Gaza and the Moment Israel Lost Strategic Initiative: Washington Takes Control of the Second Phase

By Elijah J. Magnier –

The United States is no longer seeking decisive battlefield outcomes. Instead, it is enforcing a sequencing strategy in which escalation is postponed, conflicts are frozen, and economic–political frameworks take precedence. Israel, long accustomed to shaping events through military initiative, now finds itself increasingly constrained by this approach.

As widely anticipated, Israel has not complied with the ceasefire agreement or its provisions. One of the earliest and most consequential violations concerns humanitarian access. The agreement stipulated the daily entry of 600 humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza. In practice, Israel has allowed fewer than 220 per day, despite Gaza requiring several thousand truckloads daily to cope with the consequences of a prolonged war and months of enforced starvation resulting from Israeli policy.

At the same time, the prisoner file is nearing closure. Of the 255 Israeli captives taken on 7 October, only one remains unaccounted for. All others have been accounted for, either released alive or returned deceased, in line with the first article of the agreement. Locating the final group of Israeli prisoners proved particularly difficult due to Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza, the widescale destruction and bulldozing of Palestinian homes, and the deliberate flooding of Hamas tunnels with cement, where several captives were believed to have been held.

Despite the near completion of this central obligation, no multinational stabilisation force has been deployed to Gaza, contrary to what was envisaged in the second phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan that brought an end to nearly two years of war on the Strip. Meanwhile, more than two million Palestinians remain confined to roughly 40 per cent of Gaza’s total area of 360 square kilometres. This population is restricted to zones designated — and progressively expanded — by Israel as a “yellow safe line,” pending the plan’s implementation and an Israeli redeployment to a secondary line that would nonetheless formalise a permanent buffer zone.