THE GAZA WAR IS NOT OVER

Peace has again been declared prematurely

Hamas militants carry a body retrieved from a tunnel in an area north of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Israel’s military accused Hamas of staging its search for the remains of a Gaza hostage body, one of 28 the group agreed to hand over under a ceasefire deal. Hamas says it is committed to the ceasefire terms, but lacks the equipment needed to locate and excavate hostage bodies potentially buried under buildings collapsed by air strikes. / Photo by Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images.

President Donald Trump deserves kudos for his bullying of the Israeli leadership, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, into a settlement with Hamas that resulted in the return of the remaining live hostages and the bodies of all but three of the dead. The peace agreement will not move into its second phase unless the remaining hostage bodies are returned, along with the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed and buried in Gaza during the war that took place in 2014. I have been told by an informed Israeli that the Israeli intelligence community is convinced that Hamas knows where those bodies are.

Trump has taken victory laps about the return of the hostages and, as the New York Times reported this week, he has repeatedly claimed: “I will decide what I think is right” for Israel. A new multinational command, the Civil-Military Coordination Center, headed by an American three-star Army lieutenant general, has been set up in Israel, and the press has been told that one of the general’s functions will be to decide when to engage Hamas in case of treaty violations.

More specifically, a well-informed Israeli told me, the pending peace plan gives the American general “the right to overrule Bibi” if he concludes that a pending Israeli military incursion is not justified.

Jared Kushner, the president’s businessman son-in-law who has been reincarnated in the US media as a foreign affairs expert, told 60 Minutes last week that it was his understanding that the president thought “the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control in what they were doing”—that is, continuing to bomb and kill Gazans in its ongoing effort to eliminate every member of Hamas—“and that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.”

The problem with these analyses is that little is known about the extent of the authority the new US command center has, if any. There are some in Israel who believe Netanyahu is required to coordinate his attacks with the center. If so, that agreement would be an unprecedented restraint on the Israeli leader.