symbolic moving of the Israeli army within Gaza,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

One tactic, Scheindlin suggested, could be for the Israeli military to withdraw back to the positions it was supposed to be in as part of the October 2025<\/a> ceasefire agreement. Israel has killed more than 1,200 Palestinians since that agreement, and also repeatedly expanded the territory under its control, ignoring the deal.<\/p>\n

Keeping Trump happy<\/p>\n

Managing US expectations of Israel is likely to be a problem, not just for Netanyahu, but for all of the politicians vying for leadership of the country.<\/p>\n

One anonymous US official has already said that Trump would be \u201cvery, very disappointed\u201d if Israel did not adhere to the disarmament agreement.<\/p>\n

\u201cNetanyahu already faces an uphill battle in forming any government, more so if he agrees to this,\u201d said Dov Waxman, professor of Israel studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

\"IsraeliIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the White House in Washington earlier this week [Elizabeth Frantz\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

Netanyahu has previously been able to sidestep requirements placed on Israel when it comes to Gaza, maintaining unity within his far-right coalition, with some members repeatedly threatening to bring the government down if the war ended without Hamas\u2019s total defeat.<\/p>\n

He may be silent on the latest deal for now, but he will eventually have to speak.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat could be a real problem,\u201d Waxman said, \u201cbecause, if he criticises the deal, he risks angering Trump who \u2013 though he hasn\u2019t endorsed him [in the Israeli election] yet \u2013 he must be hoping will deliver him some kind of present during the election cycle, whether that\u2019s a further call for his pardon or normalisation with Saudi Arabia, maybe both. But he has to keep Trump on his side.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while the Israeli public has grown sceptical that Israeli security remains at the forefront of the Trump administration\u2019s priorities, the need for the US security umbrella is accepted by the vast majority of the public and political establishment, elements of which have seized upon any potential fracturing in it as a means to criticise Netanyahu.<\/p>\n

\u201cNetanyahu has shown himself to be very good in the past at handling these kinds of things,\u201d Nimrod Goren, president and founder of Mitvim \u2013 The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019ll make sure Trump gets his announcement, his signing ceremony and all the optics are in place, but I don\u2019t see him withdrawing from Gaza,\u201d Goren said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the idea of him withdrawing goes further than just public opinion,\u201d the Israeli analyst added. \u201cIt goes against his whole philosophy, ideology and worldview: that Israel needs to be present beyond its borders and everywhere bad intentions could be turned into action. If anything, I see him escalating in the build-up to the election rather than discussing withdrawal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"United States President Donald Trump has been triumphal since the announcement that Palestinian group Hamas had agreed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":796763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,5620,12,5618,803,2563,129,3,2485,21,19,22,20,25,1209,24],"class_list":["post-796762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-donald-trump","tag-gaza","tag-israel","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-palestine","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-canada","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}