Israel’s top officials are openly declaring that they intend to terminate the Gaza ceasefire after they get their hostages back. Defense Minister Israel Katz has posted a tweet in Hebrew which machine translates as follows: “Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States. This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarizing Gaza and neutralizing Hamas of its weapons. I have instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission.” Hamas has not agreed to any demilitarization or destruction of its tunnels. There is no way to demilitarize Gaza and neutralize Hamas of its weapons against their will without continued warfare, something Israel has demonstrated it cannot do without killing shocking numbers of civilians. Katz’s comments echo the public statements of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who said in a televised speech on Friday that “Hamas will be disarmed and Gaza will be demilitarized,” and that if Hamas doesn’t disarm voluntarily then “it will be achieved the hard way.” In another statement Netanyahu said, “We have achieved tremendous victories but the campaign is not over; part of our enemies are trying to recover.” Israeli outlet YNet reports that Israel is planning to resume its blockade and prevent reconstruction if all the bodies of the deceased captives are not returned, when Israel already knows that Hamas probably won’t be able to locate all the bodies of deceased Israeli captives due to the intensity of the Israeli bombing campaign over the last two years. “If Hamas does not cooperate with the return process, and Israel suspects that it is deliberately hiding the bodies in order to preserve them as a bargaining chip, it is expected to impose a series of sanctions on it — including preventing the reconstruction of the Strip, the entry of caravans, the opening of bakeries and the entry of civilian equipment,” Ynet reports. In a recent article titled “Israel assesses Hamas may not be able to return all remaining dead hostages,” CNN reports that “Sources say the Israeli government is aware that Hamas may not know the location of, or is unable to retrieve, the remains of some of the 28 remaining deceased hostages.” As noted by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, these two pieces of information would seem to indicate that Israel is planning to use the unreturned bodies as a pretext to break the ceasefire. It is perhaps somewhat noteworthy that Israel’s open preparations to resume the onslaught in Gaza directly contradict the statements of the president of the United States. Asked by the press about Netanyahu’s refusal to say that the “war” in Gaza is over, Trump forcefully stated, “The war is over. The war is over, okay? You understand that?” Trump suggested (without stating outright) that he has received “verbal guarantees” from Israel that the violence will not resume. So here we have Israeli officials openly and explicitly saying that the attacks on Gaza have not ended, and the US president saying that they have. It’s not often you see these two governments directly contradicting each other with mutually exclusive positions in ways that will necessarily be proven or disproven by the events which follow. So I guess we’re about to find out who has ultimately been in charge of the Gaza genocide this whole time.