For Binyamin Netanyahu, the future looks surprisingly bright – certainly much more than six months ago. As Israel faces a general election later this year, polling suggests his party is gaining strength, and there is now an increased chance that he will be able to form a viable coalition with extreme right-wing parties. In the process, the prime minister may be able to further delay his court appearances on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, all of which he denies.
At the root of Netanyahu’s much-improved prospects is his government’s ability to convince the majority of Israeli Jews that they are once again secure, after the trauma of the Hamas attacks of October 2023. Doing so has involved the Israeli Defence Forces killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 missing under the rubble. Israel last month accepted this death toll as “broadly accurate”, having previously dismissed it as “Hamas propaganda”.
Netanyahu’s ministers have reduced Gazans to the status of “human animals” over the past two years, and polling suggests that most Israeli Jews have now come to believe that the answer to their Gaza problem is removing the entire population, and many would even accept their being killed. The IDF is continuing military operations across the enclave, where hundreds of Palestinians have died since the ‘ceasefire’ started in October last year.
