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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

One week ago, the ceasefire in Gaza collapsed as Israel launched a series of airstrikes.

Since then, more than 600 people have been killed, including children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Israel says the attacks were aimed at Hamas’ surviving leadership, and just a few days ago, Hamas confirmed its top political leader has been killed.

As the war reignites, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is weighing his own political survival.

Today, Middle East correspondent for The Economist Gregg Carlstrom on what the end of the ceasefire means for the people of Gaza, and what Trump wants out of the next stage of war.

It’s Tuesday, March 25.

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RUBY:

Gregg, thank you for speaking with us again.

GREGG:

My pleasure.

RUBY:

So Israel has launched renewed attacks on Gaza over the past week. We're hearing the death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 50,000 people since the war began. Can you tell me why it is that we've seen this attack at this moment, given that there had been a ceasefire?

GREGG:

I think what's happened is, first, the Trump administration has, to some extent, lost interest in trying to preserve the agreement that they pushed through in January, you know, the first phase of the deal expired a few weeks ago. What was meant to happen in early February was that Israel and Hamas were meant to start negotiations about getting to phase two, getting to a permanent end to the war and a release of all of the Israeli hostages who were still being held in Gaza.

Netanyahu never wanted to get to phase two because his far-right coalition partners have made it clear that they would leave the government and collapse the coalition if the war came to a permanent end. So the Americans for a while were trying to find a way to bridge that gap between what the Israelis want and what Hamas wants. There was talk of trying to extend phase one of the ceasefire, perhaps by another month or two, but Hamas stuck to its demand that it wants the war to end. The Israelis were not willing to do that.

The Trump administration was not willing to put the kind of pressure on Israel that it would have needed to apply to convince Israel to get to phase two. And so because of Israel's refusal to even begin those negotiations, eventually we got to a point where the deal simply collapsed.

RUBY:

And so since that happened, since the deal collapsed, can you tell me a bit more about what we've seen in Gaza?

GREGG:

In some ways, it almost mirrors what happened at the start of the war back in October 2023. In the first days after the end of the ceasefire, we saw Israel resume very heavy airstrikes on Gaza.

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GREGG:

As you said, there have been reports of many people killed across the territory, strikes on hospitals, strikes on civilian areas, a large death toll. And then In the past couple of days, we've also seen Israeli troops going back into Gaza on the ground in Rafah, for example, in the far south of Gaza near the border with Egypt. The Israeli army is encircling the city of Rafah. They're telling Palestinians who were living in that city to flee to the north. Same time, Israel has also cut off the main corridors linking between South Gaza and North Gaza, something that they did earlier in the war and those two territories were largely separated for much of the fighting.

So the idea here for the Israeli army is, as you know, officers have described it in recent weeks, is to essentially kettle the entire civilian population of Gaza into what's called Al-Mawasi, this so-called safe zone in the southern half of the strip, and then to go in quite strongly on the ground everywhere else in Gaza.

RUBY:

And in phase one, we saw this transfer of hostages and release of Palestinian prisoners who were able to return. So after that, how many hostages are left?

GREGG:

There are still 59 hostages remaining in Gaza. Most of them are thought to have either been killed on October 7th and their bodies were taken to the strip by Hamas or subsequently died either from Israeli airstrikes on the strip, from hunger, from disease, from abuse by their captors. So most of these hostages are unfortunately dead bodies.

But the goal when they were talking about extending phase one of the agreement was to secure the release of at least some of the living hostages who were still being held in Gaza, who are only about a quarter or so of the total.

And obviously there's a tremendous amount of anger in Israel right now, poll after poll of Israelis showed that a majority of the public wanted to get to phase two. They didn't want the government to forsake these remaining hostages in Gaza and sort of leave them to their fate. But the view in Israel is that Netanyahu has done exactly that now by resuming the war.

RUBY:

Can you talk to me a little more about the position, domestically speaking, for Netanyahu right now? Because we have seen mass protests across Israel. Tell me about what people are demanding and how secure Netanyahu feels at this moment.

GREGG:

There's a huge amount of popular anger directed at Netanyahu, but not only now over this issue, also over what he is doing to Israeli democracy. He, in the past week, has tried to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet, the domestic security service in Israel. The cabinet also yesterday passed a no-confidence motion against the attorney general. Netanyahu is seeking to remove the attorney general. Both of these people are seen as critics of the prime minister, he sees them as his domestic political enemies. Of course, the attorney general is also overseeing the corruption cases against Prime Minister Netanyahu that have been working their way through the courts for years. He's been accused of, in three different cases, accused of acts of corruption.

The problem is, despite all of this anger, what do you do with that politically? For the moment, he seems secure in his coalition. Restarting the Gaza war has reinforced his support on the far right amongst those parties that had threatened to leave if the war ended. So the coalition, I think, is going to close ranks right now and try to hold together. And so even though most Israelis want that coalition out of power, it's hard to see how they translate that anger into political change.

RUBY:

Coming up after the break - Trump, Netanyahu and the latest on America’s plans to “take over” Gaza.

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RUBY:

Gregg, the White House confirmed that they were aware that the airstrikes were going to begin again, at the same time we've heard Trump claiming to want peace in the Middle East. So you said that the administration has lost interest in the agreement that they pushed for. Why do you think that is?

GREGG:

I think one issue is Steve Witkoff, who is the administration's Middle East envoy, by all accounts is said to care personally about the plight of the hostages and to care personally about trying to bring the war in Gaza to an end. But Steve Witkoff is very distracted right now. He also is handling some of these negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, He's looking to possibly negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran as well in the coming month. So he has an enormous portfolio. He doesn't have many people working for him. He is simply overstretched.

I think Trump himself, I was in DC a couple of weeks ago and the sense that I got talking to people close to the administration is that Trump cared about getting the ceasefire in place during the transition before he took office in January, because it was something that he could say he accomplished where Joe Biden failed. But after two months of subsequent impasse over getting to phase two, Trump is just getting bored of this and he has other things he wants to focus on.

And so there's not high level presidential attention on this. And then the rest of the administration is deeply understaffed. So you put all of those things together and then you add some very intense lobbying particularly by Ron Dermer who is Netanyahu’s right hand man who has been to America a number of times in recent months who has been telling republicans you know listen we have a plan for how to win this war now we couldn't win it before because Joe Biden put restrictions on our conduct in Gaza, but if you give us a free hand, then we can win this thing in a couple of months.

RUBY:

And so, what does that actually look like for Gaza?

GREGG:

So last year during the war, there was a lot of talk about something called the General's Plan, which was a proposal written by a number of retired Israeli generals.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter:

“In Israel there are alarming signs that the Israeli military is beginning to quietly implement the General’s Plan. That’s a dramatic strategy to force anybody left in the north to evacuate, surrender or starve.”

GREGG:

And the idea they had for how they wanted to prosecute the war was to cut off humanitarian aid entirely into the northern half of Gaza, even in the south of Gaza, to greatly restrict the flow of aid outside of Al-Mawasi, this designated humanitarian area, the idea was not to allow NGOs or other groups to distribute aid in other parts of Gaza. I think, to some extent, what we're seeing now is that plan being implemented. So they are going to lay waste to the territory. They are going to destroy even more of the north than has already been destroyed. They are going to try and tightly restrict the movement of people, the movement of aid, you know, it's not clear how long any of this is going to last. The Israelis have been saying it might only need a couple of months, but they were also saying that in October 2023 and the war wound up lasting for more than a year.

RUBY:

And you said earlier, it seems that Trump has lost interest in a ceasefire. Has he also lost interest in a takeover of Gaza and this idea of developing it into the Riviera of the Middle East? That was what he said the last time that we spoke. And I think that often his statements get reported on and then dropped. But I just wonder what your thoughts are now on whether there's any actual strength behind those intentions.

GREGG:

And with the caveat that no one is entirely sure what is in Donald Trump's mind, I think there are two parts to that plan, right? One of them is removing the population of Gaza, depopulating the territory, sending two million people elsewhere.

The other part of it is this crazy plan to turn it into an American Riviera, sort of Atlantic City on the Mediterranean. I think on that latter piece, certainly the view in Washington amongst both Republicans and Democrats is that Trump is not actually serious about building a Riviera there, that this is a negotiating tactic, that this is something that he became fixated on as a way to pressure Arab states into presenting their own plan for Gaza,

On the first part of that, though, on the idea of removing Gaza's population, the view is that he is serious about that, and the genesis of that was a phone call with Steve Witkoff as Middle East envoy, who visited Gaza back in January, who saw how destroyed the territory was, and who subsequently called Trump and said, you know, there's no way this is going to be rebuilt. If the people are still here, there needs to be some solution that moves them elsewhere. That phone call happened, and shortly afterwards, Trump started talking about depopulating the territory.

But the administration is sort of going around the world trying to find countries that might be willing to accept some financial benefits in exchange for taking in large numbers of people. So I do think he is serious about pursuing that part of the plan.

RUBY:

Okay, and what about short term? What should we expect? It's been a week since the ceasefire fell apart. I think just over 600 people have died in that time. So what should we be expecting to see over the next few weeks in Gaza?

GREGG:

I think in terms of Gaza itself, remember even before Israel restarted the war, it had cut off all aid going into Gaza for about two weeks before it resumed fighting. So the UN, other aid agencies were already saying that some supplies were either running low, bakeries, for example, were running out of cooking gas to fire their ovens. And so some of the very, very few bakeries that are still operating in Gaza were forced to shut down. Hospitals were reporting shortages. That was already a problem. That problem is going to get much, much bigger now because aid is not going in and because what aid is still in Gaza, it's getting very hard to distribute that. Many aid groups have suspended the movement of their personnel around Gaza because they're just not sure right now where it's safe to go, where people can deliver aid without taking too much personal risk.

The humanitarian situation, I think, is going to get much worse very quickly. The question then becomes, is there some effort on the part of the Americans to go back to this idea of a bridging proposal of extending phase one of the agreement, convincing Hamas to release a few more hostages in exchange for a few more weeks of calm.

But it's hard to see how that's going to be successful. Netanyahu, for political reasons, may not want to do that, to pause the war again, and Hamas at this point, I think, is going to be very reluctant to make another short-term deal where they have no guarantee that it's going to bring a permanent end to the fighting.

RUBY:

Gregg, thank you so much for your time.

GREGG:

Thanks for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Both the Albanese government and the Opposition are spruiking their economic policies, ahead of the delivery of the federal budget tonight.

The government is promising cost of living relief, including a 150 dollar energy bill rebate divided across the final two quarters of this year.

The opposition says it supports the rebate, while also claiming that a Coalition government would bring down energy prices by increasing Australia’s domestic gas supply.

And, Queensland has joined other states in signing a deal with the federal government to fully fund public schools by 2034.

The deal will see the commonwealth lift its share of public school funding from 20 to 25 percent, requiring states to increase funding of public schools to 75 percent of the minimum amount recommended by the 2012 Gonski review.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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