The United States mediation seems ineffective, and the war is bogging down. Radicalization is continuing on both sides, and the chances of working arrangements are receding by the day. Hamas is not interested in the projected trade-off, and the Israelis, despite their fractured political landscape, are unwilling to consider any political and military concession to Hamas. However critical the hostage issue, the Israelis are faced with a dual dilemma: the moral dilemma of liberating their hostages and the political dilemma of compromising their national security. The negotiation scenario is based on false predicates that overlook the notional and political incompatibilities raised by the hostage issue, the restoring of the status quo ante, and the reinstatement of the same security dilemmas that triggered the war on October 2023.
The terms of the exchange are too paradoxical to be validated by the Israelis: the Israeli withdrawal versus the liberation of hostages and the maintenance of future uncertainties over the future governance of Gaza. When faced with such aporia, the negotiation plot should be revised and the order of priorities entirely reconsidered. Hamas is claiming victory since it has not yet been annihilated and is totally dismissive of the dire humanitarian costs and the disastrous fallout of a prolonged war. Israel’s hands are tied by its hostages and national security mandates, at a time when the Iranians are reactivating their war plan based on the “unified battlefields," nuclear militarization, and the state of generalized stasis and proliferating civil strife in the Middle East. One wonders how long this political and security murkiness scenario can survive when the truce playbook is on standby, while war dynamics are in full gear.
The procrastination strategy followed by Hamas is part of a broader political and strategic plot whereby the Iranian regime plays the card of regional destabilization, as lately showcased in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Irak, Jordan and Yemen, which have, each in its own right, engaged in the war in Gaza. The questioning of the existing geopolitics and civil peace in these countries indicates a reluctance to deal in good faith with the US. In parallel, the Israeli nationalist right is taken over by the extremist fringes, who are not inclined to negotiations. We have to remind ourselves that the continuation of this war is costly, highly destructive, differentially impacting its different sides.
The fractured and highly manipulated Palestinian scenery is unable to unite around the tactical truce objectives, let alone the prospects of an overall peace process, which helps sides extricate themselves from their multiple dependencies. Whereas Israeli differences revolve around issues of political expediency related to the hostages' liberation, while unanimously endorsing their shared perception of national security problems. The mediators have a hard time disentangling the issues and setting new scenarios for Israeli military disengagement, while Hamas is claiming back its control over Gaza. In other words, we are in a full-war dynamic, which portends a total war extending throughout the Near East.
The situation in Southeast Lebanon and Northeast Syria is a replica of the same war dynamics projected by the Iranian military script. Israel is not in a position to condone the Iranian politics of subversion without incurring major security risks. The full incapacitation of Lebanese sovereignty, the overwhelming control of state institutions, the total subservience towards the Iranian regime, and the instrumentalization of Lebanese strategic leverage (territories, public resources, international status, military capabilities, organized criminality, Palestinian camps, etc.) sum up the challenges posed to Israeli security. The very fact that Lebanon is unable to enforce its sovereignty mandates, safeguard minimal civil concord, and ultimately contain the Iranian subversion politics makes it vulnerable to the ravaging dynamics of an evolving war.
The pager explosions and the spate of assassinations targeting the military leadership (Fouad Shokr, Ibrahim Aqil,and the staff of the elite troop of al-Radwan) are quite illustrative of the shadow war that Israel has launched against Iran and its proxies throughout the Middle East. The latest statement of Hassan Nasrallah is quite unnerving, since it betrays intentional political blindness, a lack of critical insight, unquestioned accountability, and an irrealistic perception of political and military evolutions and their deleterious consequences. He is in a typical state of denial, which prevents him from coming to terms with the nature of the latest security breach, his faltering defenses, and the looming strategic hazards. He has failed to grasp the magnitude of the ongoing intelligence and military failures and their impact on his outdated strategic blueprints. He is still refusing to acknowledge defeat, dismissive of international resolutions and arbitration, and clinging to the whims of an elusive strategic parity and dysfunctional political alliances, at a time when all these projections have turned awry.
The questions elicited by the actual impasses make us wonder whether the projected truce is likely to reach its ambivalent goals, restrain the radical agendas, accommodate the Iranian power politics, and usher in a transformative peace process. The brunt of the open-ended war in the Near East and its mutating levers and actors are getting ahead of the peace process, if not relegating it to irrelevance. If the region is to progressively stabilize, the Iranians have to disengage from the ongoing conflicts and promote an alternative political agenda. Israelis are compelled to reinstate their national security, reopen the channels of communication with the moderate Palestinians, and reclaim the Abraham Accords as their alternative path to a deliberately subverted peace. Short of these preconditions, the ingredients of a total war are already in place.
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