Name: What lies behind Israel's latest ground offensive in Deir al-Balah? | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-07-22T16:58:39.000Z
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We start in Gaza, where the Israeli military has begun a new offensive in the central city of Deir al-Bala.

Israeli tanks have entered the city and Israeli soldiers are operating on the ground.

It's the first larger operation in Deir al-Bala since the war in Gaza began 21 months ago.

It is widely believed that some of the remaining hostages being held by Hamas could be there.

The area is home to thousands of Palestinians who have fled the fighting in the rest of the territory.

Israel's near-daily bombardment of Gaza continues.

This woman lost her son in one of the strikes.

I was injured in the leg and he was hit by shrapnel here in his neck.

I went to wake my son up and I found him martyred.

We have nothing to do with Hamas or Jihad or anything.

And for the first time in 21 months of war, Israeli ground troops are now pushing into

It's where several aid agencies are based and it's the only remaining area of Gaza that has not suffered widespread destruction.

According to Israeli sources, this is where Hamas militants may be holding hostages.

Tens of thousands of people from the rest of Gaza sought refuge here until the Israeli army issued evacuation orders on Sunday.

We really expected that these massacres would stop, that someone would stand by our side and stop this, but no action was taken.

We stopped expecting anything from anyone.

In a sign of international frustration, many of Israel's allies issued a joint statement condemning its killing of aid seekers in Gaza and called for an immediate end to the war.

It reads, the Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.

We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.

The UN says more than 800 people have been killed while queuing for aid in Gaza since

Israel has rejected the statement, calling it, quote, disconnected from reality.

Aaron David Miller joins me now, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International

A growing number of Western nations have signed a statement calling for the war in Gaza to end now and criticising Israel's tactics.

You have said on X that this is, quote, necessary but not sufficient.

What do you think is needed at this point?

Look, in the wake of October 7th, this entire process to negotiating an end to this war lies in the hands of the government of Israel and Hamas's leadership, or at least those brigade commanders that are posing as leaders of this organisation.

It has been an incremental process at best, in large part because Hamas's objectives and

Israel's with respect to ending this war are simply mutually incompatible.

And in the interim, the Israelis, frankly, have accomplished most of their military objectives.

In my judgment, this is now a political war designed to press Hamas and to create what the prime minister believes to be total victory, which would be the expulsion of the senior leadership or whatever remains of the senior leadership, the disarmament of Hamas as a military organisation, and some future for two million Palestinian citizens in Gaza.

Right now, the only way that you can get relief, what is necessary, what is imperative, and the best you can do is another interim deal.

I would suggest in the next several weeks, the odds of actually reaching such an agreement won't end a war, but it'll buy two months of relative peace and calm, which might allow for the predictable and reliable infusion and delivery of badly needed humanitarian assistance and the release of 10 hostages alive, and at least half of those that Hamas holds that are dead.

We are a long way away from ending the misery and catastrophe that is now Gaza.

If the US has leverage, what do you think the United States needs to do to push Israel to end the war?

It's just that no American president since Dwight Eisenhower, who was the last US president to seriously threaten Israel with political and economic sanctions, in this case, if Ben

Gurion, then prime minister, did not withdraw his forces as part of the British-French-Israeli plan to seize the Suez Canal in 1956 and depose Gamal Abdel Nasser.

That was the last time that a US president threatened to use sustained pressure.

It's politically costly, and it's arguable whether or not it will actually work.

If this were a negotiation that the US was mediating between Israel and Germany, for example, then I think you could envision both incentives and disincentives to move the parties toward an agreement.

In this case, you have America's closest ally, whatever the divergence and fundamental division may be in how the US and Israel seize this war, less under Trump, certainly, than under

Joe Biden, facing off against an organization that is categorized by American legislation as a foreign terrorist organization that engaged in willful and indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians, sexual predation, mutilation, and the taking of hostages.

In such a negotiation with the US brokering, there's absolutely no way that this administration and certainly the last would have fundamentally decided to use leverage against the Israelis in order to produce a better deal for Hamas.

That is what makes this situation so very difficult.

We are dealing with an American president, frankly, unlike some of his predecessors,

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, who fundamentally had an emotional stake, a political one as well, in the very idea of Israel, the security of Israel, the people of Israel.

This president is a transactional president.

If anyone is going to pressure the Israelis, it probably will be Donald Trump.

And he's demonstrated in the last six months an extraordinary series of actions, which marginalized and sidelined the Israeli government, Mr. Netanyahu's government, even as he made them central in the case of Iran, which redounded to Donald Trump's benefit.

Aaron David Miller, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

She's the Head of Humanitarian Policy and Advocacy at Save the Children International and joins us tonight from Washington, D.C.

Alexandra, good to have you on the show again.

Israel has started this offensive in Deir el-Bala now.

It's also a hub for humanitarian aid organizations, including yours, including Save the Children.

What are your colleagues on the ground telling you about the situation?

So even if they were to flee, there is nowhere to flee to.

Many other organizations also have premises in Deir el-Bala.

And this ground offensive threatens to cut off any remaining lifeline that the population in Gaza has.

There is almost no food available to the people of Gaza.

The food that is entering through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not accessible to the majority of the population.

People are having to trek miles and face gunfire just to obtain food parcels to feed their families.

I mean, the stories that we're hearing from Gaza today are absolutely harrowing.

We're hearing of people collapsing on the street because they don't have enough to eat.

Children tell us that they want to go to heaven because they hear that in heaven there's food.

And now aid workers themselves are suffering from malnutrition because they don't have enough to eat, just like the rest of the population.

Yeah, it's a devastating picture you're painting there.

The Israeli military, the IDF, says that they maintain contact with international aid organizations in order to facilitate evacuations in Deir el-Bala.

Is that happening with Save the Children, as far as you're concerned?

Not that I'm aware of, and we have not been able to get any supplies into Gaza since the beginning of the year, since February of this year.

So the situation and our ability to provide assistance is diminishing because of the constant

Israeli government bombardment and because of the siege.