MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Israel's cabinet is expected to meet this week to decide on whether to expand Israel's war in Gaza, where more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed according to health officials there.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
That's despite the families of hostages being held there who say they fear ramping up military activity endangers the about 20 hostages still believed to be alive.
MARTIN: NPR's Emily Feng is with us this morning to explain more about this. Good morning, Emily.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: It sounds like there is a lot of disagreement over what Israel's next steps in Gaza should be.
FENG: Absolutely. And those tensions are right in the public eye this week. Ceasefire talks stalled late last month. And far-right elements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political coalition have been pressing for the full annexation of Gaza. Now, NPR's own reporting has shown that Israel's senior leadership no longer thinks a deal with Hamas is possible. I want to stress, nothing militarily has been officially decided yet. But whether to pursue a bigger war in Gaza is pitting Netanyahu against the very well-respected chief of staff of Israel's military, who has taken steps that suggest he opposes extending the war.
Netanyahu, as you mentioned, is also pitted against the families of the hostages. This week, militants in Gaza released video showing two of those hostages horribly emaciated and begging for help. And an organization representing some of these hostage families on Monday accused Netanyahu of, quote, "the greatest deception" yet. They said the public has been sold the illusion that military pressure will bring the hostages home when it has not. And this urgency is reaching the United Nations. At Israel's request, the Security Council is holding a briefing this afternoon on the hostage situation. And Israel's foreign minister is in New York for that meeting.
MARTIN: So what is the end goal in Gaza now? Like, what military objective remains there?
FENG: That has been the ultimate question. What is the end goal in Gaza? Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed, quote, "a total victory." But would that be a Pyrrhic victory, at too great a cost? Israel has already flattened most of Gaza. And dozens of Palestinians a day are being killed from Israeli gunfire, or they're starving to death.
And Israel's own military is strained by this long war. It is running low on recruits. It is financially under pressure. And a little bit of recent history - Israel did occupy Gaza for a nearly 40-year period. But it was hugely expensive and deadly for Israeli soldiers. And so the military occupation inside Gaza ended in 2005.
MARTIN: How serious is this proposal to reoccupy Gaza?
FENG: So a poll done by Tel Aviv University called the Peace Index found just this past July that about 45% of Israelis support forcibly moving Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. And almost 40% of Israelis support allowing civilian settlements in Gaza again. But there's also real pushback, and most notably, multiple appeals from Israel's defense establishment. They argue an occupation is just unsustainable.
Most recently, about almost 600 senior retired security officers signed a letter to President Trump this week calling for pressure to end the war in Gaza. And perhaps the most powerful anti-war voices have been Israeli soldiers themselves. One of these young soldiers, named Ron Feiner, gave this speech at a recent anti-war protest I went to in Tel Aviv.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RON FEINER: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: He got huge applause. He says the Israeli government does not care about the hostages rotting in tunnels. They don't care about the soldiers dying in battle. All they care about are fantasies of conquest. Feiner spent 270 days fighting in Lebanon in Israel's military last year. But when he was called to fight in Gaza this year, he refused.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Emily Feng in Tel Aviv. Emily, thank you.
FENG: Thanks, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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