The position of the administration of US President Donald Trump differs from that of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu regarding progress towards the second phase of the ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement. The Trump administration is putting pressure on Netanyahu to reach and implement the second phase, while Netanyahu is trying to obstruct or delay reaching it.

In this context, the Israeli media portrays Netanyahu as having to submit to threats from the head of the Religious Zionism Party and Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who sees the implementation of the second stage as the end of the war on Gaza, which he rejects, and threatens that in this case he will withdraw from the government, which threatens its collapse, because the remaining parties in the government, namely Likud and the Haredim, will not form a majority in the Knesset, after the Otzma Yehudit party headed by Itamar Ben Gvir withdrew from the government last month.

But this scenario is not necessarily realistic. Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that the war on Gaza will resume after the current first stage of the agreement is over. And if Netanyahu decides to end the war, he will show that he has failed to achieve its stated goals: eliminating Hamas militarily and politically, and returning all Israeli prisoners held in the Gaza Strip.

In addition, Ben-Gvir's party did not join the opposition in the Knesset after withdrawing from the government, and Smotrich's party is not expected to join the opposition either, if he withdraws from the government. Ben-Gvir declared that "we will not bring down the right-wing government."

Netanyahu's government seems to be safe in this case. But there are two crises coming: a law exempting the ultra-Orthodox from military conscription, demanded by the ultra-Orthodox parties, and the state budget law for the current year, which the government must enact by the end of March, or the government will automatically fall. The ultra-Orthodox parties are threatening not to support the state budget if the law exempting the ultra-Orthodox from military conscription is not enacted before then.

In contrast, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s parties support mandatory conscription for the Haredim, as their voters enlist in the army at high rates compared to other population groups performing military service. Therefore, it is expected that they will oppose a law exempting the Haredim from conscription, especially since the Israeli army announces that it is facing a shortage of its personnel due to the war, and demands the conscription of the Haredim.

It is not clear how Netanyahu will resolve these crises in his government, but some estimates indicate that if he decides to implement the second stage of the ceasefire, prisoner exchange, and cessation of the war, he will provide “compensation” to Smotrich, in the form of implementing a plan to annex areas in the West Bank to Israel, although this will not be an easy step to implement, due to widespread international opposition to it, with the possible exception of the Trump administration, and in light of expectations of a deterioration in the security situation in the West Bank leading to a massive uprising. The most prominent thing in this scenario, the essence of which is to stop the war, is that Netanyahu declares his failure to achieve the goals of the war.

However, Netanyahu decided to resort to procrastination, and raised the possibility of extending the first stage. He excluded the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, and the head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, from the negotiating delegation, and appointed Minister Ron Dermer, who is considered his closest advisor, as head of the negotiating delegation.

The change comes as a prelude to ending the Shin Bet chief’s term in office, either by forcing him to resign, as was done with the IDF Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, or by dismissing him. This is expected to happen by the end of this month, when the Shin Bet is due to submit its investigation into its failure on October 7, 2023. Israeli reports indicate that Netanyahu will appoint someone loyal to him as head of the Shin Bet.

Dermer's appointment aims to obstruct or delay the negotiations on the second phase, as Dermer will conduct these negotiations with Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and not with the Qatari and Egyptian mediators, under the pretext of taking the reins of the negotiations away from Qatar. Since the negotiations are between Israel and Hamas, and not with the mediators, it is not clear how Hamas will be communicated with, which has no direct contact with the Americans, but it is likely that Qatar will continue its efforts to end the war, as it is the closest to Hamas, whose leadership is based in Doha.

Installing a new system in Gaza

In the past week, there has been increasing talk in Israel about the displacement of Gazans, after Trump gave it legitimacy, when he spoke about “transferring” Gazans to other countries, including Egypt and Jordan, and Netanyahu mentioned that Saudi Arabia is also among these countries, in return for rebuilding the destroyed Gaza Strip. The Palestinians, the Arab countries and the entire world oppose this plan, except for the Trump administration.

Reports in the past week have indicated Israeli plans to displace Gazans during a war on Gaza, not during a ceasefire. This means that these plans indicate the possibility of resuming the war after the implementation of the second stage, and not implementing the third stage, which, according to the agreement, requires the complete withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Strip and the beginning of reconstruction that is not linked to what Trump announced.

The Israeli displacement plans include details about “transferring” Gazans abroad by air, sea and land, while the Israeli army launches heavy-handed military operations against Hamas throughout the Strip. Israel imagines that this will eliminate Hamas’s military and governmental presence, after it has recovered its prisoners.

However, the success of the plan to displace the Gazans is not expected. All of Israel's attempts to displace the Gazans have failed, since the Nakba of 1948, and during the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956, during which Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and Sinai for a few months and was forced to withdraw from them, and also after occupying the Strip in 1967.

Although Netanyahu was aware of this historical fact, he was the first to propose, in the current war, implementing such a displacement. At the end of December 2023, he announced during a meeting of the Likud party faction in the Knesset that he was working on implementing a “voluntary migration” of the residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries, and considered that “our problem is (finding) countries willing to receive them, and we are working on this matter.” At the time, former Foreign Minister Eli Cohen formed a team whose mission was to try to make contacts with African countries that might agree to receive displaced people from Gaza, including Congo and Rwanda.

Netanyahu declares that at the end of the war Hamas will not be in power, and that he rejects the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. According to Trump's plan to "own" Gaza and turn it into a huge resort, Israel will not be in Gaza either. Netanyahu welcomed and praised this plan. This means that in Netanyahu's view, someone will be installed to lead Gaza.

The issue of installing a ruler or regime in an area occupied, besieged or controlled by Israel in any way is a complex one for the Israelis, and by their own admission, due to its failure. In the West Bank, Israel failed to install Palestinian groups loyal to it, such as the “Village Leagues,” in the late 1970s, to serve as an alternative to the Palestinian national forces and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, it failed to install the leader of the Phalangists, Bashir Gemayel, as president of Lebanon, and he was assassinated in the Phalangists’ stronghold three weeks later.

In both cases of inauguration, there were no local armed movements in the West Bank or Lebanon on the scale of the resistance in Gaza, which recorded great steadfastness in the face of the massive Israeli war machine, despite the horrific crimes of genocide and massive destruction in the Strip. Therefore, it is expected that the issue of inauguration in Gaza, regardless of who is the party that will inaugurate it, whether American, international or Arab, will be a story of declared failure.