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00:00We now in the studio is Doug Herbert, international affairs commentator.
00:04Doug, as we see there, Israel poised to identify, intensify and expand its assault in Gaza in the coming days.
00:13This less than two months after that collapse in ceasefire talks.
00:19So what is driving this all-out war strategy?
00:22Yeah, well, obviously this is all open to speculation, but it's a very fair question, more than fair to ask Annette,
00:28because look, look at the reality so far.
00:31Over the course of 18, 19 months of war, you have had Israel literally deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers, right?
00:38Nonstop pummeling basically Hamas in Gaza with the civilians caught in the crossfire all along.
00:45It has not defeated Hamas.
00:48Now that has been, yes, Netanyahu's goal to defeat Hamas as a viable military and political force, but that has not happened.
00:55If it hasn't happened with hundreds of thousands of soldiers deployed over a year and a half or more of conflict,
01:04how does he think that deploying tens of thousands more, that is ramping up the presence and sustaining it longer,
01:12is going to change the dynamics, is going to change the calculus of this war and somehow achieve something
01:17that with far many more soldiers he's been unable to achieve?
01:21So the question is, what's driving that change of strategy?
01:24Well, you could say either he really believes that this is going to lead to defeating Hamas,
01:28or he is enthralled to his far-right ministers, who have always been on board with this full, absolute, full-force, maximum strategy.
01:37You do not stop this war until Hamas is wiped out.
01:41The hostage families, they don't say it this way, be damned, but essentially their thinking excludes the hostage families,
01:47because the hostage family forum, who's been extremely vocal and present and visible throughout this war,
01:53they basically say essentially, in not so many words, that they think this is almost a death sentence for the remaining hostages,
01:59this type of plan.
02:00If the Israeli government really cared about their missing relatives, their loved ones,
02:05then they would do everything to make that the top priority, not ramping up the war,
02:10which threatens to make it even more perilous, more treacherous for the hostages still remaining there.
02:17What's in it?
02:18What is the strategy here?
02:20Well, I guess to defeat Hamas.
02:21But so far that has not worked, and there's no proof throughout this war that merely ramping up the number of soldiers on the ground is going to do anything,
02:30not to mention that the plan apparently includes, reportedly includes, plans to displace tens,
02:36if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the north of Gaza, where most of them have resided, to the south.
02:42Many of them have been uprooted many times.
02:44So this basically leaves everything up in the air.
02:46It seems that not only are we back to the early days of this war and that strategy, it could potentially be even more intense and worse.
02:54That's the fear of many on the ground.
02:56And this is coming as Israel is continuing that blockade on food, fuel, and medicine, and all types of aid into Gaza.
03:04And it's created what aid organizations have called a catastrophic situation.
03:08And it could be about to get worse because there is an Israeli plan to overhaul whatever remaining aid is being distributed in Gaza.
03:18Yeah.
03:19So the Israelis are officially presenting this, even though it hasn't explicitly been spelled out yet,
03:25as a plan to start getting the aid back in, back flowing into Gaza, getting it into the hands of the Palestinians.
03:31The problem, say almost every aid organization, plus the United Nations, is it simply isn't going to work.
03:38This plan, the basic outlines of it are, yes, for nine weeks, no food, fuel, medicine, or other supplies have been allowed to get into Gaza.
03:49It's been essentially blocked.
03:51What this plan proposes to do is set up what's called, I put this in quotes, my quotes, logistics hubs.
03:58That is, centralized checkpoints, which would be overseen by Israel, that would subcontract to private firms, private companies,
04:07would basically not the UN, not aid agencies, which have a lot of experience, decades of experience doing this type of thing.
04:14Private firms, unknown at this point in time, would be handling the distribution at distribution points.
04:20Now, given what I said in the first answer, Annette, how do the Palestinians get to these logistics hubs,
04:25even presuming that, you know, that the companies giving them out will have the food at hand?
04:29This is the problem.
04:30They say, aid organizations say, this plan won't work.
04:33It will make things worse.
04:34A catastrophic situation, even more catastrophic, even more dire.
04:39You need to get the food to Palestinian civilians where the Palestinians are,
04:43not displace them further and make them have to go to these logistics hubs.
04:48Who knows how they would even begin to try to get there?
04:51So the plan presented as a goodwill gesture by Israel to try to get food to Palestinians again.
04:56But in reality, aid groups say, this looks like a no-go from the very outset.
05:00Doug, thank you for that.