May 20: Here Comes the Cease-Fire Circus

Hamas spokesman to Arab world: Don't worry, there is no genocide; Rubio speaks on Iran talks; Why all the fake news about Trump and Israel?

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The Big Story

It’s barely been 48 hours since Israel resumed ground operations in Gaza, and already the “international community” is throwing a tantrum. On Monday, as Operation “Gideon’s Chariots” operation got rolling and Israel announced the resumption of “basic” aid deliveries to Gaza, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom jointly threatened “concrete” actions if Israel did not abandon its war effort. On Tuesday, the leaders of those three countries released a joint statement demanding that “the Netanyahu Government” cease its “wholly disproportionate” escalation in Gaza and “lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid” in coordination with the United Nations, while declaring their commitment “to recognizing a Palestinian state.”

The United Kingdom followed that up by suspending bilateral trade negotiations, summoning the Israeli ambassador for a reprimand, and announcing sanctions against Israeli settlers. British Foreign Minister David Lammy threatened “further measures” if Israel does not “stop the Gaza war.” The European Union’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, declared that EU foreign ministers would “review” the bloc’s association agreement with Israel and Sweden, for good measure, threatened EU sanctions against Israeli ministers. To cap off the farce, an official from the United Nations told BBC Radio on Tuesday that “14,000 babies” will starve to death within the next 48 hours if aid is not resumed; a nonsense figure that appears to be drawn from an estimate of how many pregnant women are “food insecure” in Gaza.

This mass escalation of international pressure comes at a convenient time for Hamas. As we noted yesterday, the Israeli aid blockade had been effectively bankrupting the terror group, and the IDF had succeeded in eliminating several senior Hamas military commanders, including Mohammed Sinwar, immediately prior to the launch of the current operation, disrupting the group’s capacity to organize an effective defense against the new IDF campaign. The degradation of the group’s financial and military position has, more recently, been paired with what appears to be a degradation of its political legitimacy in Gaza. On Monday, for instance, thousands of Gazans took to the streets of Khan Younis to chant “Hamas out” and “Ya Emadi”—a reference to the Qatari envoy to Gaza, Mohammed al-Emadi—“Wait patiently, the Gazan people will dig your grave”:

To put it bluntly, the European position is that Hamas must be preserved and that Israel must accept strategic defeat in Gaza. Hamas, to its credit, had the common decency to thank its friends. On Tuesday, the group released a statement praising the Europeans’ actions as a “step in the right direction.”

Perhaps in response to pressure from the Europeans, but more likely as a favor to the Trump administration, Israel began further stepping up aid deliveries on Tuesday. On Monday, 5-9 aid trucks (reports vary) were allowed to enter the Gaza Strip. On Tuesday, however, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories announced that 93 aid trucks had been allowed to enter Gaza. According to a U.N. official, the aid will be distributed through the “existing” system—i.e., the one involving U.N. agencies and nonprofits, such as the World Central Kitchen, and not the alternative Israeli-U.S. system set to begin some time in the coming weeks. So, for the moment at least, Israel will once again be sustaining Hamas with its left hand while attempting to destroy it with its right.

And what of the United States’ position in all of this? Yesterday, we noted with skepticism a report from The Washington Post that Trump had threatened to “abandon” Israel if it didn’t end the war. Several U.S. officials angrily denounced that report, with hostage envoy Adam Boehler calling it “fake news.” But on Tuesday morning, we got a new wave of doom and gloom. Barak Ravid reported, first in Walla News and then in Axios, that Trump was “shocked” by images of starving children in Gaza and was pressing Israel to end the war, which he sees as a “flash point” delaying his plans for the region. And in testimony on Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said—in a remark that made headlines in Israel—that the United States viewed the limited amount of aid allowed into Gaza on Monday as “insufficient.”

Again, however, we think the reports of a serious rift are overblown. Despite Ravid’s blaring headline that Trump is “frustrated” and wants Israel to “wrap it up,” Israeli sources in the same story said that Netanyahu “does not feel much pressure from Trump” and that if Trump wants a cease-fire, he needs to “put a lot more pressure on both sides.” Boehler, though he reiterated the White House’s preference for a cease-fire, praised the IDF for escalating pressure on Hamas to reach a deal. And Rubio, in the same hearing mentioned above, defended the IDF’s current operation and said that Israel “can achieve their objective of defeating Hamas while still allowing aid to enter in sufficient quantities.” Rubio went on, “The central question for the future of Gaza is going to be: Who governs it? Because as long as there’s a group like Hamas there, it’s going to be very difficult to imagine long-term peace or prosperity. So, whether it’s Hamas or some successor organization that spins out of it, that’s a factor that has to be eliminated.” It’s also worth noting, on the question of the aid, that The Times of Israel has reported that the White House has threatened to cut U.S. funding to the U.N.’s World Food Program if it doesn’t cooperate with the new Israeli aid delivery plan.

Would it be better if Rubio echoed his fire-and-brimstone denunciations of Hamas from his time as a senator? Yes, of course. But realistically, there is nothing right now to indicate that the United States is exerting more than minimal pressure on Israel over Gaza. There is no “Italian strike” on arms deliveries, nor are there threats to back sanctions at the United Nations, nor has Trump taken any of the ample opportunities he’s been given to stick a rhetorical knife in Netanyahu’s side. What that adds up to is that, for now, as Michael Doran argued in the latest edition of Tablet’s “Israel Update,” “Gaza is in the hands of Israel,” and it’s “not Donald Trump that’s keeping Israel from winning in Gaza,” but Israel itself.

Our guess is that this state of affairs won’t go on forever. Trump, in all likelihood, will give the current operation some time to play out, but will eventually cut bait if it doesn’t seem like it’s leading anywhere. Which in turn means the IDF needs to act aggressively. In a statement on Tuesday, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said that Israel will “expand ground maneuver, conquer additional territory, [and] clear and destroy the terror infrastructure” until Hamas is either destroyed or agrees to release all of the hostages. Which sounds like the right idea. Here’s hoping that Israel will attempt to see it through.

—Park MacDougald

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The Rest

→While Hamas no doubt finds the “genocide” rhetoric useful for gullible Westerners, for Arab audiences, it still needs to explain that, no, of course it’s not responsible for an actual genocide of Gazans. For instance, here’s Hamas’ Sami Abu Zuhri, in a clip from late March translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, defending Hamas against claims that it had brought destruction on Gaza:

A house that was destroyed will be rebuilt ... The wombs of our women will give birth to many times over the number of martyrs. Did you know that the number of newborn babies in Gaza equals the number of martyrs who were killed in this war? At least 50,000 babies were born in Gaza during the war.

Zuhri, a senior spokesman for Hamas’ Doha-based political leadership, also suggested to the interviewer from Libyan television that the Gaza war was helping to spread the faith in the West. “What makes people in America, France, and elsewhere in Europe convert to Islam?” Zuhri asked. “We must not minimize this matter to 20, 100, or 1,000 homes destroyed in Gaza. The implications of this war far exceed the extent of Gaza and the region. The implications of this war exceed the boundaries of space and time.” Indeed.

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→In his Senate testimony, Rubio was twice asked about the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Here’s the second of those exchanges, with Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA):

Key points here:

1. The U.S. position remains zero enrichment of uranium in Iran

2. Rubio said the talks, “at this point,” had focused solely on the nuclear issue, and that the United States had not broached Iran’s support for terrorism or its ballistic missile program.

3. If a final deal does not address Iran’s proxies or missile program, then U.S. sanctions related to those issues would remain in place even in the event of a deal.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Laurence Norman observed on X about the third point, “This is extremely important. If terror and other sanctions stay on [the] books, you can forget [about] significant trade between [the] US and Iran.”

→In a Tuesday X post, Israeli journalist Tamir Morag, a diplomatic correspondent for Channel 14, sought to explain the seeming disconnect between the Trump administration’s Israel policy and popular perceptions of its policy based on social media conversations and anonymously sourced reports in the left-wing U.S. and Israeli press. The pro-Israel faction of the administration, Morag wrote, is “dominant” and includes “the vast majority of senior administration officials,” but there is nonetheless a “significant” number of “restraintist” officials at the junior and mid-levels of the U.S. government, who are working through the media to shift administration policy. Morag writes:

Administration officials aligned with the isolationist camp frequently brief Israeli and American journalists with claims of a “collapse in relations” or “Trump’s rage at Netanyahu.” And many journalists, most of whom hold left-leaning agendas and seek to undermine Netanyahu’s government, eagerly buy into this narrative.

Therefore, when a journalist reports that “an administration source says the Trump-Netanyahu relationship is in crisis,” he’s not necessarily fabricating or lying—he may very well have heard it from a real administration source. But in most cases, these claims do not reflect the administration’s actual position or the real situation. That’s why senior officials who do speak on the record so often issue strong denials shortly afterward.

This, for what it’s worth, accords with what The Scroll has heard in conversations with administration officials—i.e., that the “restraintist” faction is loud but consists principally of mid-level bureaucrats and junior staffers working with outside influencers and protected by the president’s son.

→On Monday, the United Kingdom and the European Union struck a trade and security deal to “reset” relations nearly a decade after British voters opted to leave the EU and five years after Britain left. The deal drops certain barriers on trade and movement but is less than comprehensive; according to the write-up in The New York Times, the deal should ease barriers to entry for British travelers, make “traveling with pets” easier, and allow for the sale of certain British meat products on the continent. (British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had ruled out rejoining the European single market or customs union.) Diplomatically, the most important part of the new “reset” is a security partnership, which calls for London and Brussels to ramp up cooperation on shared security issues—principally the war in Ukraine.

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