While Trump is declaring “war over” in Gaza, top Israeli officials are directly contradicting him with statements about resuming the onslaught.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz at the Pentagon in July. (DoD/Noel Diaz)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
Israel’s top officials are openly declaring that they intend to terminate the Gaza ceasefire after they get their hostages back.
Defense Minister Israel Katz has posted a tweet in Hebrew which machine translates as follows:
“Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States. This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons. I have instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission.”
Hamas has not agreed to any demilitarization or destruction of its tunnels. There is no way to demilitarize Gaza and neutralize Hamas of its weapons against their will without continued warfare, something Israel has demonstrated it cannot do without killing shocking numbers of civilians.
This is Israel’s defence minister declaring that Israel will resume its military onslaught against Gaza once the Israeli hostages are returned. https://t.co/JWbD3VloDa pic.twitter.com/wvQkW3gwWL
— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 12, 2025
Katz’s comments echo the public statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in a televised speech on Friday that “Hamas will be disarmed and Gaza will be demilitarized,” and that if Hamas doesn’t disarm voluntarily then “it will be achieved the hard way.”
In another statement Netanyahu said, “We have achieved tremendous victories but the campaign is not over; part of our enemies are trying to recover.”
Israeli outlet YNet reports that Israel is planning to resume its blockade and prevent reconstruction if all the bodies of the deceased captives are not returned, when Israel already knows that Hamas probably won’t be able to locate all the bodies of deceased Israeli captives due to the intensity of the Israeli bombing campaign over the last two years.
“If Hamas does not cooperate with the return process, and Israel suspects that it is deliberately hiding the bodies in order to preserve them as a bargaining chip, it is expected to impose a series of sanctions on it — including preventing the reconstruction of the Strip, the entry of caravans, the opening of bakeries and the entry of civilian equipment,” Ynet reports.
In a recent article titled “Israel assesses Hamas may not be able to return all remaining dead hostages,” CNN reports that “Sources say the Israeli government is aware that Hamas may not know the location of, or is unable to retrieve, the remains of some of the 28 remaining deceased hostages.”
As noted by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, these two pieces of information would seem to indicate that Israel is planning to use the unreturned bodies as a pretext to break the ceasefire.
It is perhaps somewhat noteworthy that Israel’s open preparations to resume the onslaught in Gaza directly contradict the statements of the president of the United States.
Asked by the press about Netanyahu’s refusal to say that the “war” in Gaza is over, Trump forcefully stated, “The war is over. The war is over, okay? You understand that?”
Trump suggested (without stating outright) that he has received “verbal guarantees” from Israel that the violence will not resume.
So here we have Israeli officials openly and explicitly saying that the attacks on Gaza have not ended, and the U.S. president saying that they have. It’s not often you see these two governments directly contradicting each other with mutually exclusive positions in ways that will necessarily be proven or disproven by the events which follow.
So I guess we’re about to find out who has ultimately been in charge of the Gaza genocide this whole time.
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This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Thanks Caitlin – your coverage is insightful as usual.
Of course the so-called cease fire won’t last, and I’m cynical enough to believe it was brought about only to help Trump chase his Nobel, and to give Israel some breathing room. The intermission will end soon and the bloody, grotesque show will resume.
Trump tries very hard to act like he’s not owned and controlled by Israel. I’m still a believer that Israel has kompromat on Trump from his Epstein days. I mean, they control both political parties in Washington, so who is Trump to demand Israel do anything?
At the same time, how many times has Israel lied about not attacking the Palestinians since they located themselves in the Middle East?
When I hear that Israel has agreed to anything, it’s only a matter of days before they renege. That is Israel’s status quo.
Give it a week. It’s a foregone conclusion. Some kind of double dealing Israeli action with the USA is on its way. It was never going to be any other way. We’ll call it the tunnel-busting campaign, or Israel security expansion or any other false name will suffice.
With the hostages home, Netanyahu’s credibility has taken a big rise, plus the visit by the Trump circus, so its all hands to the 100 year old plan of “Eretz Israel”. Next on the list…….look it up. It’s been there for 100 years.
Thanks, naive America. You’ve made it all possible with all the planners / sponsors living on American soil. Right under your nose.
Anyone that thinks otherwise is living in dreamland.
So don’t be under any illusion that the USA is not aware of what is about to happen….to continue. It is after all their military supplies that make it all possible, their large number of well trained ex-USA Army IDF volunteers (mercenaries), such people now throughout the world in many geographies, CIA assisted, now a large industry and financially rewarding as well….. shekels converted to dollars, both from the same sources living as highly respected US citizens on US soil and proudly calling themselves “Americans”.
What a sham.
The 500 year Western white supremacist colonial project is on its last legs which is why the US and its vassals have ignored their own populations, their own laws and international laws to allow Israel to commit genocide against the Palestinians. Israel has always been a Western colonial project plopped down in the ME to maintain control of its vast petroleum resources. Indigenous people have always been “in the way of capitalist progress.” This is no different. It mirrors what has been done to the indigenous everywhere profit seeking states have gone for “investment opportunities.” This sick ideology must be defeated now. We are out of time to turn the corner to a better model of human development. A better world is possible, but only if we are able to stand up to the psychopaths leading us to global disaster.
? comments and astute observations.
More Please!
Thank you, Caitlin. Nobody should believe anything the Israelis say because any promises or “agreements” they claim to be supporting are all lies and they have proven this to the world time and time again. Israel is a pariah state. Its supporters are pariahs and anti-human. That goes double for the United States and the UK. Liars and land thieves who profane the actual tenets of Judaism in the name of the false god of Zionism.
Sadly, this is to be expected and predicted. Israel will resume attacks and the genocide will continue.
The DT is a serial liar and now he can’t even remember his own BS. We might as well just ignore what the dude says. Just deal with actions and facts, the emperor just babbles gibberish.
The Zionist regime says it will not attack Iran again, so that likely means an attack on Iran will be coming in the near future. This time, the Iranians will inflict even more damage to Israel. Another sad state of affairs is that the retaliation of Iran may be the only way to stop the Zionist regime. And, as always, we can only wish that the conflict will not escalate into the exercise of so-called Samson Options.
“Trump suggested (without stating outright) that he has received “verbal guarantees” from Israel that the violence will not resume.”
Well that settles everything. If we know anything, it’s that the Jewish supremacists can always be taken at their word.