What Israel’s shattered ceasefire means for Gaza
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This week on True Crime Reports. It's July 2020. We're in the port town of Salerno in Italy.

Police have just raided a cargo ship transporting machinery and paper cylinders. But when police crack them open, inside they find bags and bags stuffed with tiny white pills. The pills are a very dangerous, highly addictive drug called Captagon. It's a drug you may not have heard of, but it's been wreaking havoc across the Middle East.

True Crime Reports, a new global crime show from Al Jazeera. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Al Jazeera Podcasts. Today, Gaza reels from one of its deadliest nights as Israel shatters the ceasefire. From now on, Israel will act against Hamas with ever-increasing force. From now on, negotiations will take place only under fire.

What's driving Israel's decision to reignite this war? I'm Kevin Hurtin, and this is The Take. Overnight, as most Palestinians in Gaza were sleeping, Israel launched a series of strikes. We woke up to the sound of strikes tonight. We woke up and got out of the tents to the street.

Zia-ed Ahmed lives in Hunyunis. They fired a missile here near us. We looked around and found fire coming from the strike. While we ran to see what had happened, we found a second missile had been fired. The tents were on fire, the women started to scream, and children were terrified. Of course, everything escalated suddenly. We ran towards the screams.

Ziad was able to recover some from the rubble, but the Gaza health ministry estimates that many of the victims are still trapped beneath. They bombed us last night and people rushed to the streets in the middle of the night. The martyrs couldn't even be buried. No one knew who would bury them. Palestinians were left asking why. What do they want from the wounded and devastated people of Gaza?

The U.S. supports Israel with all kinds of military equipment available in the Middle East and in its stockpiles. We have become a testing ground in Gaza for Israeli-American strikes. We just want to understand from them what do they want from us. Al Jazeera Digital's Gaza reporter, Maram Humaid, says she was woken up by her daughter. She asked her what was happening, but she couldn't reassure her.

The war is back and the bombing is still in place right now in Gaza. Every now and then there is a bombing and there is an intense hovering of water plants overhead and in the skies of Gaza.

And we just hope that this nightmare won't continue and it would be stopped very soon. People of Gaza wouldn't endure more of this suffering and more of this horrific scenes of the war. My guest today has been following it all from Haifa. We spoke on Tuesday, the evening after the attack.

My name is Deanna Butu, and I'm a lawyer and analyst based in Haifa. So Deanna, Israel attacked Gaza, shattering the already fragile ceasefire that had been in place since January. Things were already on edge, and around 2:00 a.m., all hell broke loose. Tell us what happened. Tell me how this horrible night unfolded. At 2:00 in the morning, Israeli airplanes entered into Gaza airspace.

and bombed all throughout the Gaza Strip. A lot of the places that they bombed were the areas that were, the places that were the so-called safe areas. So particularly in the central part of the Gaza Strip. But they also hit in the north, in the south, all throughout the Gaza Strip. There wasn't one particular area. And this is why we're seeing so many, so many,

People who've been killed because it's all dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip. And the hospitals have been unable to deal with all of the people who have been attacked. We're still at this hour pulling people out from the rubble. They were bombing people as they were asleep. And it wasn't just the individuals, their entire families that were wiped out as they were sleeping.

And we fully expect that this death toll is going to rise.

The reason that I expect that it's going to rise is because this wasn't just a question of Israeli aerial bombardment and bombing, but also because for the past 16 days, Israel hasn't allowed any humanitarian aid to get into the Gaza Strip. That includes everything from food to fuel to medicines to much-needed medical supplies as well.

And you can see that the medical system is on the verge of collapse. And so what Israel is doing now is it's just bombing people. 90% of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been bombed. This is now just going after people and trying to inflict as much damage as possible and to terrify people even further after 15 months of genocide.

Yeah. Al Jazeera's Tariq Abu Azum reported that most of the airstrikes have been on heavily built up neighborhoods, makeshift schools and residential buildings where people were taking shelter.

Yeah, that's exactly what has happened. Just this morning, the Israeli army then announced that there are people along the eastern part of the Gaza Strip that they should also flee. And remember, there have been hundreds of these evacuation orders. They're at the point now where they're bombing people in tents, in U.N. schools, in hospitals.

And the part that is so disturbing in all of this is that I just don't see anybody pushing Israel to stop. Quite the opposite. I see that the cheerleaders have come out and they're pushing Israel to continue and to do it even harder and faster and fiercer.

So, Diana, Israeli officials had been publicly saying for weeks that they were preparing plans to resume the war should ceasefire talks break down. This happened days after they came back from a round of talks in Egypt about the second phase of the agreement, which was supposed to lead to a permanent end to the war. What is the Israeli government saying officially about why they're doing this? Why are they are doing this now?

They're actually not really saying a whole lot other than that they want to see all of the Israelis released. As of this morning, Israel is operating with full force against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip. We have reached this situation after the Hamas repeatedly refused proposal to extend ceasefire and to release our hostages.

One of the things that has been so striking about this is from the very beginning, Netanyahu, on the eve of the ceasefire agreement, pretty much announced that it wasn't going to last. As soon as he was elected, President Trump mobilized to secure the release of the hostages.

He spoke to me on Wednesday evening. He ran with the agreement and he rightly emphasized that the first phase of the agreement is a temporary ceasefire. And so they're not even really providing any form of an excuse as to why they're reattacking Gaza. They're doing it because they know that they can.

Yeah. One of the statements was, if Hamas does not release all the hostages, the gates of hell will open in Gaza. That was Israel Katz said that. And Hamas, it seems like, sniffed this out pretty fast. They said, well, we're not going to release without some sort of guarantee that as soon as they're gone...

you're going to just immediately start bombing. On that point about what Katz said, Katz is simply parroting what Donald Trump said. Donald Trump earlier on said that he didn't want the Israeli captives released in a phased approach, that he wanted them all at once. And the reason that he wanted them all at once is because, again, it feeds into what exactly Israel wants, which is they want all of the Israeli captives, and then once they're out, then they want to bomb Gaza immediately.

even further and flatten the place. And they made this clear from the very beginning. This strategic explanation with Trump now in the White House saying he openly wants to displace the Palestinian population and build a Riviera in Gaza. I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent.

But it should be said that Trump is also one of the big reasons that the ceasefire was there in the first place. So do you think that Netanyahu has a complete green light when it comes to Trump total war to accomplish this new displacement goal? I do. I think he does have a green light to do whatever it is he wants to do.

And the reason I think that he has that green light is because while initially Trump was involved and pushed for the ceasefire, at the same time, we've seen just how much Israeli effort and how much Israeli attention has been paid to Trump and how they have really pushed this idea of expelling Palestinians.

of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, of creating the so-called Riviera. And this is exactly what Netanyahu's dream, this is his fantasy. So you have an Israeli prime minister who's saying,

always believed in ethnic cleansing, who's been pushing and who's been now charged with war crimes for genocide. Yeah. Coupled with a U.S. president who views the world as some sort of real estate deal,

never really looking at what his plans actually mean. He doesn't have the bandwidth or the attention span to be doing anything. And so when he gets a nice, convenient plan, like let's just ethnically cleanse Palestinians, it sounds good to him.

Yeah, there's never going to be a better opportunity is probably the calculus. We know that the White House was consulted about these strikes beforehand. White House spokeswoman Carolyn Leavitt confirmed that on Fox News. The Trump administration and the White House were consulted by the Israelis on their attacks in Gaza tonight. And as President Trump has made it clear, Hamas, the Houthis, Iran...

all those who seek to terrorize not just Israel, but also the United States of America will see a price to pay. All hell will break loose. It wasn't just in consultation. This is U.S. weaponry. Remember, since Trump has taken office, he too has continued the supply of weapons that the Biden administration first began. And he's been making sure that Israel has as many weapons as it wants. This is why I'm so worried.

because you have this combination of Netanyahu and his goals and Trump and everything that he's been doing. And you can see that there's nobody that's putting the brakes on the United States or on Israel. More with Diana after a quick break.

This week on Now You Know, we speak with Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first American Muslim Olympian to compete in a hijab. She shares her journey about navigating her identity and the importance of representation in sports. That's on Now You Know. Find us on Al Jazeera's YouTube channel or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Deanna, there's a personal element to this as well. Netanyahu is dealing with a lot at home.

He's on trial for corruption. He's facing a ton of pressure politically from the families of the captives and his coalition partners, those on the right who say he's not going far enough. How much of this suffering that we're seeing in Gaza right now do you think redounds to just what's going on in Netanyahu's life? You know, Palestinians always pay the price for Israeli political choices.

And Palestinians always pay the price for Netanyahu and his own political career. This is being done at our expense, with our lives, with our bodies. The reason that he has resumed these attacks on Gaza, it's no coincidence that today he was supposed to appear in court for yet another day of his corruption trial.

It's not at all surprising that we heard today, we learned today that Itamar Ben-Gavir has resumed and rejoined the cabinet after leaving the cabinet back in January over the ceasefire agreement. We heard from Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir, saying that he would resign if this goes ahead. He urged Benjamin Netanyahu to pull out of the deal, which he says only whets the appetite of Hamas.

It's not at all coincidental that we see that Israelis are protesting and very angry with the Netanyahu government because they don't trust the government and they certainly don't trust him.

And he knows that the only thing that he can do to maintain his political survival is to carry out massacres against Palestinians, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, to carry out genocide. This is what will win him votes. It's what will win him coalition power. And it's what will keep him in office.

Back to Gaza, we have hundreds of casualties. The hospitals are overwhelmed. But even before this happened, people who had been returned to the north of Gaza were living on tents on top of rubble. Also, Israel had halted all humanitarian aid, all humanitarian aid, which means limited food, limited supplies, limited fuel. And this is all happening in the middle of Ramadan.

Can you try to paint us a picture of the desperate conditions there even before the attack? This Gaza is very different to the one that Israel first attacked in the autumn of 2023. Yes, this is a population where the UN is estimating that over a million are facing malnourishment.

And this is because over the course of the past 15 months, there hasn't been an adequate amount of food that's getting into Gaza. The quality of the food that has been getting in is not good. Doctors are reporting massive dehydration. Almost everybody has had some form of stomach problems in the Gaza Strip because of the lack of food and the lack of sanitation.

In places like the central part of Gaza, there isn't any drinking water any longer. People have been drinking water that is unfit for human consumption. Israel shut down electricity to Gaza's main desalinization plant. It's 500,000 Palestinians rely on this place. And we can assume that at least half of those 500,000 are under 18. Yes. When you're cutting off drinking water to children...

You just run out of ways to describe what they're doing. Genocide. That's it. From the beginning, I and others were saying that this is going to be an attack on children. Because when you look at the makeup of the Gaza Strip, more than half of the people who live in the Gaza Strip are under the age of 18. Anything that is done in Gaza is going to affect children.

We're now looking at the highest number of child amputees in the world. We're looking at a place where it's the unsafest for a child to live in the world. They wanted to attack the most defenseless people in the world to make sure that they can't ever have a future. That's the essence of genocide.

So Israeli officials are saying this is just the beginning. They say they're carrying out extensive strikes on terror targets, and they've ordered Palestinians in large swaths of Gaza to leave their homes. There's speculation of a renewed ground invasion now. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said, without the release of our hostages, Israel has no alternative but resuming military operations. No alternative.

But of course they've had an alternative. You know, from the beginning, Hamas said that they were willing to release the Israeli captives in exchange for a halt to the bombing. This was within the first week of October the 7th. Israel then decided that they didn't want that because I don't think they've ever really wanted the Israeli captives back.

and instead pursued a massive bombing campaign. We saw that the first wave of Israelis to be released was in November of 2023. And so we saw that there was a way. And yet, once again, Israel resumed. And here again, we've seen that there's been yet another wave of Israelis who've been released. And yet again, Israel has resumed. The problem here is that because there's nobody that's putting the brakes on Israel, instead we're seeing the cheerleaders...

that they can make these sorts of statements and some fool out there is going to believe them. But if anybody really wants to understand and wants to know what is happening, they'll look at the history records and they'll understand that it didn't have to be like this to begin with. The fact that the only way that Palestinians can be released from Israeli dungeons, from Israeli prisons, is through

some sort of a prisoner exchange is perverse. And yet this is the system that has been set up, is one in which the only way that Palestinians can be released en masse from the system of mass incarceration is through some sort of prisoner exchange. So there are alternatives out there. The problem is that we shouldn't have been in this position to begin with.

Yeah, I mean, the goal here is to eliminate Hamas. But this is not that. This is lobbing bombs from a safe distance into devastated communities. You know, so even on this issue, there are rules to war. And the rules to war say that if a person is a combatant, meaning that they're actually engaged in armed struggle, then they are targets.

But if they're not a combatant, they're not targets. But what Israel has done is it's reversed everything. It's twisted everything on its head that everybody is a target unless they prove otherwise. This is the height of dehumanization. That's why when you see the numbers of children who've been killed, the Israelis are calling them collateral damage. Israel thinks that everybody is a target, and that's the problem.

is that it isn't a person who is in active combat. It's that if you are in any way affiliated, if we even think you're affiliated, then you're considered to be a legitimate target. And oops, sorry, this is the problem. When I talk about how the international system has been turned on its head, this is precisely what Israel's done, is they've turned everybody into a target unless you prove otherwise.

And there's no way to prove otherwise in this system. And so even with all of this technology that we have out there, all the AI that Israel boasts, for some reason, they still can't seem to just go after the people who are combatants. And it's because they don't want to. Their whole point is to terrorize an entire population so that everybody is considered to be a target. This, again, is the height of dehumanization. I think that this is just straight-up genocide.

And I think that when we view it in its proper context of there's no fighting back, these were people who were asleep in their beds, or they weren't even in beds because most of them were in tents. You can see that this is just a straight-up massacre of Palestinians. And it's part of their process of genocide. And that's The Take. This episode was produced by Tamara Kandaker, Sonia Bhagat, and Chloe K. Lee, with...

It was edited by Noor Wazwaz. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abusalah and Mohanad Elmelhem. Alexandra Locke is the take's executive producer, and Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio. We'll be back tomorrow.