By blaming the Jewish state alone for the food crisis and the ongoing war, European governments may have helped derail ceasefire talks and deepen Palestinian suffering
July 28, 2025 15:07
Once, European powers strutted around the Middle East and beyond, pillaging and asset-stripping whatever they wanted. Though the days of formal imperialism are over, old habits die hard. No longer are European powers filling ships with gold, slaves, and antiquities – they’re filling up on virtue signals and symbolic trophies, to wave before their sectarian voters in their constituencies or to burnish their post-politics CVs.
And so, at a critical point in the Israel-Hamas hostage negotiations, 28 Western governments effectively emboldened a terror organisation – whether so intended or not. In a joint statement, they put all the blame for the food situation and the pressure to agree on a ceasefire on Israel alone. Hamas’s position then hardened despite many Israeli concessions, leading to a collapse of the talks.
What’s happening in Gaza now is the result of a massive tangle of misaligned incentives and endless bargaining fictions – and the victims are the Gazans. Those responsible for the misaligned incentives are mostly sitting in comfortable offices at NGOs and news organisations. Their victims are in tents, and will be for a third winter.
The Gazans want to be free – but their Hamas overlords want them to die, for the PR. The Gazans mostly want to flee the war zone – but Hamas wants them to stay and die, for the photo ops. The Gazans want to eat – but Hamas wants to make that as hard as possible, to promote a false famine narrative. For the PR, yes, but also for the money by looting and reselling the food, money which they then use to pay their fighters in what remains of their once 35,000-strong force, now reduced to a ragtag insurgency running suicidally at tanks.
The United Nations seems desperate to preserve a distribution system that allows Hamas significant control over it. The UN has failed to pick up large amounts of food already on the Gazan side and openly oppose the rival US- and Israel-backed GHF food aid system. Gazans pay the price.
Do you notice who is aligned with the wishes of the Gazans and who is aligned with Hamas PR? That’s right, by amplifying the jihadist narrative, the global media, the NGOs and the UN are giving Hamas false hope and in the process, they’re prolonging Palestinian suffering. They're simply forcing the IDF to continue grinding its way across Gaza in search of hostages and Hamas killers, while the territory is further destroyed
Israel and the US, by contrast, stand with the Gazans. Twenty Israeli hostages and two million Gazans are Hamas’s final cards and look who’s helping them play them.
It was all avoidable, even after October 7. If everyone Hamas cared about had stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel and told Hamas it was doomed, the group would have had fewer reasons to believe global pressure would deliver them Israel’s surrender to their demands. Without all that international pressure on Israel, Hamas may have folded already. Now Gaza is mostly ruined – in a just war – after Hamas booby-trapped half the buildings. Just the clean-up will take years.
The new American administration finally seems to have received the message that the last one didn’t. To quote Trump: “We're down to the final hostages, and they know what happens after we get the final hostages out.”
This has been the issue for twenty-one months: most hostages can be freed via deals, but Hamas knows what happens when the last of them are released – their defeat. What leverage can you have against fanatics who relish the deaths of their own people?
And what of French President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration to recognise a Palestinian state, issued just hours before the US administration announced that hostage negotiations had collapsed because Hamas was presenting “increasingly insurmountable obstacles” to a deal? Only the Hamas leadership in Qatar knows if France’s push for Palestinian statehood emboldened them – but it certainly didn’t help the cause of a Palestinian state. If anything, it likely pushed it further out of reach by reinforcing in Trump’s mind the notion that the very idea of such a state was weakening his and Israel’s hand in talks.
One detail of Macron’s statement went mostly unnoticed – except by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who was recently sanctioned by the Trump Administration.
Albanese was naturally appalled by Macron’s insistence that any future Palestinian state be demilitarised. The French President’s declaration is a double-edged chalice for the proponents of Palestinian statehood with full sovereignty. Netanyahu’s own demand for a demilitarised Palestine is now effectively baked into the starting point – likely far in the future – of any eventual negotiations with French backing.
In the end, the Israeli public now has a firm veto on the terms under which Palestinians will have a state. Hamas didn’t just lose a war, they collapsed their entire support network on their own heads, while turning their Jewish neighbours, including many former supporters of a two-state solution, against giving them sovereignty for at least a generation.
Saul Sadka is a geopolitical analyst and author of “The Intertextual Tanakh.” On X: @Saul_Sadka
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