Israel’s renewed war on Gaza, which on Tuesday killed more than 400 Palestinians, including over 100 children, is perhaps the most blatant politically motivated Israeli military move since the beginning of the conflict.
Meanwhile, expulsion orders are forcibly displacing thousands of Palestinians across Gaza once again.
Even Amos Harel, the moderate military commentator for Haaretz, defined the attack as a war for the sake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
It seems that the motivations behind the assault and the manner in which it was carried out are related to political developments inside Israel.
We can note at least three: Netanyahu’s political survival, his dominance of the military and security services, and the wish to appease allies without provoking the public.
Netanyahu must approve the budget by the end of the month, otherwise his government will fall, and Israel will go to elections.
If the budget is approved, it guarantees the survival of his administration until the next elections in October 2026, so it is of great importance.
While there were no clear indications that the budget would not be approved by parliament, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox members of the United Torah Judaism party were a source of concern for Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s coalition depends on the party and its eight seats. Yet it threatened that it won’t support the budget if there’s no progress in advancing a bill that would exempt ultra-Orthodox youth from serving in the military.
The prime minister therefore needs to strengthen his government. In the past two weeks, there were rumours that Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right party, Jewish Power, will return to the government after it left it following the approval of the ceasefire agreement in January.
Hours after the Israeli attack yesterday, Ben Gvir announced that his party would indeed return as his demand to resume the war was fulfilled.
That means even if the ultra-Orthodox vote against the budget, it will be approved. Net gain for Netanyahu.
Then there is the Trump factor. After returning from a meeting with US President Donald Trump in February, Netanyahu seems to have vigorously adopted the president’s worldview, where there is no need to abide by set rules or laws.
Since then, Netanyahu has intensified his purge of opponents from the most significant institutions of Israeli society.
The military and the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, two pillars of state institutions, have felt his burden.
In the military, which still enjoys broad support from the Israeli public as an allegedly independent body, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi was replaced by Eyal Zamir, whose appointment was approved a week after Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.
Since Zamir took office at the beginning of March, it seems that he is serving as Netanyahu’s political emissary in the army.
Zamir dismissed Daniel Hagari, the popular spokesperson who was perceived as critical of the government. Yaniv Asor, who as head of the personnel department helped Netanyahu block the conscription of the ultra-Orthodox, was appointed as the head of the crucial Southern Command, which overlooks Gaza.
And Itzik Cohen, one of the senior officers responsible for the massive destruction of the Gaza Strip, was appointed to the senior position of head of the operations directorate. All these moves indicate changes in the army that are convenient for Netanyahu.
Zamir also visited a synagogue during a prayer calling for the need to eliminate the Amalekites, a Biblical enemy that Netanyahu associated with the Palestinians early in the war.
In recent days, Netanyahu has embarked on an even more significant move: an attempt to take over the Shin Bet.
The prime minister’s announcement that he intends to fire its chief, Ronen Bar, coincided with investigations the Shin Bet is conducting into some of Netanyahu’s staff, who are suspected of receiving money from Qatar.
By taking over the Shit Bet, Netanyahu will accumulate enormous power. With the service under his control, he can politically eliminate his domestic opponents.
Even regarding the ceasefire agreement, Netanyahu acted in Trump’s spirit. According to the deal, which Israel signed in January, negotiations on the second phase of the agreement were to begin after 16 days, and if there is no agreement on the second stage, the ceasefire should continue nonetheless.
Netanyahu, with the backing of Trump, felt that he, too, could ignore a written agreement and attack Gaza in the most violent way.
Even the way in which the Israeli attack was carried out – bombing from the air, and not a ground invasion – was probably influenced by Israeli politics.
While Netanyahu did not hide his unwillingness to go to the second stage and his desire to return to war, his far-right allies, Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, demand Israel takes over the whole of the Gaza Strip and begins expelling Palestinians from it.
Yet Netanyahu is afraid of going into a large-scale ground operation in Gaza, because he knows that his steps to purge the military and the Shin Bet and his reluctance to approve a deal which will release all remaining Israeli captives and end the war enrages large parts of the public to a point that there are open calls not to serve in an army which appears to have become Netanyahu’s political tool. The rate of those reporting to reserve service has already dropped to 50 percent. 
So as a move to reoccupy the whole of the Gaza Strip or at least its northern parts would require the mobilisation of tens of thousands of soldiers, Netanyahu fears mass refusal – whether openly or unofficially, in what is known in Israel as “grey refusal”.
Netanyahu knows that such a mass refusal will deal a severe blow to the army, which is still the building block of Israeli society, and it will also damage Israel’s global image.
Therefore, at least for now, Netanyahu prefers to attack only from the air. These bombings are more politically convenient for Netanyahu, as they do not require the mobilisation of reservists or putting soldiers at risk. Netanyahu knows that killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians will already raise some opposition within Israeli society.
It seems that maintaining the integrity of the government until the next elections, the moves to purge the army and the Shin Bet, and answering the demands of Ben Gvir and Smotrich to renew the war, while curbing the centre-left opposition, led Netanyahu to decide to resume air strikes.
At the same time, the military objectives of those attacks are almost non-existent.
Netanyahu’s only plausible military goal is that these attacks will exert pressure on Hamas to agree to prolong stage one of the agreement, releasing more captives without an Israeli commitment to end the war.
If, after these bombings, Hamas will agree to release some prisoners without a commitment to the second stage, Netanyahu could argue that military pressure led to this release and he could continue to soar in the polls, as he has been doing in recent weeks.
But even this is not a clear military target. Israel itself is saying that the Hamas officials it hit were part of the organisation’s civil administration of Gaza. It does not seem that there was any damage to Hamas’s military capabilities.
It must be stressed that during the ceasefire Hamas did not attack Israeli targets, so yesterday’s bombing cannot be even described as a response to any violence by the Palestinian side.
Therefore, Israel’s return to the war is an operation stemming entirely from internal political goals, an assault intended to spread terror in Gaza without a precise military goal.
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