It’s hard to see how breaking the ceasefire helps Israel. It’s easy to see how it helps Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers remarks following a meeting with U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 7. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

The Gaza ceasefire appears to be over. That’s a tragedy for the 59 hostages who remain in the strip, fewer than half of whom are believed to still be alive. But it’s great for strengthening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hold on power.

In the early hours of Tuesday, Israel struck Hamas targets throughout Gaza, taking out several senior terror officials and, according to Hamas’ health ministry, killing more than 400 Palestinians. Some two months after the ceasefire deal was signed, there are still plenty of legitimate reasons for Israel to be pursuing action against Hamas, which has promised to repeat the horrific crimes of Oct. 7 over and over again. But restarting the war is unlikely to advance this objective.

What it will do is take care of several important aims for Netanyahu, foremost among them shoring up his coalition in advance of the March 31 deadline to pass a budget in the Knesset. If Netanyahu falls short of the 61 votes he needs, elections will automatically be triggered. If you doubted that possibility was weighing heavy on the prime minister’s mind, it’s telling that mere hours after hostilities resumed, the far-right leader Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that his Otzma Yehudit party would rejoin the government, providing Netanyahu with a much-needed margin of error heading into this crucial vote.

But the broader dynamic at play is the Netanyahu government’s ongoing assault on the democratic guardrails that prevent executive overreach in Israel and safeguard the interests of the public.

One front of this assault has been the coalition’s revived bid to subvert the power of the judiciary. A controversial bill to politicize judicial appointments, which resurfaces efforts made in the attempted judicial overhaul of 2023, is quickly advancing through the Knesset.

Another is the government’s attempt to fire Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, an independent official tasked with ensuring that the government adheres to the law. Why make the attorney general a target? One reason is that Baharav-Miara has oversight over the prosecution of elected officials — meaning that Netanyahu could be aiming to replace her with a yes-man who would cancel his criminal indictments.

In recent days, Baharav-Miara has gotten under Netanyahu’s skin by attempting to block the firing of another powerful figure in Netanyahu’s crosshairs: Shabak chief Ronen Bar. The Shabak is one of Israel’s primary intelligence bodies responsible for the Palestinian arena, including Gaza. As Bar himself has acknowledged, both he and the organization he leads bear responsibility for Israel’s security failures leading up to and on Oct. 7.

Netanyahu, in attempting to fire Bar, is trying to deflect blame for those failures from himself — particularly as the Shabak just released the results of an inquiry that draws a direct line between Netanyahu’s policy of covertly channeling funds to Hamas and Oct. 7. For his part, Bar has said he will resign once the hostages are released and a full state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7 is established, a move Netanyahu has resisted.

As all this drama unfolds, with mass protests against Netanyahu’s efforts planned for Wednesday, resuming the war in Gaza seems like a convenient cover for Netanyahu to divert the public’s attention away from his government’s shadow war against the “deep state” — in other words, the civil servants and independent institutions that prioritize the rule of law over the will of the prime minister.

The resumption of fears for the remaining hostages, the economic and social burden posed by the mobilization of reservists, and the likely return of daily IDF casualties will leave Israelis with limited bandwidth to resist democratic backsliding.

It will also mire Israel deeper in a conflict with no apparent end.

After the first phase of the ceasefire deal expired on March 1, and negotiations to extend the deal reached an impasse, it was only a matter of time before the war resumed — a situation that Netanyahu’s government actively encouraged. Under his leadership, Israel’s government pushed for a temporary extension of Phase 1 to allow hostage releases to continue.

This proposal was an obvious non-starter for Hamas, which remained steadfast in its demand for an end to the war and full Israeli withdrawal.

In an absolute sense, Hamas is unquestionably to blame for this situation. There is no justification for any of its actions. But it is a terror organization, and Israel is a democratic country whose government is accountable to the people. The people of Israel are overwhelmingly clear: They want an end to the war, and the hostages returned. Yet their government, in delaying the phase two negotiations, proposed conditions that ensured the impossibility of reaching a diplomatic arrangement.

There is a security rationale — albeit flawed — for Israel’s willingness to prioritize a resumption of the war over a negotiated hostage release. Officially, Israel’s strikes on Gaza are intended to put pressure on Hamas to free the hostages, or at least soften its stance in the negotiations. Echoing Trump’s “all hell to pay” threat, the message Israel is sending to Hamas is that it will resume the ground operation — which it has not yet done — if Hamas doesn’t show greater flexibility.

But even faced with the possibility of the war restarting, Hamas has little reason to acquiesce to Israel’s demand to release hostages if Israel refuses to declare an end to the war in exchange. Why would Hamas concede its most valuable bargaining chip when the only thing it stands to gain is a delay in the war’s inevitable resumption?

For Hamas, the threat of returning to fighting is also not all that compelling; the Israeli military operation has decimated its capabilities, but the group remains the dominant force on the ground in Gaza. It benefits from the ways in which the war is fostering a potential recruitment pool of hopeless, traumatized, and radicalized Gazan youth. And, indifferent to Gazans’ suffering, Hamas’ goal is surviving the war and living to fight another day. Netanyahu has largely vetoed the entry into Gaza of the Palestinian Authority, the only entity in Palestinian society that could plausibly challenge Hamas’ dominance. Short of fully occupying Gaza or expelling the population, it is unclear what Israel’s military campaign could do to prevent this outcome in the absence of a credible plan to address the question of what will replace Hamas.

This gambit will also likely doom the remaining Israeli hostages,given the narrow chances of freeing them outside of an agreement with Hamas. It is, if anything, likely that Hamas will respond to renewed Israeli strikes by stepping up its psychological terrorism, abusing or even gradually killing hostages as a means of manipulating the Israeli public.

Israel’s post-Oct. 7 era is one of compounding existential challenges. The country waged 16 months of war against Iran-backed terror organizations — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis — that threaten its security while being led by a government that threatens its democracy.

Netanyahu wants to continue leveraging these external threats for his own benefit. For those who wish for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, the return of the hostages, and the onset of rebuilding in Gaza, the question is: Will he succeed?