US PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s announcement of a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday may rekindle hopes of a possible peace deal over Ukraine, but at the same time it is stoking fears that as the world media focus shifts to the summit, an opportunity will be provided to Israel to start its military occupation of Gaza.
Simultaneously with Trump’s announcement of the summit came the approval of the Israeli security cabinet of war crimes-accused Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s plan to physically occupy Gaza. Netanyahu’s handpicked military chief earlier had reservations, but eventually consented and complied.
The military chief has been quoted as saying any expansion of the military operation would jeopardise the lives of the remaining 20 hostages held in captivity since being seized by Hamas on Oct 7, 2023. The group broke through the fence, walls and other obstacles around Gaza to attack Israel and kill some 1,200 Israelis, including nearly 400 civilians that day.
The Times of Israel quoted IDF chief of staff Lt-Gen Eyal Zamir’s assessment offered to his senior colleagues ahead of the security cabinet meeting. According to Hebrew media reports, he warned that “occupying the Strip would drag Israel into a black hole — taking responsibility for two million Palestinians, requiring a years-long clearing operation, exposing soldiers to guerrilla warfare and, most dangerously, jeopardising the hostages”.
Netanyahu’s plan looks like an attempt to grab all or most Palestinian land in Gaza
“We are not dealing with theory; we are dealing with matters of life and death, with the defence of the state, and we do so while looking directly into the eyes of our soldiers and the citizens of the country,” Zamir maintained during Thursday’s assessment, the army said. Then, under threat of a forced resignation, he said he’d comply.
It is clear that the starvation policy pursued by Israel for months, with the backing of the US through the murderous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which so far has killed hundreds of starving Palestinians queuing for food in Gaza, does not seem to have broken the Palestinians’ iron will.
In fact, the images of starving people being slaughtered by IDF and GHF contractors have evoked outrage around the globe, with even the duplicitous EU and UK making disapproving noises and some European nations, led by France, saying they might recognise the Palestinian state during the UN General Assembly session next month as a first step towards a two-state solution.
Netanyahu’s plan looks like an attempt to grab all or most Palestinian land in Gaza to mirror what has been happening in the West Bank, ahead of any recognition, so as to deny the creation or existence of a viable Palestinian state. The psychopathic Israeli leader has received US approval, with Trump saying: “It is pretty much up to Israel” to do what it wants in Gaza.
There have been laughable leaks in the US media, probably originating in the White House where spin doctors have sold stories like Trump shouted down Netanyahu when the latter was claiming that there was no starvation in Gaza and all such stories were Hamas propaganda.
Who does not know that it was Trump who first mentioned his planned Gaza Riviera that would follow the (forced) displacement, again, of Gaza’s 2m Palestinians whose earlier generations were first displaced to the Strip in the Nakba in 1948?
It would be important to see the Trump-Putin summit against this backdrop. It is unlikely Putin will have changed his stance on key issues to which he ties any ceasefire in Ukraine, after one visit to Moscow by US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff (he is a US presidential envoy, despite often sounding like an Israeli spokesman on Gaza).
Putin has clearly stated that he will offer no territorial concessions in eastern Ukraine where his military has slowly but surely started to make gains and wants recognition of his Crimean annexation of 2014 and Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in 2022.
He has sought explicit guarantees that the Nato alliance would not be expanded to Ukraine because that would be too close for comfort and take away the buffer Ukraine has provided between Russia and Nato since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the past, Trump has indicated that concessions (not by Russia) will have to be made in some of these areas for a peace deal to be realised. Ahead of the summit, it wasn’t clear if the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, or even the European members of Nato, was willing to make any such concessions.
And without such concessions, a peace deal cannot be realised. Perhaps, Putin agreed to the summit to give Trump a small win to boast about for weeks in the media and, at the same time, give himself more time and space to continue with his military campaign where he believes his forces are making good progress.
Inevitably now, the global media attention will shift from the Gaza forced starvation story to looking ahead at the Alaska summit. And this shift in focus will enable Israel to push ahead with the occupation of northern Gaza to start with, going on to the rest of the Strip, as only that will enable it to complete ethnic cleansing — even annexation — if that too is an unsaid part of the agenda.
All this is happening with the complicity of Western democracies, despite the unease of sections of their populations over the images of starving children and malnourished babies. It seems these images are more powerful or somehow affect the Western media sensibilities more than the slaughter of some 15,500 children and the amputation of the limbs of thousands more.
The less said the better about the Arab neighbours and the larger Muslim world, many of whose despotic rulers are too fearful of the consequences of defying the US to do anything other than being complicit in, or at least acquiescent to, genocide in Gaza. This is where we stand today in helpless despair and despondency.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2025
