Latest / The Fourcast / Is Trump turning on Netanyahu - what it means for Gaza war

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Is Trump turning on Netanyahu - what it means for Gaza war · The Fourcast

0:00
What the Israeli government says they want to do now is take
0:04
control of Gaza, split it into three parts to keep the
0:09
population there. Well, some people would say like
0:12
animals in enclosures and feed them a minimum of food so that
0:17
they don't die. Certainly the atmosphere outside
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the British, the French, the Canadians and so on, they're
0:24
also saying enough, enough. You have succeeded militarily,
0:29
and any more than this is just cruelty.
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Is there anybody actually working on a proper plan for how
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to end this for real? Fundamentally, in the end, it
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comes down to the Americans and it comes down to American
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support of Israel, because if Israel loses American support,
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it can't survive. Hello and welcome to the
0:54
Forecast. I'm Christian Guri Murphy.
0:55
It's 600 days since Israel's war with Gaza began after the
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October 7th attacks by Hamas, and it's a moment to try and
1:04
take stock because things seem to be shifting.
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There is more anger that we have been reporting on the ground in
1:11
Israel around the Israeli government's position.
1:13
The families of the hostages are demanding an end to the war and
1:17
believe that carrying on makes it less likely that they will
1:20
get their loved ones back. At the same time, Britain,
1:23
France, Canada and others are expressing deep concern about
1:28
the blockade on aid and are saying that what Israel is doing
1:31
is totally unacceptable. So things could be shifting a
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little bit. Let's take stock with where we
1:38
are with our international editor, Lindsay Hilson, who has
1:41
spent the last couple of weeks in Israel for us.
1:44
Lindsay, does it feel like things are shifting?
1:47
It does feel that things are shifting, but I would say still
1:50
just on the margins. So if you look at the
1:53
government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his
1:57
coalition, they are very clear that the war will continue.
2:02
Another 300,000 reservists have been called up in the last week
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or so. They have, many of them have
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gone in. There's a new ground offensive.
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They are attacking from the air with the same ferocity as
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before. And we are seeing this
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horrendous situation of hunger in Gaza with only a tiny trickle
2:23
of aid allowed through. Now, yes, I have spoken to some
2:26
people who are against this. There's a small group of
2:30
reservists, some of whom had fought in Gaza, who were in
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favour of the war at the beginning after the horrendous
2:38
killings and rapes in on October the 7th.
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But now they're saying what are we doing?
2:45
What are we achieving? And those people who are
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criticizing are saying that there is no military logic to
2:51
continuing this war in this way. This is just to save Benjamin
2:56
Netanyahu's political skin. Now is the military logic
3:01
shifting as well because there are, you know, again, louder
3:05
voices on the right, it seems, and now within the government
3:09
talking more aggressively about what they want to do, which is
3:12
to take over Gaza and to control it militarily fully.
3:18
Yeah. I mean, look, Hamas has been
3:20
suppressed militarily. It is no longer firing missiles
3:24
into Israel. Now, has it been crushed
3:27
completely as an idea? No, it never will be crushed
3:31
completely as an idea. But as a military force, it is
3:34
tremendously weakened, and all of its leadership have been
3:38
killed. Now, what the Israeli government
3:42
says they want to do now is take control of Gaza.
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And we've seen various, you know, maps have come out which
3:50
basically indicate that they want to split it into three
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parts to keep the population there.
3:55
Well, some people would say like animals in enclosures and feed
4:00
them a minimum of food so that they don't die.
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And that's it, that you it's not viable.
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It's not any kind of way that anybody would want to live.
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And what some are saying on the far right is that the aim of
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this is to force them to leave or as they put it, to leave
4:19
voluntarily. They will want to leave if the
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conditions are like this. And so those who oppose this
4:24
would say this is ethnic cleansing.
4:27
And you were talking about a former Prime Minister, I think,
4:29
as Erhud Olmert. He has now come out and said
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what is being done now? These are war crimes.
4:35
And certainly the atmosphere outside the British, the French,
4:39
the Canadians and so on, they're also saying enough, enough.
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You have succeeded militarily. And any more than this is just
4:49
cruelty. Are are the far right war aims
4:53
now effectively adopted by Netanyahu and the government?
4:57
Yeah, look, they keep the his coalition going.
5:00
There's there's two particular far right ministers, Isma
5:05
Bangaveer and Bazar Schmotrich and their people.
5:08
If they drop out of the coalition, then his government
5:11
falls. If Benjamin Netanyahu's
5:13
government falls, then this long standing corruption case, which
5:17
he has to appear in court for several times a week, that will
5:21
that will go further. And it looks as if he may not
5:25
win a new election. That is what he doesn't want to
5:28
do. That is what he fears more than
5:30
anything else, facing a new election.
5:32
And so he's really at their mercy and whatever they want to
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do. And these are people who are on
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the absolute margins of Israeli society before people who
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believe that Palestinians basically should be wiped off
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the state of what they call Eretz Israel, Greater Israel.
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They don't mince their words about it.
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But this is now in the mainstream of government.
5:57
And so where are the talks going, if anywhere at all?
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I mean, we have Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff talking about a
6:05
ceasefire plan, which would involve getting half of the
6:08
hostages live and dead back in return for another temporary
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ceasefire. Given what we've seen over the
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last few weeks of Israel's onslaught on Gaza, why would
6:19
Hamas go for that, knowing that Israel will just start again?
6:24
But I'm not sure that either Hamas or Israel is going for
6:26
that. Benjamin Ave. withdrew his
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envoys at the talks the other day.
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But there's a really critical thing here, which is that the
6:34
Americans had a separate negotiation with Hamas to get
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the last American Israeli hostage out, a man called Eden
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Alexander. And he came out a couple of
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weeks ago. Now that shows that by
6:48
negotiating the Israeli government could get their
6:51
hostages out. And there are 58 there, of which
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20 are believed to be still alive.
6:57
And there are many demonstrations today here in Tel
7:00
Aviv, where I am from, the hostage families and supporters
7:03
of the hostage families saying, look, this continued war is
7:07
endangering the lives of our family members.
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And we know because the Americans did it, you can
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negotiate to get these people out.
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Do that now. And they are blaming the Israeli
7:18
government, as they see it, for condemning their family members
7:22
hostages to starvation and to possible death.
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But but are they right to think that they can get their their
7:29
family members out at this stage given Israel's stated aim now is
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to take over the full Gaza Strip?
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I mean, how you know What is the logic in why this would go
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anywhere given Israel still wants to crush Hamas and
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continue bombing? That's a good question.
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And there and there is an argument which says that, you
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know, the hostages are the only bargaining chip that Hamas has.
7:55
But there's a diminishing return because it is very hard under
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these circumstances for Hamas to keep these people alive, these
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poor people who are suffering along with the Gazans who were
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suffering too. And hostages have a lot more
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value as bargaining chips, to put it bluntly, if they're alive
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than if they're dead. And certainly Hamas wants to be
8:16
seen to be part of negotiations. That, I think is what they
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proved with these negotiations with the Americans.
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That in a sense puts them in the Americans good books, as it
8:27
were, compared compared to Israel.
8:28
And at the moment, even the Americans are beginning to lose
8:33
patience with Benjamin Netanyahu.
8:36
Trump himself has said, look, you know, I don't want to see
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all this starvation in Gaza. I don't want to see all this
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suffering. And so I think that it's not
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just the Europeans who are beginning to lose patience with
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the Israeli government. It's also the Americans.
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And of course, the Americans are the ones who hold the key
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because if they cut off military aid, that's the end of it.
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Then the Israeli government absolutely has to back down.
9:01
No, we're nowhere near there. But you know, President Trump,
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he's not a traditional politician.
9:07
If he totally loses patience, he might just do that.
9:10
You just don't know. It is the situation on the
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ground in Gaza which has provoked these angry words, if
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you like, from from Europe and Canada and as you say, might be
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moving the situation in America to over aid and the blockade
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that has gone on for 11-12 weeks now.
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This is like a tap that Israel can turn on and off and and
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we've started to see a little bit more aid going in today.
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But the situation is still, I mean, really desperate.
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And you know, there are images of starving children and all the
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fault knock on effects of lack of food in terms of the general
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health of the population. I mean, what what is the actual
9:52
situation now in terms of how aid is getting in, You know,
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who's distributing it? How?
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How are people getting it? Look, it's absolutely horrendous
10:03
and people are desperately hungry.
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And we've seen images of women and their children scrabbling in
10:09
the garbage trying to find just a few scraps to eat.
10:12
And once aid stops like this, you know, it takes a time before
10:17
there's enough going in. If people die in the gap.
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And what is happening now is that a tiny amount is going
10:25
through. They need 5600 trucks a day.
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And at the moment they're lucky to get, you know, not even a
10:30
hundred. I think none are going in today.
10:33
And the Israelis have decided that the well worn system of the
10:36
UN distributing aid, which on the whole is not looted by
10:41
Hamas. In fact Hamas are the people who
10:44
frequently stop the looting because they put guards on the
10:48
trucks, because otherwise people are so desperate.
10:50
They send out the young men in the family just to get whatever
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they can. But the Israelis and the
10:55
Americans have started this new Gaza humanitarian foundation,
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which is supposed to be doing aid.
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It has no experience in doing aid.
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It knows nothing about it. They are security people.
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They have developed a system which was a biometric, you know,
11:12
face, facial recognition and so on.
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They started yesterday. And what is the result?
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Riots, desperation, and then they start shooting and a lot of
11:24
people were injured. It was complete chaos.
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But they will not let the UN, which does know what it's doing,
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distribute the food. So what is the result of that?
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The result is more hungry children and probably more dead
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children. And, and do we know who they
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really are? I mean, Yair Lapid, the Israeli
11:41
opposition leader, has questioned whether they are
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effectively being run by Israel, even though they are an American
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organization, an American charity.
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I mean, do we, do we really know how this is being run?
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Look, it's murky. It's extremely murky.
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We don't know the funding. We do know that the idea was
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conceived by the Israeli government, and we do know that
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people from American security forces are running it.
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And we do also know that the person who was leading it has
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resigned because he said it could not abide by international
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humanitarian standards of neutrality and effectiveness.
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So clearly, there isn't. It is not being run by people
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who know what they're doing. And so it does appear that the
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aim is not so much to actually relieve the situation but to
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allow, as Benjamin Netanyahu puts it, a minimal amount of aid
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in, but also to increase social control.
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The Israelis are trying to to keep a certain distance from it,
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but I'm not sure how convincing that is.
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The the Palestinians say around 60 people have died of
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starvation so far, on top of all the people being killed in the
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bombing. Now, these are numbers, as you
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know, that the Israelis tend to sort of poo poo.
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And so we can't trust anything that's coming out of Hamas.
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I mean, how do you deal with that kind of information when
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you're in Israel and sort of assess it and try and work out
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what you can say and what you can't?
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It's extremely difficult to assess information from Gaza
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because, as you know, international journalists have
13:16
not been allowed in by either the Egyptian or the Israeli
13:19
authorities since October the 7th.
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We have an excellent team of Gazan journalists who work for
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us and the information they provide is reliable.
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But of course they can't go around adding up the numbers of
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people who are who are killed and who are starving.
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And in any situation those numbers are extremely difficult
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because quite often, you know, kids don't die of starvation.
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They are have malnutrition and then they die of something else.
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They die of pneumonia. They die of respiratory
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diseases. Many years ago, before I was a
13:52
journalist, I was an aid worker in Ethiopia during the famine
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there in 1984 and 85, and I can remember this.
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It was really hard to know those numbers because and also because
14:04
kids died quietly and were buried by their families.
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It's not always possible to know what the exact numbers are, but
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what we do know from the eyewitnesses we have there and
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the pictures which are coming out is there is the most
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appalling and unbelievable suffering going on.
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We had a story the other day of a little girl and we could see
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her in the flames of the house which had just been hit by an
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Israeli air strike. And then we saw her later
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sitting in the charred ruins, crying, crying about the fact
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that her brothers and sisters and her mother had been killed.
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And if you don't look at that and cry, then you have a heart
14:45
of stone. And some of the right wing
14:47
Israelis I've spoken to say they don't care because this is a
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battle between good and evil and the Israelis are good and the
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Arabs are are evil and that the Palestinian children, they want
15:00
to kill our children. They say, well, it's one way of
15:03
looking at the world. But most people, and I would say
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most Israelis do not look at the world like that.
15:10
Most people do have a heart and do understand that this
15:15
deliberate starving of children and continued attacks, which,
15:20
yes, may get Hamas members but which also get huge numbers of
15:25
civilians, it has to stop. Yes, I mean that that story of
15:30
of wad the little girl has has obviously gone right around the
15:35
world and has affected a huge number of people.
15:38
But you can also see the backlash online from the Israeli
15:42
right and on social media who are trying to undermine it and
15:46
say that this is all fake. They talk about a thing called
15:49
Pallywood, you know, as if all the children who are filmed or
15:55
the the civilian, you know, the civilians full stop who are
15:57
filmed are sort of making it up again.
16:00
Could you just explain, you know, how that how you get that
16:03
material? Who does it?
16:05
How do you assess it? You know, how do you know it's
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true? Well, as I said, we have a team
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on the ground and they film and, and then we talked to them.
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We talked to them about how did you get that material and how
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did you know that person and where did the information come
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from and and so on. And it's quite painstaking
16:23
stuff. But also it's not like we're the
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only people. There are also, you know, the
16:28
news agencies, Reuters and The Associated Press, They, they
16:31
have their teams there and quite often the information overlaps.
16:34
So you are sort of getting more than one source and and you
16:38
know, the BBC has people there on the ground.
16:40
Most of the larger news organizations do have people on
16:44
the ground who are filming and getting information.
16:46
And most of these stories do back each other up.
16:49
But also in a couple of days ago, I spoke to a young man who
16:54
had been a reservist who was serving in the military in Gaza.
16:58
He did 2 tours, 270 days now. He had initially, on October the
17:03
7th, rushed down to do what he could.
17:07
He was horrified by the Hamas killing of his people.
17:11
And then he believed totally in going in and fighting Hamas.
17:16
But he did say, look, this level of destruction and death of
17:21
Gazans is not alright. It's a stain on Israel, on
17:25
Israel's conscience. He said that the most of the
17:28
damage that he saw was done by air strikes.
17:31
That was most of the killing. But he also said that the
17:34
soldiers on the ground and he was with the unit on the ground.
17:36
He's a deputy commander of the unit.
17:39
He said there was no accountability that if you
17:42
source and this is always a problem in guerrilla warfare.
17:44
I understand that, that, you know, you see somebody and you
17:47
shoot them and then you discover that they were a civilian.
17:50
Now that is difficult. If you're fighting a militant or
17:53
terrorist organisations, they don't wear uniforms.
17:55
They, you know, they hide their weapons and so on.
17:57
You're not quite sure who you're seeing.
17:59
But the point he was making was that there was no
18:01
accountability, that the rules of engagement were basically, he
18:05
said, the Wild West. In other words, you shoot
18:07
whoever you want to shoot because the only thing that
18:09
matters is protecting your life. The is force protection.
18:13
So there was him and then there was also there's a former
18:17
spokesperson of the of the Israeli Defence Force, Colonel
18:20
Peter Lerner, who I also know he's now retired.
18:24
He wrote an article the other day and he said we cannot deny
18:28
that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
18:31
He said, look, you just can't deny it.
18:33
It is happening. So it's not just the
18:36
international media working with their local journalists who are
18:39
saying this. There are some Israelis,
18:41
including those who have been there, who are also saying this,
18:45
as well as some of the politicians on the centre and
18:47
the left. So can we talk then about where
18:50
this is going? I mean, there is no particular
18:52
reason why 600 days should be, you know, a moment of change,
18:56
but it's a moment to take stock, I suppose, and work out, you
19:01
know, where, where this might move.
19:02
Apart from the sort of the attempts to bring back another
19:05
temporary ceasefire which we've discussed, is there anybody
19:09
actually working on a proper plan for how to end this for
19:14
real? The Saudis and other Gulf
19:18
countries and working with the French are talking about a plan
19:21
for the day after. And there's going to be a
19:24
conference which will be organized by Saudi Arabia and by
19:27
President Macron of France, which is coming up in the next
19:29
few weeks. And I suspect that they're going
19:31
to talk about the day after plan.
19:33
The Israelis do not have a day after plan.
19:35
Apart from their plan, which is just to corral everybody and
19:39
feed them the minimal amount so that they don't all die of
19:43
starvation immediately. The Israelis do not seem to have
19:45
a viable A viable plan. But I think that the other thing
19:49
which is interesting is that the impact this is having on Israel.
19:53
They have called up another 300,000 reservists.
19:56
This is a country of less than 10 million people.
19:59
Already the economy has suffered. 75,000 small
20:03
businesses have closed down, partly because the economy just
20:07
has generally suffered and partly because the people who
20:09
are running those businesses are fighting people working in the
20:12
high tech sector here. They don't want to live in this
20:14
country if it's going to be a never ending war.
20:17
And many of them have alternative passports.
20:19
And so they have left, many of them going to America.
20:23
And then you have this political crisis, this permanent political
20:27
crisis because Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition is so
20:31
dependent on the far right. And then you have all this
20:33
diplomatic pressure on the government as well.
20:37
So Israeli society is under a lot of strain and I think that
20:42
that we are going to see in the coming months and days is going
20:45
to have an impact too. And then from the point of view
20:48
of the West Bank, you increasingly see the far right
20:52
settlers attacking Palestinians in their villages, taking over
20:56
more and more land and nothing being done to stop them because
20:59
basically the Israeli government supports them.
21:01
So this is like a new front in the war that is opening up.
21:05
You still have Yemen, the Houthis occasionally firing
21:10
here. They fired at the airport the
21:11
other day. And yesterday the Israelis fired
21:14
into Yemen and they hit airport there.
21:18
They say they destroyed the last aircraft.
21:21
And then you have a split between the Americans and the
21:25
Israelis about Iran because President Donald Trump, he wants
21:29
to talk to Iran and to have a negotiation about their their,
21:33
their nuclear program. But then you have the Israelis
21:37
who want to bomb Iran. Prime Minister Netanyahu thinks,
21:40
seems to think that bombing is the answer to many of their
21:43
problems, whereas President Trump seems to be moving against
21:47
that kind of idea. So you have all of these
21:50
different fronts on which Israel is is fighting and increasing
21:55
pressure on them to do things differently from the Europeans
22:00
and to some extent the Americas. So I think that there is a
22:03
crisis brewing in Israel as well and at the same time we have
22:08
this horrendous humanitarian situation in Gaza, unbelievable
22:12
suffering, and until there is a change of policy, we are not
22:16
going to see an end of that. I I spoke to a very senior
22:19
European diplomat recently just ahead of their talks with Israel
22:24
and, and they said to me, the Israelis don't care what we say.
22:28
They tell us you should just be more like the Americans.
22:31
And as long as they've got American support, it almost
22:34
doesn't matter what we say. We try and say things as
22:37
strongly as we possibly can, but we don't have purchase that was
22:41
somebody very senior in the European Union.
22:43
Is it still the case that America is really the only
22:46
player that can change things? Yeah.
22:48
Yes, I think in the end America is the only player.
22:50
But I mean, the Europeans do actually have some economic
22:55
sway. They, you know, Israel, Israel's
22:59
biggest trading party partner is the European Union.
23:02
And they European Union could, you know, they're, they're
23:06
reviewing their new trade deal. They could stop it.
23:10
Britain has a policy which is contradictory.
23:13
So on the one hand, they said they're suspending the trade
23:16
talks for a new free trade deal with Israel.
23:18
And then they send out a trade envoy, Ian Austin, who goes
23:23
around Tel Aviv saying how marvellous the relationship with
23:26
Israel is and how all these fantastic new deals that they're
23:29
going to do. The British policy makes no
23:32
sense. And as long as it makes no sense
23:33
and has no coherence, then they're not putting any, they're
23:37
not putting any pressure on Israel at all.
23:39
Now, if the European Union and Britain actually started to do
23:42
things which would affect the economy, then that might have
23:45
some impact. But yes, fundamentally, in the
23:48
end, it comes down to the Americans and it comes down to
23:51
American support of Israel, because if Israel loses American
23:55
support, it can't survive. And so that is what you have to
23:59
look to in the coming weeks, whether President Trump, who
24:03
instantly doesn't like Benjamin Netanyahu that much, they have
24:05
fallen out over over time. If President Trump in his
24:09
mercurial way decides actually I don't like what I'm seeing, that
24:14
would have the most impact. But but as you come to the end
24:17
of this particular visit, do you see any grounds for hope in the
24:22
near future, or does this still feel like it's going to go on a
24:25
long time? You know, I went to film at a
24:30
left wing anti war rally the other day and there were all the
24:34
slogans that you would expect. And increasingly people were
24:38
holding up not just pictures of the hostages but also
24:40
Palestinian children. These were the people who were
24:43
beginning to really think about the impact on on Palestinian
24:46
children. And there was one guy who had a
24:50
poster and it said in Trump, we trust now that is not a poster
24:56
you would expect to find at a left wing rally.
24:59
But what he said is we're pinning our hopes on him because
25:04
although he we know that he supports the Israeli government,
25:07
he has said he doesn't like what he's seen.
25:09
He doesn't like this war and he wants a Nobel Peace Prize and he
25:12
wants to be seen as the man who who comes in and and puts an end
25:17
to to confidence here. And also, as we know, he snubbed
25:21
Israel on his last tour. And the places he really loves
25:25
in the Middle East are the Gulf states, the really rich ones,
25:30
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, the places that he visited on
25:34
this trip. And he's looking at this and
25:36
beginning to think, well, where is the value for me in the
25:39
support of Israel? And it seems as if he's looking
25:43
and thinking, well, in the Middle East, the main value, and
25:46
he does do value in monetary terms is those Gulf states.
25:50
And those Gulf states are not happy with what Israel is doing.
25:54
So I think that the situation of which we have taken for granted
25:57
for so many years of permanent, almost unquestioning American
26:03
support for Israel, I don't know if that will continue without
26:08
any questioning forever and ever.
26:12
There may come a point where that changes, and it may be that
26:16
it comes from an unexpected quarter President Trump.
26:19
Lindsay, brilliant to hear your thoughts.
26:21
Thank you very much indeed. Lovely to talk to you, Krish.
26:24
Well, that's the forecast. Until next time, bye bye.