While he's Trump's friend, Netanyahu is never going to end the bloodshed in Gaza

Conscious of the need not to infuriate unnecessarily Benjamin Netanyahu on whom the fate of the 59 Israelis still held in Gaza depends – the country’s Hostage and Missing Families’ Forum usually tries to weigh its words with care.

- DONALD MACINTYRE

But the forum’s reaction to his government’s unilateral resumption of the war in the early hours yesterday was unequivocal, accusing it of having “chosen to give up on the hostages”.

This reflects the double agony of the hostages’ families. They fear that the renewed bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces will inevitably endanger the lives of the survivors still in Hamas’s hands, as well as, once again, those of Palestinians, whose latest death toll had already reached over 400 by mid-morning yesterday, on top of more than 48,000 in 15 months of war.

But, secondly, they have every reason to believe that the only way to release the remaining hostages is through an agreement with Hamas. Netanyahu’s repeated boasts that military pressure will somehow free them have been proved hollow by the realities since 7 October, when Hamas and other armed factions kidnapped 251 hostages, and killed another 1,200 Israelis.

The families’ frustration is all the greater because such an agreement actually exists, and because, on this occasion, it is Israel, rather than Hamas, that has reneged on it.

The unpleasant televised parades by Hamas that accompanied the release of hostages last month do not alter the fact that the first stage of that agreement, releasing Israeli hostages in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, went ahead as planned.

What Netanyahu didn’t do, and perhaps never intended to, was to stick to the agreed date of 1 March for a second phase of the deal negotiated – one that had been arranged with US backing in January, and which would have ensured the release of the remaining Hamas hostages, Israel’s withdrawal of its forces from the Gaza Strip, and an end to the war.