Netanyahu Promises the “Final Stage” of Gaza Genocide Will Lead to Implementation of “Trump’s Plan"
Soon after Hamas announced it had accepted a ceasefire proposal, Israel responded by heavily bombing Gaza, killing children dressed for the Eid holiday, and preparing further ground invasions.
Hours after Hamas announced it had accepted a ceasefire plan, drafted by negotiation mediators from Egypt and Qatar, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his plans on Sunday for what he called the “final stage” of his genocidal campaign in Gaza. “Hamas will lay down its weapons. Its leaders will be allowed to leave. We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday, referring to President Donald Trump’s threat to seize Gaza and remove Palestinians from their land. “This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.” Netanyahu also boasted, “We have an alliance with the greatest superpower in the world.” He later said the Israeli cabinet had voted in favor of intensifying the military assault on Gaza.
Hamas’s chief negotiator, Dr. Khalil al-Hayya, announced that Hamas had accepted a deal on Saturday put forward by Qatar and Egypt, the two main regional mediators. “We do not want anything new. We want to respect what was signed, what the guarantors guaranteed, and what the international community approved,” al-Hayya said. “Out of our concern for our people and our families, we dealt with all offers responsibly and positively, with the aim of achieving our goals of stopping the war.” The Qatari-Egyptian plan to which Hamas agreed is largely based on a proposal put forward by Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy, three weeks ago. The plan calls for the release of five living Israeli captives, including U.S. dual citizen and IDF soldier Edan Alexander, in return for a temporary 50-day truce and a resumption of negotiations on implementing the second phase of the January ceasefire deal.
Regarding the “Trump plan” for displacing Palestinians from Gaza, al-Hayya said, “It is impossible for us to accept humiliation and disgrace for our people. There will be no displacement or deportation.”
Israel said Saturday that it submitted a counter-proposal to the plan, saying in a statement from Netanyahu’s office that it did so “in full coordination with the US.” Citing Israeli officials, Reuters reported on Monday that, as part of a renewed truce, Israel is demanding the return of roughly half of the twenty-four living Israeli captives held in Gaza, as well as the bodies of seventeen of the thirty-five deceased.
On Monday morning, Israel issued forced displacement orders to almost the entire governorate of Rafah on Gaza’s border with Egypt—the only gateway Palestinians in the Strip have to a world beyond Israeli control. “The IDF is returning to fight with great force to eliminate the capabilities of terrorist organizations in these areas,” Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army’s Arabic spokesman, wrote on the social media site X. He included an image of a map directing thousands of Palestinians to immediately flee to Al Mawasi, an overcrowded makeshift displacement camp built on sand dunes and lacking basic necessities such as water and electricity.
Throughout the weekend, as Palestinians in Gaza observed the Eid al-Fitr holiday that ends the holy month of Ramadan, Israeli forces pummeled areas across the Gaza Strip in what local journalists described as some of the heaviest bombing of the past seventeen months. An airstrike in Khan Younis on Monday left a massive crater where a building once stood. “The massive destruction,” said Abdullah Al Attar, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, was “caused by the occupation's missiles after targeting Al-Maqdad family's home, full of children and women.” Holding a fragment of a munition, he said in a video posted on social media, “[it] weighs more than 15 kilograms. These are the war missiles which the occupation uses against civilians.” A neighbor who witnessed the attack told Al Attar, “The children were happy for Eid and were sleeping. I didn't hear the strike, and woke up from my sleep to the sound of [the Maqdad] children screaming. I didn't know where I was, and I thought my children and husband were killed.”
At least fifty-three Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on Sunday alone. An Israeli airstrike on displaced people in Khan Younis killed sixteen people, including nine children and three women, according to local medical officials. “They died in their Eid outfits,” a female relative of the victims told Al Jazeera Arabic. “Why did they do this to us?” Among the sites hit were tents housing displaced people. Gruesome images, posted on social media by witnesses, depicted the bodies of bloodied children killed in the attack. They had to be lifted from the shredded ruins of tents and blankets.
In Shujaiya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, an airstrike on a family home killed several people, including at least one small child. “We are dying. This is the first day of Eid. This is a child, do you see him?” said a man as he carried the child’s blood-soaked body through the streets. “God is sufficient for us, and he is the best disposer of affairs. He is going to celebrate a better Eid in Heaven with God.”
One medical volunteer in Gaza reported Sunday that they “spent the entire morning and afternoon cutting brand new Eid clothes off dead children.” Over the past 48 hours, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, eighty people have been killed and more than 300 injured in Israeli attacks. These statistics are likely an undercount, as they only include people who have been brought to hospitals and other medical facilities.
Since Israel resumed its genocidal war against Gaza, senior Israeli officials have vowed that, if Hamas does not unilaterally release Israeli captives, they will “permanently” seize Palestinian land. “The more Hamas persists in its refusal to release the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed to Israel,” declared defense minister Israel Katz soon after the resumption of massive airstrikes against Gaza on March 18. Those attacks have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians—the majority of them children and women.
As Israel continues its terror bombings of Gaza, evidence continues to mount that Israeli forces recently summarily executed more than a dozen aid workers from the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) and local civil defense crews in Rafah on March 23. Israel initially stated that its forces fired on “suspicious vehicles” in the area, but later acknowledged its forces shot at an ambulance and other rescue vehicles. In an attempt to provide first aid to people injured in an Israeli attack, rescue and medical workers had deployed to the Hashashin area of Rafah, and had not been heard from since. On Saturday, officials from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) accompanied Palestinian Red Crescent workers to the scene of the massacre to recover the bodies from what officials described as a “mass grave.” A UN worker was one among those found dead.
The head of OCHA’s local office, Jonathan Whittall, said in a post on X that the missing workers were dispatched to rescue injured people when “all five ambulances and one fire-truck were struck, along with a UN vehicle that arrived later.” For five days after the incident, he said, Israel denied the UN the right to retrieve or aid the rescue workers. In one attempt to reach the site, Israeli forces opened fire on more civilians in the area, shooting one Palestinian woman in the head along with a man who tried to rescue her. “Returning the next day, we were finally able to reach the site and discovered a devastating scene: ambulances, the UN vehicle, and fire truck had been crushed and partially buried. After hours of digging, we recovered one body—a Civil Defense worker beneath his fire truck,” Whittal said on Sunday. “On the first day of Eid, we returned and recovered the buried bodies of 8 PRCS, 6 Civil Defense and 1 UN staff. They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives. This should never have happened.” In all, fifteen bodies were recovered from the scene.
Yousef Harb, Deputy Minister of Health in Gaza, provided an update from Nasser hospital: “Some of the Civil Defense members were found handcuffed. Almost all of them had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, and they were buried in deep holes.” The Palestinian Red Crescent issued a demand “that the perpetrators of this war crime be held accountable, that an immediate and urgent investigation be conducted to ensure justice for the victims of this massacre.”
"The weapons of resistance are a red line"
Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said in a statement that Israel’s renewed attacks on Gaza has seen “Patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed.” He added that “the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures in the case on the application of the Genocide Convention remain in place. And yet, this continues without accountability. So, if the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act, while it can, to uphold them.”
From the moment a “ceasefire” deal with Hamas was signed on January 17, Israel has systematically violated the agreement by continuing to kill Palestinians. While the delivery of food and medical supplies increased during the first 42-day phase of the deal, Israel largely blocked the delivery of tents, mobile homes, and construction equipment to the Strip and refused to negotiate the implementation of the second 42-day step of the deal. The second phase would have seen the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the release of all remaining Israeli captives. Instead, Israel announced a full-spectrum blockade of Gaza, barring any aid or food deliveries. Israel shut off the Strip’s remaining electrical supplies and then resumed the full scale war on March 18 with a series of massive strikes across Gaza that killed nearly 200 children in a matter of hours.
While Palestinian resistance fighters have launched a few rocket attacks against Israel in response, forces from Hamas’s Qassam Brigades and Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have largely held their fire in the face of massive Israeli attacks. That is due, in part, to the fact that Hamas’s political negotiators have continued talks with international mediators and publicly issued calls for the world community to compel Israel to cease its violations of the deal and to return to the agreed framework.
Netanyahu has maintained that Israel will only negotiate while continuing its military assault on Gaza and that no lasting deal will be achieved that does not ultimately result in the disarmament of Hamas and the expulsion of its leaders from the Strip. Neither of these demands were part of the ceasefire deal signed in January.
Hamas has publicly stated that it does not seek to govern Gaza and would relinquish formal control of the Strip to an independent technical committee run by Palestinians. It has also maintained that the disarmament of resistance forces in Gaza will not be up for negotiation until Palestine has its own official armed forces capable of defending its right to self-determination and to resist colonial occupation.
“We say frankly to those who bet that Hamas and the resistance factions can abandon their responsibilities or surrender our people and our families to an unknown fate controlled by the occupation as it pleases, we say to them: You are delusional,” said al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator. “As for the weapons of resistance, they are a red line, and they are linked to the existence of the occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. If the occupation persists, it will remain a weapon for the people and the state, protecting their capabilities and rights.”
Jawa Al Muzaiel contributed research for this article.
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In other news, this morning Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “counter-terrorism operation” that sent a new group of seventeen alleged members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 to El Salvador. Read our story from yesterday that lays out the secret deal Bukele struck with MS-13, which is now at the center of Trump’s rendition scheme.
Thank you for your relentless reporting on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Jeremy, and to the other contributors as well. It's abhorrent and despicable, and a tragedy in itself that it's not being reported on in mainstream media, most likely because things in the US are such a shitshow that that alone "floods the zone" and the threat seems more immediate. How the US can allow this to continue - and, in fact, straight up endorses it - is beyond comprehension, and makes us blatantly complicit. Not to mention what is unfolding in the West Bank...
His promise of the "final solution" has not gone unnoticed by millions of people, yet the Western leaders are happy to have plugs in their ears when that promise is shouted out.