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Is Israel About to Return to Genocide? Three Scenarios for What Comes Next

By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | December 30, 2025

With Tel Aviv openly rejecting withdrawal and insisting on disarmament, the “ceasefire” risks sliding into either renewed mass killing or a slow-motion attempt to impose control and displacement.

Debate rages on over what Phase Two of the Gaza Ceasefire will look like, as US President Donald Trump demands the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance. Meanwhile, Gaza refuses to hand over its weapons. Most analyses are, however, missing the mark when it comes to reading Tel Aviv’s calculations.

The so-called Gaza Ceasefire has proven itself to be little more than an extended pause in the mass slaughter of civilians. While it is still described as a ceasefire, there were three major changes to the predicament on the ground that took hold during “Phase One,” as the war continued to rage on.

The first major change, perhaps the most notable, was that the Israelis committed to no longer killing an average of around 100 civilians on a daily basis. The second was that more aid entered Gaza, although nowhere near the amount required or agreed to. The third was a mutual prisoner exchange.

Assessing the strength and direction of the ceasefire in its first phase is important to reading what the second phase may have in store, if it is even reached.

To the Israelis, the benefits of the partial implementation of Phase One were numerous. To begin with, the least consequential element, they relieved themselves of the burden of releasing their captives. This was important for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in that he managed to clear the topic of returning the captives, especially as he heads into a new election cycle.

Then we have the other benefits for the Israelis. Gaza exited the international headlines, as daily killings appeared too low to even register as a major issue in the biased Western press. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers were able to continue doing the exact same work inside Gaza that has constituted the majority of its military operations throughout the genocide: building demolition work.

These demolition missions, for which a privatized Israeli workforce has been employed to operate alongside the occupation army’s engineering units, have constituted the vast majority of the military’s efforts on the ground. Face-to-face combat on the ground has never been a notable feature of the Israeli genocide; they simply refused to actually fight the Palestinian resistance groups.

One thing that troubled the Israelis was that this demolition work, which sometimes included destroying entrances to tunnels, came with a high risk of running into armed ambushes. The Palestinian fighters would prepare traps and set up ambush operations for their forces, especially when Israel would invade or reinvade any new area they had not retained a permanent presence in.

Phase One of the Gaza Ceasefire agreement, therefore, guaranteed that soldiers were not going to be subjected to the same dangers as before, as the Palestinian resistance groups would halt all operations against the invading army.

It is important that this reality is established when analyzing Israel’s decision-making, because what is being done to Gaza is a genocide, not a conventional war. Israel’s intent is to wipe out Gaza, ensuring that it becomes totally uninhabitable, with the intention of mass expulsion in mind. This is also why they rarely targeted the armed wings of the Palestinian factions, focusing on maximum damage to the civilian population instead.

Any other way of framing this issue is misleading and whitewashes what the Israeli regime has committed since October 7, 2023. It also robs any analyst of his or her ability to assess Israel’s calculations critically.

With this in mind, consider that the Israelis have now had over two months where their armed forces have still been working, but have had a break from any fighting or the fear of being ambushed. Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other equipment were also being repaired, as the decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington designed new plans for their fronts against Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.

They also needed fewer soldiers for security reasons, as a so-called Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) took over in monitoring the situation and helping shape the realities imposed on the ground. Every country involved in the CMCC was therefore made complicit in the genocide.

This phase came with the additional benefit for the Israelis that they now had the space to experiment with new approaches, conjure up more conspiracies, and seek to find a way to ensure the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip occurs. As Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has explicitly stated, his army has no intention of withdrawing from the besieged coastal territory.

Phase Two and What It Will Show Us

If we establish the fact that the Israelis are adamant on achieving ethnic cleansing, that their military operations have always sought to achieve this goal, and that they are continuing to conspire to achieve this, then we have arrived at the starting point from which to assess the implementation of a so-called Phase Two.

During the first phase, the groundwork was laid for a new set of conspiracies against the people of Gaza. The population was subjected to countless pressures, which the criminal CMCC oversaw, including the deprivation of sustainable living conditions, with only a handful of its nongovernmental organizations even raising issues about it.

Despite the best efforts of the Hamas-affiliated government security forces to restore order, they were dealing with an impossible situation. Over a million people live in tents that are unstable or susceptible to dire weather conditions, a lack of adequate medical supplies, sanitary supplies, and many food items are even restricted. Amid this, most people don’t have jobs, few have adequate salaries coming in, and even for those in a better economic standing, they remain traumatized and unable to return to their homes. Inevitably, this leads to social issues that no regular security force can fully repel.

Meanwhile, the Israelis expand the so-called Yellow Line, behind which they were supposed to remain, instead using this line to execute anyone who comes within a few hundred meters of it, thus deterring them from returning to their own homes or land, where they could possibly plant small crops. Behind this ever-expanding occupying line, the Israeli military and private contractors destroy more and more infrastructure. All of this is monitored by the US-Israeli-led CMCC.

The plan is rather overt in its goals, but still vague in its precise stages of implementation. Both US and Israeli officials have made it crystal clear that they seek reconstruction only inside the Israeli-controlled portion of the Gaza Strip, where five ISIS-linked death squads are being strengthened by Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UN’s most shameful Resolution 2803, passed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in November, makes it apparent that the goal is to implement a “Board of Peace” (BoP) and International Stabilization Force (ISF). The BoP makes Donald Trump the de facto ruler of Gaza, and the ISF is set to be a multinational invasion force tasked with fighting the Palestinian resistance factions.

This Monday, the new spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades of Hamas, who has also taken on the alias Abu Obeida, announced a staunch opposition to disarmament, instead calling on the Israelis to disarm, as they are the ones responsible for committing a genocide. All the Palestinian factions, with the exception of the mainstream branch of Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), are united on this issue.

The PA is in favor of Donald Trump’s plan for him to rule the Gaza Strip and disarm the resistance by force, but it is irrelevant in terms of representing Palestinians. This authority only continues to exist because it is propped up by the Israelis, Americans, Saudis, and Europeans, and its popularity, beyond its base of employees, is in the single digits among the Palestinian people. It does not even represent the sentiments of the majority of Fatah supporters anymore.

All of this is to say that if any Phase Two is going to be implemented, neither side is going to be in agreement about it. Netanyahu’s government demands disarmament, while the Palestinian factions demand Gaza’s self-governance and will only disarm by handing over their weapons to a newly established Palestinian state. Hamas is clear that it would allow a technocratic administration to take over Gaza and is not demanding that it remain as the government of Gaza.

Considering that neither side can agree upon the basis on which a Phase Two can begin, keeping in mind that Israel and the US are the sides with military dominance, there are three ways that this will unfold:

The US and Israel will proceed with aggressively implementing their plan, as laid out in the shameful UNSC Resolution 2803. They will begin deploying a regime change force and attempt to implement a number of schemes to start a slow ethnic cleansing of the territory amid this.

Israel will restart its full-scale genocide.

The shaky ceasefire will continue, but remain in limbo. This will mean periodic spats of violence, as the Israelis and the US attempt to slowly and partially implement the ISF-BoP agenda. This will be a process during which the people of Gaza will be subjected to more pressure, but not enough to collapse the agreement altogether.

An Aggressive Phase Two?

The first means of implementing the next phase of the Gaza Ceasefire initiative would likely buckle under the immense pressures destined to befall it. If we look at the ISF alone, it is a recipe for total disaster.

Forcing the “International Stabilization Force” aggressively on the people of Gaza means that it will start going after Palestinian resistance factions. Two major issues will immediately pop up. The resistance will certainly kill some of these foreign soldiers, who will return to their home nations in body bags and cause domestic chaos. A heavy-handed approach here would also likely result in civilians being killed, another major debacle in its own right.

The Israelis are adamant that Türkiye, Qatar, and other Muslim-majority nations they take issue with cannot deploy their armed forces in Gaza. Whether they get their way or not, consider that this armed force would mean gathering a few hundred soldiers from one country, a few thousand from another, and so on.

If this kind of ISF was sent into Gaza aggressively, considering that so far there has been no agreement concerning how to implement this invasion initiative or which countries will participate, it will be thrust into a complex urban warfare environment. They all speak different languages, work off different military doctrines, are ill-prepared, likely ill-equipped for their tasks, and, according to reports, will only number in the tens of thousands.

Donald Trump recently boasted that the nations which, he says, are participating in his so-called “peace plan” will work to destroy Hamas if it refuses to disarm, even bragging that Israel would not be required to act and that foreign invading forces would do all the work for them.

In order to conduct a regime change operation of this nature, the ISF would have to be at least 250,000 men strong. Bear in mind that mobilizing a multinational invasion force of this kind would take many months, an enormous amount of funding, and the key feature would be that it actually fights, unlike the Israeli army, which refused to go after the Palestinian resistance factions on the ground.

If an ISF that numbers only in the tens of thousands is going to try and defeat the Palestinian resistance, it will suffer heavier casualties than the Israeli military did. Any Arab or Muslim-majority nation deploying forces could experience mass protests or rebellions against their role in the genocide. Without going into the fine details, it makes no sense and if it is tried, it will quickly fail. Even the Egyptians, who along with Israel will be the guarantors of the strategy, have been advocating for a force equivalent to Lebanon’s UNIFIL to enter Gaza, which is not what UNSC Resolution 2803 approved.

Israel Collapses the Ceasefire

The next way this can go is that Benjamin Netanyahu decides to collapse the ceasefire altogether. Some argue this wouldn’t happen because the US is committed to its “peace plan.” This is not a serious argument. Donald Trump has demonstrated that he will go along with whatever the Israelis choose. He isn’t a strong leader on this question and clearly possesses a level of knowledge about the region that you would expect of a public high school student who took history and didn’t really bother to listen.

There are only two circumstances under which the Israelis will collapse the ceasefire in its entirety. They no longer believe that any of the schemes they sought to implement under the so-called ceasefire will work, and there is some kind of political benefit to returning to all-out combat. The second reason is that they are scared that the Palestinian resistance may launch some kind of offensive while the Israeli army is also battling Hezbollah and Iran.

Collapsing the ceasefire demonstrates that the Israelis are without any direction and lack a coherent plan to actually end the fighting on the Gaza front. It means that they are simply reverting to all-out genocide, with the hope that eventually an opportunity arises which will allow a mass ethnic cleansing event, or a slow process of ethnic cleansing as they exterminate tens of thousands more civilians.

Stuck Between Phase One and Phase Two

Another option is for the Israelis and Americans to stall the collapse of the ceasefire. It would mean placing the situation in limbo, not allowing its total collapse, but undergoing a process of trial and error, whereby it slowly attempts to force elements of “Phase Two” into reality.

This is a very likely outcome, designed to keep the Gaza front closed while focusing more on Iran, Lebanon, and perhaps even Yemen. We could therefore expect to see the ISF deployed in a less meaningful capacity than is currently envisaged in Washington, disastrous plots implemented involving private military contractors and aid distribution, and attempts to ethnically cleanse the population slowly here and there. All of these schemes will fall flat on their faces, but not without inflicting suffering on the civilian population of Gaza.

In the meantime, the US-Israeli alliance will have Tehran in its sights. The thinking behind this would be to squeeze the civilian population of Gaza, while prioritizing Iran and Hezbollah as their major strategic threats.

Israel’s Failure Hedges against Iran and Hezbollah

The conspiracies of Washington and Tel Aviv against Gaza can be defeated, but this hinges upon Hezbollah and Iran for the most part. If Iran and Hezbollah manage to deal enormous blows to the Israelis, refusing to play their game of fighting short defensive conflicts, then Israel will be dragged into deep waters.

All that is required of Hezbollah and Iran is that they don’t stop firing, no matter the degree of carnage exacted against their people. If Hezbollah drags the Israeli military into Lebanese lands and refuses the calls for a ceasefire, instead forcing the Israelis into a war that it intends to fight for many months, and Iran does the same, the Israelis will be in a major crisis.

The details of such conflicts are a topic for different pieces and many outcomes could occur, yet it suffices to say that major moves from Lebanon and Iran could put the Israelis in a very weak position, one that even enables major action from Gaza also.

If Iran and Hezbollah are either defeated or taken out of the picture for an even longer period after agreeing to meaningless ceasefires, after short rounds of fighting, also suffering the assassinations of major figures, this is the most favorable outcome for Benjamin Netanyahu. Victories in these arenas will open the door to ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, even if slowly rather than in a stampede into the Sinai Peninsula. This is, of course, assuming there are no other major fronts which suddenly open to preoccupy them.

As things stand, the Israelis are in a very weak position, having failed to defeat any of their enemies. The only exception is the fall of the previous Syrian regime, which was not directly fighting Israel, but was a major land bridge for the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. For now, Syria can be considered a victim of Israel, but poses no immediate threat.

Ultimately, Israel has fought for over two years and failed to defeat the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Iran, or any of its other adversaries, even after dealing varying degrees of blows against each of them. Netanyahu’s long-sought-after “total victory” does not appear likely, yet he still continues to double down on attempting to achieve this goal. The primary reason for this is the refusal of the people of Gaza, and also Lebanon, to give up.

Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

December 30, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine, Syria, United States, Zionism