Netanyahu rejects Gaza plan his government secretly pursues
Netanyahu says Israel rejects Trump's 15-point Gaza plan, but for Gaza's population the war and the hunger continue regardless.
Gaza ceasefire withdrawal dispute leaves Rafah families feeling abandoned Nesma Harazin, 27, has been displaced from Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood for the better part of two years. On Sunday, when Israel’s prime minister told his own cabinet that Israel “rejects the 15-point document” brokered by Washington, deepening the Gaza ceasefire withdrawal dispute, her assessment was blunt. “We are dealing with an Israeli occupation army that is capable of stopping these operations, but does not accept stopping them,” she said.
Mehdi Ahmed, 53, still in Gaza City, put it more starkly. “We are under occupation. As far as we are concerned, any ceasefire is temporary,” he said. “We have no one standing behind us to protect us. Why?” For people living under bombardment and blockade, Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision is not political theatre. It is the difference between a winter with reconstruction under way and a winter without one, for a population where more than 74,000 children under five are projected to need treatment for acute malnutrition through April 2027.
How the plan came apart
Sunday’s rejection followed months of work by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, chaired by the US president, which had produced a 15-point roadmap for handing Gaza back to Palestinian-led civilian government. Hamas accepted it last month, including a commitment to disarm, conditional on full Israeli withdrawal and eventual Palestinian statehood. That acceptance came against a backdrop that already runs to 73,386 Palestinians killed and 174,250 wounded since October 2023, with more than 8,000 still missing or under rubble, according to Gaza’s health authorities. A ceasefire brokered by Trump in October 2025 was meant to end the killing; Israeli strikes since have killed a further 1,258 Palestinians and wounded 4,139.
Against that toll, Netanyahu’s cabinet statement inverted the plan’s own sequencing: Israeli forces would not withdraw until Hamas was fully disarmed first, not as part of a parallel process. The reversal blindsided his own military. Channel 12 quoted an unnamed defence official saying commanders “learned about it today from the media” after Netanyahu had personally signed off, in meetings days earlier, on a phased withdrawal from pilot areas in Rafah, and had discussed the precise boundaries with IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir. Netanyahu’s office denies detailed withdrawal plans were ever agreed. The rejection came days after Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, visited Israel to press Washington’s demand to wind down the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran together.
The quiet contradiction
Yet the public rejection has not stopped preparation on the ground. Israel Army Radio reported that Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz secretly approved rehabilitation work in eastern Rafah even after Sunday’s cabinet statement, and the army has received no order to freeze second-phase planning. An International Stabilization Force base is reportedly still planned for Rafah by late August. Last week Israel also raised the authorisation threshold for targeted killings in Gaza to the chief of staff, a step read in Washington as a concession. Board of Peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov has declined to treat the rejection as final, saying only that “discussions continue,” and has separately argued that full implementation of the plan is Israel’s only guarantee against a repeat of 7 October. The gap between Netanyahu’s public words and his government’s private conduct suggests the rejection is aimed less at Washington than at an audience closer to home.
An election Netanyahu cannot afford to lose
That audience is the Knesset, dissolved 62-0 on 17 July, with Netanyahu himself voting to bring down his own government and trigger an election on 27 October, the first Israeli parliament to run a full term since 1988. The vote is widely read as a referendum on his wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed Sunday’s rejection, saying the objective remains “the destruction of Hamas militarily, civilly, and as a governing authority,” a goal he says the roadmap runs “180 degrees contrary to.” National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir welcomed the growing opposition to the plan. Smotrich has already completed plans for three new Israeli settlements in northern Gaza, awaiting only Netanyahu’s signature, part of a longer push by the far right to reverse Israel’s 2005 disengagement.
None of this is unprecedented. Netanyahu distanced himself from Joe Biden’s May 2024 ceasefire framework in similar fashion, even as his own negotiators had shaped it, and he has bowed to Trump before, reining in the Lebanon offensive and turning back fighter jets bound for Iran on the US president’s orders. Hamas, for its part, says it remains committed to the roadmap it signed. “Our acceptance of the roadmap, despite all the challenges, reflected a sense of national responsibility,” said Bassem Naim of Hamas’s political bureau, who is now waiting on Washington to pressure Netanyahu rather than abandoning the deal himself.
Britain’s role in a war it condemns
Britain has its own stake in how this resolves. London has sanctioned Smotrich and Ben-Gvir alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway over incitement to violence in the West Bank, suspended trade talks with Israel, and had foreign secretary David Lammy call the military offensive “morally unjustifiable” and “wholly disproportionate.” Yet Britain’s High Court ruled in 2025 that continued export of F-35 fighter-jet components to Israel, through the global F-35 supply pool, remains lawful, despite the government’s own acknowledged risk that the parts could be used in violations of international humanitarian law. Sanctions on paper, spare parts in practice: London condemns two of the ministers now cheering the collapse of Trump’s plan while keeping its hand in the supply chain of the war they are waging.
What the numbers say now
The clearest sign that this is not yet over, in either direction, is in the casualty figures themselves. Weekly deaths in Gaza fell sharply, from 47 between 27 July and 3 August to 8 between 4 and 10 August, even as the political rejection played out. That fall complicates any simple story of renewed escalation, but it does nothing for the more than 74,000 children still facing acute malnutrition through next April, or for residents like Ramez Haniyeh, now displaced in Nuseirat, who put the stakes better than any minister has. “Withdrawal, then reconstruction, and living with dignity,” he said. “I have hope in God, but there is no hope that this war will end.”
