Israel is alienating its Western allies and could soon be left with just the US support, says a political pundit.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government made a U-turn this week when it agreed to a previously-rejected ceasefire and prisoner exchange proposed by the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas.
Casualties have been mounting both among Palestinian civilians and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops as they attack the besieged Gaza Strip in retaliation for the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.
Some 13,000 Palestinians have been killed and 33,000 injured by the IDF, around three-quarters of them women, children and the elderly. Israel has revised down its initial estimate of its own losses on October 7 from around 1,400 to 1,200, of which 300 were soldiers or police officers.
Geopolitical commentator George Szamuely told Sputnik that the agreed truce was significant — if only for the 200 people who will be freed under its terms.
"One would like to think that this is the first steps towards the beginning of the end, and that somehow how we're going to move towards a gradual cessation of Israel's onslaught on Gaza," Szamuely said. "But one can't be certain because all the noises that are coming out of the Israeli government is that they intend to go on fighting until they achieve their objectives, which is very nebulous, that they are going to destroy Hamas."
"They haven't done a very good job so far," he added. "It doesn't look like they've damaged Hamas at all."
He noted that the details of the ceasefire deal, which will see three times as many Palestinian women and children freed from Israeli prisons as are held in Gaza by Hamas, showed that the "idealized" picture of Israel painted by the Western media "bears little resemblance to the reality."
"That's a fascinating question: just how many children Israel has in its prisons," Szamuely said. "It really puts the lie to the whole story that Israel is this extraordinarily liberal humanitarian place."
Israel's total siege, bombing and ground offensive against the tiny enclave of Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, has prompted huge protests around the world.
The pundit said Tel Aviv was in danger of losing the "information war" among its Western allies for the first time in its history.
"Israel is sensing that international public opinion, particularly in Europe and most particularly in the United States, is turning against it," Szamuely said. "There is now criticism of Israel that I have never seen in in Western media."
"The BBC ridicules Israel's claims that they found Hamas command and control structure underneath al-Shifa Hospital," he added. "You've got CNN grilling Israeli spokesmen by saying: 'hey, you mean you you bomb a hospital or you bomb a refugee camp because you think there's one Hamas fighter there, and so you're ready to kill hundreds of women and children just in order to get one Hamas fighter?' We haven't heard this type of commentary about Israel ever."
He pointed out that Israel has invested major resources into controlling its public image in the West — "the whole 'plucky little country' up against these horrible, terrible barbarian, savage, Koran-quoting head-chopping loonies that Israel is supposedly daily fighting," but suddenly "no-one's buying that."
"The Israeli government realizes that it has to do something because the window for its operations is rapidly closing," Szamuely said. "The Biden administration is pretty much its only friend now in the world."
Even the ruling Democrats in the US were becoming "very nervous" over the ongoing Israeli onslaught "because its own base is really turning against this."
"All the polls suggest that young people are becoming really disgusted with what Israel is doing and particularly with the way the Biden administration is enabling Israel," Szamuely noted.
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