As the U.S. media has turned its attention to other pressing matters, war continues to devastate Gaza. A temporary ceasefire agreement fell through in March, and in the months since then Israel has blockaded Gaza—virtually no food, water, fuel, or medical aid has entered the territory since March 2. Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of starvation. Israel also began a bombing campaign that, since mid-March, has killed three thousand people, many of them children. Hospitals, journalists, and aid workers have been among the targets.
On May 4, the Israeli security cabinet approved Operation Gideon’s Chariots, a plan for the “conquest of the Gaza Strip,” indefinite Israeli occupation, and the destruction of what’s left of Gaza’s infrastructure. Ten days later, the military ordered civilians—2.2 million people—to relocate to a “humanitarian zone” in the south. Writing for Drop Site News, Rasha Abou Jalal witnessed the scenes of panic as people started to pick up whatever they still had and relocate yet again, their grim procession southward like “a slow-moving human flood flowing through destroyed streets.”
Jalal describes her husband and brother-in-law looking at a phone, scrolling for news from a few countries away. They were waiting to see if a new ceasefire would be announced during President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East. Trump’s trip included stops in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, but, notably, not Israel. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he would initiate Gideon’s Chariots in earnest if a ceasefire agreement has not been reached by the end of Trump’s trip. As of this writing, the trip has ended, and indirect ceasefire talks have yielded no progress. Netanyahu’s office said that it would begin letting some food aid into Gaza, but the full-scale ground operation to take Gaza has begun.
Some have speculated that Trump and Netanyahu have had a falling out. Just as Netanyahu was announcing an escalation of the war, Trump was publicly talking about the need for a ceasefire. As Yousef Munayyer wrote in The New Republic, Trump has found that Netanyahu stands in the way of many of his goals in the Middle East. Looking to build his reputation as a peacemaker and dealmaker, Trump has recently signed a ceasefire agreement with the Houthis in Yemen, initiated talks with Iran to forge a new nuclear deal, and lifted sanctions on Syria—all against the wishes of the Netanyahu government. Trump even secured the release of U.S. citizen and Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, who was kidnapped by Hamas in the October 7 attacks, without Israel’s involvement. (In exchange for Alexander’s release, negotiators told Hamas that Trump would consider pushing Israel toward a ceasefire.)
The Gulf states Trump visited all support a ceasefire, but that wasn’t the focus of their discussions with the president, whose main goal was to get some business deals done. Accompanied by the CEOs of several major U.S. corporations, Trump secured a $142 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, the largest in U.S. history, as well as an agreement for Nvidia to sell AI microchips to the UAE. What’s perhaps most remarkable—and troubling—is how much Trump and his family will personally benefit from many of the deals struck on this trip: he will build two Trump Towers in Saudi Arabia and a golf course in Qatar. Meanwhile, a private business in the UAE will invest $2 billion in the Trump family’s crypto company. This is brazen corruption, and the Gulf states are more than happy to enable it.
It might seem that Trump’s chumminess with the Gulf states and the chilling of his relations with Israel would make a ceasefire more likely. But there isn’t much evidence that he has actually changed his mind about Israel’s war in Gaza or decided that the mass death of Palestinian civilians is unacceptable. He recently repeated his proposal for the United States to take over Gaza and turn it into a “freedom zone.” The Trump administration is now reportedly in talks with officials in Tripoli to relocate one million Palestinians to Libya—a project that would amount to ethnic cleansing. Of course, it’s possible that Trump will change his position—he is notoriously mercurial—but it seems far likelier that he will continue to let Netanyahu do his worst and count on the greed of Gulf state leaders to outweigh whatever scruples they may feel about what’s happening to their neighbors in Gaza.
