Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has been playing Donald Trump again and again.
Trump has handed Netanyahu exactly what he wanted: Israel gets to stay put in Gaza until Hamas has surrendered every single weapon.
And what has Trump got back for that concession?
No withdrawal. Not a deal. Not even a promise that Netanyahu will stop adding more conditions, because he’s always got another one hasn’t he?
Just another chance to stand next to him and pretend this is going brilliantly.
We are of course talking about Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace here. The body sold as the bridge between a ceasefire and Gaza actually being rebuilt.
Its job, in theory, was to oversee the handover from war to something resembling normal life again, which of course is what we all want to see: weapons dealt with under international supervision, Israeli forces withdrawing in stages, and a Palestinian administration taking over.
The Yellow Line is the Israeli military line inside Gaza. The point beyond which Israel was supposedly meant to begin pulling back.
Now, the Board did not throw every part of that plan in the bin. It only tore up the bit that made it an actual exchange.
Its own representative described a neat little dance: weapons decommissioned in stages, Israeli withdrawal in stages. One side performs, the other side has to move too.
But then the Board met Benjamin Netanyahu and then it announced that Israel would not leave beyond the Yellow Line until Hamas had completed full disarmament.
So Israel gets to remain on the line it already holds, actually having taken more than that and moving up to an orange line. Netanyahu had bragged on camera that they had control of 70% of the strip and would go for more, all while Hamas is expected to hand over the last rifle, pistol, slingshot and, presumably, every remaining scrap of dignity before Israel has to give up a single inch.
The Board took a phased, reciprocal arrangement and moved the risk almost entirely onto Gaza. What an absolute shocker, with people like the orange dunce and Tony Blair involved, I can’t imagine how this panned out.
