Netanyahu’s War on Gaza Was Meant to Unite Israel — Now It’s Tearing It Apart

Right, so the state that built itself as a refuge for the world’s displaced Jewry has become a place its own citizens are now desperate to escape. You can call it irony, poetic justice, or just bad policy, but when Ben Gurion Airport starts looking busier than Heathrow on a bad day, something has gone catastrophically wrong. Netanyahu’s endless war — marketed as “defence,” performed as genocide, and sustained by Western indulgence — has gutted Israel from the inside out. Every bomb dropped on Gaza hasn’t made Israelis feel more safe, but less so and just serves to drive another family, wherever they might have originally come from, out of the country. This isn’t security; it’s self-destruction by airstrike. And the so-called ceasefire, with israel now having racked up 80 violations and still starving Gaza, isn’t peace for them or for Israel.
Right, so Israel is living through an exodus of its own making it seems. According to data released by the Knesset’s Research and Information Center, since 2020 around 146,000 more Israelis have left the country than have returned. In 2023 alone, more than 80,000 emigrated permanently. The report categorises this trend as a “strategic threat,” warning that the flight of young professionals, academics, and skilled workers is weakening the state’s social and economic core. A May 2025 survey by Haaretz reported that four in ten Israelis were actively considering leaving altogether. Protecting Israel at any cost until there is literally nobody left living there? Is that what we’re seeing?
Ben Gurion Airport’s departure hall has become the mirror image of the Kerem Shalom crossing, where aid trucks wait for Israeli clearance. One funnels citizens out of a nation they no longer trust; the other keeps food from entering a territory it controls. Both scenes define the reality of Israel in 2025: movement restricted by the same state that claims to safeguard it.
These departures are not driven by fear of rockets. They are the product of fatigue and disbelief. The belief that Israel was exceptional, democratic, and secure has given way to a darker recognition that is becoming more and more prevalent - that the state is now defined by permanent war and moral disintegration. The government has no plan to halt the trend because it cannot fix what it has broken, Netanyahu has no interest in ending a conflict that keeps him in power, as he looks around for the next opportunity to collapse the ceasefire.
Israel continues to describe its operations as self-defence, but fewer and fewer people are buying it anymore and that includes people in Israel. The Israeli public has been told that this destruction is necessary for national safety. Increasingly, citizens are deciding that the price is unbearable — that living inside a state built around siege has become its own form of imprisonment.
How did a nation founded as a refuge, at the expense of the people already living there of course, become a place its own citizens are desperate to escape?
Well as we know, on 10 October, a ceasefire brokered by the United States, Qatar, Egypt, and Türkiye took effect. It was meant to stop the bombing and permit sustained humanitarian access. In practice, it changed only the language used to describe the violence.
The Gaza Government Media Office has at time of writing now recorded eighty separate Israeli violations since the ceasefire began. Ninety-seven Palestinians have been killed and more than two hundred and thirty wounded. The breaches include live fire on civilians, drone strikes, and ground raids in every governorate. These are not minor infractions. They are a continuation of the war under diplomatic cover, they are examples of Israel and Netanyahu’s serial dishonesty when every ceasefire ends up meaning everyone but Israel actually cease firing.
During this period, as I covered in a video yesterday, a single bulldozer incident in Rafah became the latest illustration of Israel’s narrative control. When an Israeli vehicle hit unexploded Israeli ordnance, killing several soldiers, officials immediately blamed Hamas and claimed the ceasefire had been broken by them. Never mind 80 breaches on Israel’s aprt, though it was only 47 breaches at that point. Subsequent evidence confirmed it was Israel’s own munition. The error did not matter; the story had already served its purpose. Within hours, Israeli warplanes were again over Gaza.
At the same time, Donald Trump said that “the ceasefire is still in place.” His statement reflected the detachment of those mediating from those living under bombardment.
US-linked envoys, including Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, arrived in Israel that same week to discuss the next phase of the truce. While they met with Netanyahu, the Israeli Air Force carried out new strikes in Deir al-Balah.
The reality of the ceasefire can be read in the figures. Under its terms, 6,600 aid trucks were expected to enter Gaza by yesterday. Only 986 have made it through — less than 15 percent of what was agreed. Of those, only fourteen carried cooking gas and twenty-eight delivered fuel. Gaza’s bakeries, hospitals, and water pumps rely on both.
The United Nations maintains that at least 600 trucks per day are needed to sustain Gaza’s population. Since the truce, the daily average has been fewer than ninety. Bureaucracy has replaced bombardment as the method of control.
This is siege by administration as much as by Israel blatantly breaching it with further strikes. Israel’s authorities inspect and authorise every delivery. Shipments are rejected for containing items as ordinary as medical tubing, solar lamps, or tents. Each delay and each rejected manifest is an act of policy. The result is a famine engineered through paperwork — what aid officials now describe as starvation by design.
The Gaza authorities have warned that the limited quantities permitted do not meet even the minimum survival threshold. They have demanded the daily entry of at least six hundred trucks carrying food, medicine, and operational fuel. That demand remains unmet.
In Deir al-Balah, one of the few remaining community kitchens feeding displaced families was destroyed by an Israeli strike yesterday. The site belonged to the Rammun Foundation, which operated in partnership with the German public broadcaster ZDF, Germany being Israel’s second largest arms supplier, so I wonder if it was German ordnance involved? A Palestinian broadcast engineer working there and an eight-year-old child were killed. Germany’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the incident and have called for clarification.
When humanitarian activity itself becomes a target, a ceasefire ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.
Israel’s actions since October 2023 cannot be understood as military miscalculations. They are the logic of political survival. Benjamin Netanyahu governs through crisis, sustained by a coalition of far-right parties that would fracture without a constant state of emergency. The genocide provides the cohesion his domestic politics lack.
Each escalation creates the impression of leadership; each diplomatic collapse buys more time in office. His incentive is obvious: peace is personal risk.
This strategy extends to foreign mediation. This week Netanyahu has publicly ruled out any Turkish or Qatari role in Gaza’s post-war reconstruction, calling their involvement a “red line.” Both countries have been central to every previous truce, prisoner exchange, and humanitarian corridor since 2023. Their proposed role was limited to reconstruction and coordination with international agencies. By vetoing their participation, Netanyahu ensured that post-war planning remained dependent on Israel’s military and political control. Israel should have no say in the matter as the illegal occupier.
Even Washington has expressed concern that this stance could derail the US-backed framework for stability. Israel’s refusal to allow independent actors into Gaza ensures that no lasting reconstruction can occur. The objective is not resolution but maintenance of dominance.
The intentions driving this campaign have been articulated publicly by senior Israeli officials. Likud lawmaker Nissim Vaturi stated that once the bodies of hostages were returned, “we will continue the war.” He has previously said Gaza should be “burned” and that “there are no innocents there.” These are not fringe remarks. Similar statements have been made by other members of the governing coalition, by military officers, and by major media commentators. So much for it being all about getting the hostages back though eh?
South Africa’s filing to the International Court of Justice cites multiple examples of such rhetoric as evidence of genocidal intent. Domestic rights groups, including B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have used the same term to describe government conduct. When political leaders frame an entire civilian population as an enemy collective, extermination ceases to be a figure of speech and becomes doctrine.
The social and economic consequences inside Israel are becoming visible. Investment has declined, inflation is rising, and confidence in institutions continues to fall. Strikes by health and education workers over funding shortages have increased. Crime rates are climbing in cities that once prided themselves on order. The war economy absorbs state resources that once supported public services.
Reservists have expressed exhaustion after multiple deployments. Large demonstrations demanding hostage exchanges and elections have been dispersed by police using stun grenades. Journalists critical of the government’s conduct face censorship and the threat of license revocation.
The Knesset report warning of emigration’s strategic danger reflects more than statistics; it reflects loss of faith. Those leaving are disproportionately young, educated, and - relatively speaking - politically moderate. Their departure accelerates the shift of the remaining population toward ideological extremes. Israel is only getting worse.
The same militarism that sustains the occupation is eroding civic life at home. A state that defines itself through siege will eventually turn that siege inward.
Israel’s ability to sustain this war depends on international indulgence. The response from Western governments remains formulaic: expressions of concern followed by continued support.
When an Israeli missile killed the ZDF contractor in Deir al-Balah, the German government said it was “shocked” and demanded “clarification.” There was no suspension of arms exports or cooperation agreements. The United States continues to provide precision munitions while urging restraint. European governments abstain on resolutions calling for accountability.
This choreography allows Israel to act with impunity. It also binds Western states to its crimes. As long as they frame Israeli operations as “self-defence,” they avoid confronting the legal consequences of aiding a campaign that UN investigators amongst others have identified as collective punishment. The result is paralysis at the United Nations and silence from governments that still describe themselves as defenders of international law.
Last Sunday alone, during a ceasefire they claim to still be upholding, Israel dropped 153 tonnes of bombs on Gaza. The figure was recorded by multiple media outlets using field data from the Gaza authorities and satellite observation.
This is not strategy; it is compulsion. A government that defines every pause as weakness has no off switch. Netanyahu’s coalition exists because of war, not in spite of it. Without an external threat, its internal contradictions would surface: corruption trials, sectarian disputes, and collapsing public confidence.
Peace would expose those fractures. War hides them. Each detonation therefore buys political time. Yet the longer the campaign continues, the more it corrodes the foundations of the state — economically, socially, and morally.
History provides examples of what follows when governments build identity around domination. Apartheid South Africa collapsed not from military defeat but from moral exhaustion and economic isolation.
Israel shows similar symptoms: demographic decline, dependence on external subsidies, and growing international isolation. These are not moral judgments but structural realities. A state that relies on force for legitimacy cannot adapt when force becomes untenable.
The flight of Israelis is therefore not peripheral to the story of Gaza. It is its domestic reflection. Every bomb dropped on Gaza reverberates in the conscience of the society that authorised it.
And the record speaks plainly.
Around 146,000 more Israelis have left than returned since 2020.
Eighty ceasefire violations have killed ninety-seven Palestinians and injured more than two hundred and thirty.
Only 986 of 6,600 promised aid trucks have entered Gaza.
Fourteen only carried fuel.
One hundred and fifty-three tonnes of explosives were dropped on Gaza in a single day.
These are the quantifiable results of policy, not mistakes or coincidences. They describe a government that cannot coexist with truth, a leadership that sustains itself through destruction, and a society beginning to vote with its feet as they board planes.
International patience is thinning. United States officials have admitted privately that Netanyahu’s actions are undermining mediation. European parliaments face pressure from constituents to suspend arms sales. The global south has already mobilised legal and diplomatic action under the Genocide Convention.
Inside Israel, fatigue is spreading. Citizens recognise that continued escalation yields no security, only further isolation. Each new bombing campaign widens the gap between the state’s rhetoric and the lived experience of its people.
The question now is not whether Israel can defeat its enemies, but whether it can recover from what it has done. No democracy can remain credible while normalising mass death and starvation. No economy can thrive while exporting violence and importing sanctions.
The departure halls of Ben Gurion Airport are the quiet evidence of this reckoning. Those leaving are not radicals. They are professionals, students, and families who once trusted in the idea of Israel as a modern, democratic state. Their exits are acts of disassociation, not rebellion.
Each departure diminishes the state’s capacity to renew itself. Each ceasefire breach makes return less likely. Israel’s internal decline and Gaza’s external devastation are no longer separate phenomena; they are cause and effect. The state that starves another people has begun to consume itself.
The facts are not ambiguous. The data on emigration, the verified record of ceasefire violations, the documented obstruction of aid, and the open rhetoric of extermination all describe the same reality. Israel’s leadership has chosen permanent war as its organising principle. The result is the degradation of its own society.
A government cannot wage genocide abroad and maintain democracy at home. The evidence from 2020 to 2025 shows that Israel is failing on both fronts. The ceasefire has functioned as cover for continued assault. The blockade has become a substitute for policy. The flight of citizens has become a referendum on the future.
The question now is not whether Israel will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, but what the world will do when it does. The longer Western governments sustain this system, the more complicit they become in its inevitable fall.
Israel remains powerful but unstable. Its survival now depends not on weaponry or diplomacy but on confronting what it has become and they show no sign of doing that. Until that reckoning occurs – it it ever does - the exits at Ben Gurion Airport will stay crowded, and perhaps become ever more so.
For more on Netanyahu’s desperation as shown in other recent ceasefire attacks, notably the attempt to weaponise that friendly fire incident in Rafah to justify calling off the ceasefire and blaming it all on Hamas, check out this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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