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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Alex Dibble and Stuart Willey. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is warning of an intensive, expanded military operation to completely take over and occupy Gaza indefinitely. His newly approved plan would also see perhaps two million Palestinians shifted south and
even as aid groups warn of catastrophic conditions in the Gaza Strip. Israel says the operation will begin unless there's a hostage deal before the end of Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East next week. Our guest today is Gabrielle Weininger, The Times' correspondent in Israel, with us from Tel Aviv. Gabby, this seems to go well beyond Netanyahu's earlier war goals to get rid of Hamas and recover the Israeli hostages. What exactly does this new plan involve?
I think Netanyahu still firmly believes that this is the way to get rid of Hamas. And the more hawkish elements in his government have been calling for this really all along. I think what's changed, firstly, is for the Gazan population. It's really unclear what's going to happen to the civilians who are being told that,
They're going to be moved out for their own protection. Where are they going to go? They're going to be moved from the north to the south. We've seen already Israel enact certain operations to clear out the southern city of Rafah. It's been completely flattened. Some 70% of Gaza is now in control of Israel. This is something that's been happening over the past two months since the resumption of fighting in mid-March and since the breakdown of the six-week ceasefire.
Hamas now saying they're not willing to go back to negotiations. It's really given Israel somewhat of a free reign to do what they set out to do to destroy Hamas. But what's changed for families of the hostages is now the hostages are barely even a priority. They seem more like a tangential war goal than something that is a priority for them. They're saying that this new strategy to destroy
essentially occupy all of Gaza, will see them rescue hostages possibly along the way. That is a quote, along the way. It's not a goal anymore. It's not a goal to negotiate them back in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. It's not a goal to negotiate with Hamas for any kind of ceasefire. And it's not a goal to bring them back in any other way other than to rescue them along the way. That's a huge change also for the Israeli public to swallow.
Gabby, this action to take and to occupy indefinitely, somewhere that Israel pulled out of years ago, seems a big step. What's been the international reaction? There's been a huge backlash, of course, particularly from aid groups who are saying that Israel's
New plan, which is essentially to outsource the distribution of vital humanitarian aid, which we remember hasn't gone into Gaza since March, despite things starting to move in January during the ceasefire. In March, there was a complete standstill even before the fighting resumed. So we saw the blockade of goods, fuel, vital medicine, food and clean water, electricity completely stop on March 2nd.
That has led the population to be in dire straits, to say the least. They're quite desperate. We've even heard murmuring from the US administration, Donald Trump, saying he will help get food into Gaza. But within the Israeli cabinet, those hardline ministers that we mentioned earlier, they are completely against any kind of humanitarian aid going into Gaza. And the new Israeli plan...
won't see soldiers distribute aid, it will see them outsource the distribution of aid, not to the band UNRWA, who are the UN body in charge of Palestinian affairs in Gaza and elsewhere, and not to the World Food Programme and not to those donor countries or donor organisations, rather to private security companies, similar to what we see in the West Bank, where private security guards
man these checkpoints and stop Israeli soldiers coming face to face with desperate civilians, really, kind of putting a barrier there, protecting the soldiers and removing any interaction between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians. Of course, there has been a window of opportunity offered by Netanyahu to protect
Donald Trump is a goodwill gesture, perhaps, to say there is this week before Trump visits the region where we might see some kind of breakthrough in negotiations. So does this make Donald Trump the one man who could prevent this escalation? It's possible. I think Donald Trump has...
on and off in his interest in the Gaza ceasefire. At the very beginning of his term, he said this is something he's going to solve. He pitched an outlandish plan to solve it, which was widely rejected to take over the Gaza Strip by America. And we've seen him kind of go back and forth on this. The murmurings of offering to help feed Gazans is a positive step, but he hasn't really shown any...
forceful effort to push Netanyahu to do so, to bring in that international aid, as we saw Joe Biden do when aid was blocked, as we saw the international community do when aid was blocked. We haven't seen that kind of forceful push from Donald Trump to get aid in. It's not really clear. He really has seemed to have given Netanyahu a free reign to do what he wants. And I think Netanyahu has taken that as a green light.
and also seeing that Donald Trump perhaps isn't as hawkish as he expected him to be, particularly on issues like Iran and firing Mike Waltz, who was more hawkish on some kind of a strike, a US-Israel strike on Iran. So Netanyahu might be kind of taking advantage of that silence or taking advantage of that
lack of interest or dipping in and out of the conflict, dipping in and out of solving the conflict to do what he wishes and what his cabinet is pushing for, which is the reoccupation of Gaza by the military. And of course, there are elements in his government who also seek for the resettlement of Jewish civilians in the Gaza Strip as well. So far as has been announced, Trump's visit will take in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, but it seems not Israel.
Is there a danger this pause is actually about the optics of Netanyahu starting this big operation while Trump is in the neighbourhood? I think that's why he's going to wait until, and he's given that kind of golden window of opportunity for something to flourish.
before that and before this so-called operation, or I think it's called Chariot of Gideon, before that operation starts. He's given that time. He's called up the reservists, but they haven't gone in yet. Tens of thousands of reservists are getting letters as we speak, but they haven't gone up yet. So this operation hasn't started, and he's giving this a moment to say there is a chance of diplomacy. Perhaps...
on the back of the idea that Donald Trump is looking to push forward on the Abraham Accords, the continuation of normalization between Israel and formerly hostile countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. So that could be a window of opportunity there to make something happen and negotiate the release of hostages and perhaps pull back from the brink of this all-out reoccupation.
That being said, I don't think it's particularly likely, especially given that Hamas are now saying Israel is starving Gaza and civilians and they are not willing to continue negotiations in Qatar or in Egypt in any way to make a ceasefire deal. They're just not interested. If we look ahead, Gabby, are we getting more of a sense now as to what Gaza will look like and what Israel will look like if this war ever ends? I think we've...
had a sense of what Gaza will look like and it will only get worse from here. If Israel is holding 70% of water on Gaza, 90% of the buildings are fully or partially destroyed. The population has been squeezed into islands of so-called safety, but we've heard that nowhere is really safe in Gaza.
The international press haven't been there. There's complete reliance on courageous Palestinian journalists to get the news out. But what we've seen of hungry civilians, of lawlessness and chaos, of the military acting almost with impunity and going ahead with what they need to do to crush Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian population, it's unimaginable. And we can't imagine it because we haven't seen it ourselves. We've only seen it in those images.
I think also the Israeli public are exhausted. The reservists that have been called up, many of them are saying they're not going to go ahead. They don't necessarily cite ideological reasons as to why they're not going to fight. They cite perhaps burnout or an inability to leave their families or their work because they've already served 200, 300 days in
So what's actually happening with that large call-up is that Israel's going to send its conscripts into Gaza and then send those reservists into other places like in Lebanon, in Syria, in the West Bank to do that work so they can rotate them more and not give them that very difficult job of being a soldier in Gaza. So the public in Israel is exhausted. The public in Gaza are exhausted, hungry, war-torn, homeless, homeless.
It's very hard to see a chink of light in that picture. OK, Gabby, thank you. The Times' correspondent, Gabriel Weininger, with us from Tel Aviv. Another significant recent development, which we didn't have time to discuss with Gabby, was Israel's main airport being hit with a Houthi missile.
Tomorrow, we're going to analyse what threat the Houthis still pose to Israel, to the US, and indeed to the West as a whole. That's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. See you tomorrow.
If you work as a manufacturing facilities engineer, installing a new piece of equipment can be as complex as the machinery itself. From prep work to alignment and testing, it's your team's job to put it all together. That's why it's good to have Grainger on your side. With industrial-grade products and next-day delivery, Grainger helps ensure you have everything you need close at hand through every step of the installation. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, clickgrainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.
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