The story of Gaza’s collapsing ceasefire is being told as a military story: strikes, violations, body counts. The more accurate story is a domestic political one. Netanyahu is not being held back from a deal by Hamas’s intransigence or battlefield logic. He is being held in place by a coalition arithmetic that makes any durable ceasefire more dangerous to his political survival than the war itself. Until that calculation changes, no framework brokered in Doha or Cairo will hold.
Seven months after the ceasefire was announced with considerable international fanfare, Israeli forces have killed at least 880 Palestinians since the agreement came into effect, pushing the total death toll to over 72,000. The ceasefire has not ended. It has morphed into something else; a diplomatic fiction that allows military operations to continue under a different name, while international mediators issue statements and Netanyahu attends to the only audience that has ever mattered to him: the 64 seats that keep him in the prime minister’s office.
The Numbers That Run Israeli Policy
Netanyahu’s coalition is built on a premise that has been true for years and is now more constraining than ever: he cannot govern without the far right, and the far right will not survive a genuine ceasefire. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism are not factions that tolerate ambiguity on Gaza. Smotrich has explicitly threatened to resign if the war stops completely, demanding Netanyahu promise to continue Gaza operations after any prisoner exchange. Ben-Gvir already resigned from the coalition over the ceasefire agreement, calling it a capitulation to Hamas and a renunciation of the military’s achievements. Both have made clear that a negotiated end to the war — one that leaves Hamas’s political structure intact, allows Gaza reconstruction, and accepts a Palestinian administrative committee, crosses a line they will not cross.
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The calculation is what makes this structural rather than personal. Without UTJ, Netanyahu’s coalition holds just 61 out of parliament’s 120 seats, making him more susceptible to pressure from far-right parties who strongly oppose ending the war in Gaza. A second ultra-Orthodox party has also been considering leaving over the military draft exemption dispute, a crisis that has nothing to do with Gaza but everything to do with Netanyahu’s ability to hold a majority. The Israeli government collapsed into legislative paralysis when Netanyahu was forced to withdraw all coalition bills from the Knesset agenda following an open revolt by his ultra-Orthodox allies, with Rabbi Dov Lando labelling Netanyahu a liar and instructing his party members to move toward dissolving the Knesset. A prime minister managing that kind of internal fire cannot simultaneously be making genuine concessions in Cairo.
Why Elections Have Become the Ceasefire’s Real Variable
With Israel’s next national election expected in September, analysts and human rights officials have warned that Netanyahu is deliberately stalling the peace process to appease his right-wing coalition allies and voters. That framing, deliberate stalling, is correct but incomplete. Netanyahu is not simply playing for time. He is trying to sequence events in a way that maximises his electoral survival in a landscape where Naftali Bennett has emerged as a serious right-wing challenger who can plausibly outflank him.
The electoral logic runs like this. A ceasefire that ends the war before elections remove Netanyahu’s last claim to being the indispensable security leader. It hands the hostage families a politically potent domestic constituency; the argument that a deal could have been reached earlier and that their relatives died unnecessarily. It frees Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to campaign against him from the right, claiming he surrendered. And it gives Bennett, who has positioned himself as a tougher, more competent version of the same right-wing politics, the opening to say the war was mismanaged from the start.
Continuing the war, by contrast, keeps Netanyahu at the centre of the national security narrative, suppresses the coalition’s internal fractures under the gravity of ongoing conflict, and allows him to control the timing of any eventual deal rather than having it forced on him by American pressure or mediator deadlines. If Netanyahu feels like he has improved his political standing, he may want to call elections before the scheduled October date. Every day the ceasefire holds at the level of fiction rather than reality is a day Netanyahu retains that option.
The Coalition’s Red Lines on Any Gaza Deal
The gap between what the international community thinks a ceasefire requires and what Netanyahu’s coalition will tolerate is wide enough to drive a tank through, and both sides know it.
The Hamas disarmament deal brokered with American involvement requires, at minimum, a verifiable weapons decommissioning process, a Palestinian administrative committee for civilian governance, and a timeline for Israeli military withdrawal from populated areas. Netanyahu has used the stipulated disarmament of Palestinian factions as a pretext to evade his ceasefire commitments, while his coalition partners have made clear that any arrangement leaving Hamas’s political structure intact is unacceptable. Smotrich’s position is that Israel must take over the provision of humanitarian aid itself. Ben-Gvir’s position is that Gaza must be permanently occupied or resettled. Neither position is compatible with the framework that Trump, Qatar, Egypt and the Arab League have been working toward.
What Netanyahu can accept, within coalition constraints, is an arrangement that looks like a ceasefire from the outside and functions like a managed occupation from the inside. Continued Israeli military presence in the corridor zones. Humanitarian aid conditional on Israeli control of distribution. No Hamas role in governance. No reconstruction timeline that implies permanence of Palestinian civilian authority. The problem is that Hamas will not accept that arrangement, and the mediators have run out of creative formulations that can paper over the gap.
The Scenarios
Base case (~40%): Netanyahu navigates the election period without either a genuine ceasefire or a full return to open war. The fiction of a ceasefire holds at current levels — regular Israeli strikes framed as responses to violations, gradual expansion of buffer zones, continued obstruction of reconstruction, while international mediators cycle through another round of framework talks that produce communiqués without implementation. Ben-Gvir returns to the coalition after elections in exchange for policy concessions on settlements. The situation in Gaza is no better by December than it is today.
Downside case (~40%): The coalition fractures before or immediately after elections, producing a governing crisis that paralyses Israeli policy at precisely the moment a new ceasefire framework requires decisive Israeli commitment. A caretaker government cannot make the concessions a real deal requires, and the window that currently exists: Trump’s second term, a functional Qatari-Egyptian mediation track, Hamas leadership willing to negotiate, closes without being used. The ceasefire collapses into open conflict under a government that has no political mandate to end the war.
Upside case (~20%): Elections produce a coalition that does not depend on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich for its majority. Bennett, if he wins, has the right-wing credibility to make a deal that Netanyahu could not, in the same way Nixon going to China worked precisely because his anti-communist credentials were unimpeachable. A Bennett government with a different coalition arithmetic is the one scenario in which a durable ceasefire becomes politically achievable rather than politically suicidal for the prime minister who signs it.
Our Take: Netanyahu Has No Incentive to End a War That Keeps Him in Power
The international community has spent seven months treating the Gaza ceasefire as a security problem with a diplomatic solution. It is a domestic political problem with an electoral solution, and that solution is not available until Israel votes and a new coalition is formed around different arithmetic.
Netanyahu is not a leader who will sacrifice his political survival for a foreign policy legacy. He has demonstrated this consistently across thirty years in Israeli politics. The ceasefire he will accept is the one that keeps him in power, and the one that keeps him in power is the one his coalition will tolerate. Those two things are not the same as the ceasefire Gaza needs, the ceasefire Hamas will accept, or the ceasefire the international community is currently trying to broker. Until the domestic equation changes, the ceasefire will remain exactly what it has always been: a fiction that serves the man who controls it.
