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TEL AVIV: As it grinds on well into its twenty-second month, Israel’s war in Gaza has set friends and families against one another and sharpened existing political and cultural divides.
Hostage families and peace activists want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to secure a ceasefire with Hamas and free the remaining captives abducted during the October 2023 Hamas attacks.
Right-wing members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, meanwhile, want to seize the moment to occupy and annex more Palestinian land, at the risk of sparking further international criticism.
The debate has divided the country and strained private relationships, undermining national unity at Israel’s moment of greatest need in the midst of its longest war.
“As the war continues we become more and more divided,” said Emanuel Yitzchak Levi, a 29-year-old poet, schoolteacher and peace activist from Israel’s religious left who attended a peace meeting at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square.
“It’s really hard to keep being a friend, or family, a good son, a good brother to someone that’s — from your point of view — supporting crimes against humanity,” he told AFP.
“And I think it’s also hard for them to support me if they think I betrayed my own country.”
As if to underline this point, a tall, dark-haired cyclist angered by the gathering pulled up his bike to shout “traitors” at the attendees and to accuse activists of playing into Hamas’s hands.


Dvir Berko, a 36-year-old worker at one of the city’s many IT startups, paused his scooter journey across downtown Tel Aviv to share a more reasoned critique of the peace activists’ call for a ceasefire.
Berko and others accused international bodies of exaggerating the threat of starvation in Gaza, and he told AFP that Israel should withhold aid until the remaining 49 hostages are freed.
“The Palestinian people, they’re controlled by Hamas. Hamas takes their food. Hamas starts this war and, in every war that happens, bad things are going to happen. You’re not going to send the other side flowers,” he argued.
“So, if they open a war, they should realize and understand what’s going to happen after they open the war.”
The raised voices in Tel Aviv reflect a deepening polarization in Israeli society since Hamas’s October 2023 attacks left 1,219 people dead, independent journalist Meron Rapoport told AFP.
Rapoport, a former senior editor at liberal daily Haaretz, noted that Israel had been divided before the latest conflict, and had even seen huge anti-corruption protests against Netanyahu and perceived threats to judicial independence.
Hamas’s attack initially triggered a wave of national unity, but as the conflict has dragged on and Israel’s conduct has come under international criticism, attitudes on the right and left have diverged and hardened.


“The moment Hamas acted there was a coming together,” Rapoport said. “Nearly everyone saw it as a just war.
“As the war went on it has made people come to the conclusion that the central motivations are not military reasons but political ones.”
According to a survey conducted between July 24 and 28 by the Institute for National Security Studies, with 803 Jewish and 151 Arab respondents, Israelis narrowly see Hamas as primarily to blame for the delay in reaching a deal on freeing the hostages.
Only 24 percent of Israeli Jews are distressed or “very distressed” by the humanitarian situation in Gaza — where, according to UN-mandated reports, “a famine is unfolding” and Palestinian civilians are often killed while seeking food.
But there is support for the families of the Israeli hostages, many of whom have accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war artificially to strengthen his own political position.
“In Israel there’s a mandatory army service,” said Mika Almog, 50, an author and peace activist with the It’s Time Coalition.
“So these soldiers are our children and they are being sent to die in a false criminal war that is still going on for nothing other than political reasons.”
In an open letter published Monday, 550 former top diplomats, military officers and spy chiefs urged US President Donald Trump to tell Netanyahu that the military stage of the war was already won and he must now focus on a hostage deal.
“At first this war was a just war, a defensive war, but when we achieved all military objectives, this war ceased to be a just war,” said Ami Ayalon, former director of the Shin Bet security service.
The conflict “is leading the State of Israel to lose its security and identity,” he warned in a video released to accompany the letter.
This declaration by the security officers — those who until recently prosecuted Israel’s overt and clandestine wars — echoed the views of the veteran peace activists that have long protested against them.


Biblical archaeologist and kibbutz resident Avi Ofer is 70 years old and has long campaigned for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
He and fellow activists wore yellow ribbons with the length in days of the war written on it: “667.”
The rangy historian was close to tears as he told AFP: “This is the most awful period in my life.”
“Yes, Hamas are war criminals. We know what they do. The war was justified at first. At the beginning it was not a genocide,” he said.
Not many Israelis use the term “genocide,” but they are aware that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is considering whether to rule on a complaint that the country has breached the Genocide Convention.
While only a few are anguished about the threat of starvation and violence hanging over their neighbors, many are worried that Israel may become an international pariah — and that their conscript sons and daughters be treated like war crimes suspects when abroad.
Israel and Netanyahu — with support from the United States — have denounced the case in The Hague.

NEW DELHI: The men shared bear hugs, showered praise on each other and made appearances side by side at stadium rallies — a big optics boost for two populist leaders with ideological similarities. Each called the other a good friend.
In India, the bonhomie between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump was seen as a relationship like no other. That is, until a series of events gummed up the works.
From Trump’s tariffs and India’s purchase of oil from Russia to a US tilt toward Pakistan, friction between New Delhi and Washington has been hard to miss. And much of it has happened far from the corridors of power and, unsurprisingly, through Trump’s posts on social media.
It has left policy experts wondering whether the camaraderie the two leaders shared may be a thing of the past, even though Trump has stopped short of referring to Modi directly on social media. The dip in rapport, some say, puts a strategic bilateral relationship built over decades at risk.
“This is a testing time for the relationship,” said Ashok Malik, a former policy adviser in India’s Foreign Ministry.
The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Simmering tensions over trade and tariffs
The latest hiccup between India and the US emerged last week when Trump announced that he was slapping 25 percent tariffs on India as well as an unspecified penalty because of India’s purchasing of Russian oil. For New Delhi, such a move from its largest trading partner is expected to be felt across sectors, but it also led to a sense of unease in India — even more so when Trump, on social media, called India’s economy “dead.”
Trump’s recent statements reflect his frustration with the pace of trade talks with India, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal administration thinking. The Republican president has not been pursuing any strategic realignment with Pakistan, according to the official, but is instead trying to play hardball in negotiations.
Trump doubled down on the pressure Monday with a fresh post on Truth Social, in which he accused India of buying “massive amounts” of oil from Russia and then “selling it on the Open Market for big profits.”
“They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA,” he said.
The messaging appears to have stung Modi’s administration, which has been hard-selling negotiations with Trump’s team over a trade deal by balancing between India’s protectionist system while also opening up the country’s market to more American goods.
“Strenuous, uninterrupted and bipartisan efforts in both capitals over the past 25 years are being put at risk by not just the tariffs but by fast and loose statements and social media posts,” said Malik, who now heads the India chapter of The Asia Group, a US advisory firm .
Malik also said the trade deal the Indian side has offered to the US is the “most expansive in this country’s history,” referring to reports that India was willing to open up to some American agricultural products. That is a politically sensitive issue for Modi, who faced a yearlong farmers’ protest a few years ago.
Trump appears to be tilting toward Pakistan
The unraveling may have gained momentum over tariffs, but the tensions have been palpable for a while. Much of it has to do with Trump growing closer to Pakistan, India’s nuclear rival in the neighborhood.
In May, India and Pakistan traded a series of military strikes over a gun massacre in disputed Kashmir that New Delhi blamed Islamabad for. Pakistan denied the accusations. The four-day conflict made the possibility of a nuclear conflagration between the two sides seem real and the fighting only stopped when global powers intervened.
But it was Trump’s claims of mediation and an offer to work to provide a “solution” regarding the dispute over Kashmir that made Modi’s administration uneasy. Since then, Trump has repeated nearly two dozen times that he brokered peace between India and Pakistan.
For Modi, that is a risky — even nervy — territory. Domestically, he has positioned himself as a leader who is tough on Pakistan. Internationally, he has made huge diplomatic efforts to isolate the country. So Trump’s claims cut a deep wound, prompting a sense in India that the US may no longer be its strategic partner.
India insists that Kashmir is India’s internal issue and had opposed any third-party intervention. Last week Modi appeared to dismiss Trump’s claims after India’s Opposition began demanding answers from him. Modi said that “no country in the world stopped” the fighting between India and Pakistan, but he did not name Trump.
Trump has also appeared to be warming up to Pakistan, even praising its counterterrorism efforts. Hours after levying tariffs on India, Trump announced a “massive” oil exploration deal with Pakistan, saying that some day, India might have to buy oil from Islamabad. Earlier, he also hosted one of Pakistan’s top military officials at a private lunch.
Sreeram Sundar Chaulia, an expert at New Delhi’s Jindal School of International Affairs, said Trump’s sudden admiration for Pakistan as a great partner in counterterrorism has “definitely soured” the mood in India.
Chaulia said “the best-case scenario is that this is just a passing Trump whim,” but he also warned that “if financial and energy deals are indeed being struck between the US and Pakistan, it will dent the US-India strategic partnership and lead to loss of confidence in the US in Indian eyes.”
India’s oil purchases from Russia are an irritant
The strain in relations has also to do with oil.
India had faced strong pressure from the Biden administration to cut back its oil purchases from Moscow during the early months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Instead, India bought more, making it the second-biggest buyer of Russian oil after China. That pressure sputtered over time and the US focused more on building strategic ties with India, which is seen as a bulwark against a rising China.
Trump’s threat to penalize India over oil, however, brought back those issues.
On Sunday, the Trump administration made its frustrations over ties between India and Russia ever more public. Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House, accused India of financing Russia’s war in Ukraine by purchasing oil from Moscow, saying it was “not acceptable.”
Miller’s remarks were followed by another Trump social media post on Monday in which he again threatened to raise tariffs on goods from India over its Russian oil purchases.
“India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits. They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine,” Trump wrote.
Some experts, though, suspect Trump’s remarks are mere pressure tactics. “Given the wild fluctuations in Trump’s policies,” Chaulia said, “it may return to high fives and hugs again.”
India says it will safeguard its interests
Many expected India to react strongly over Trump’s tariff threats considering Modi’s carefully crafted reputation of strength. Instead, the announcement prompted a rather careful response from India’s commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, who said the two countries are working toward a “fair, balanced and mutually beneficial bilateral trade agreement.”
Initially, India’s Foreign Ministry also played down suggestions of any strain. But in a statement late Monday, it called Trump’s criticism “unjustified and unreasonable” and said it will take “all necessary measures to safeguard its national interests and economic security.”
It said India began importing oil from Russia because traditional supplies were diverted to Europe after the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict, calling it a “necessity compelled by global market situation.”
The statement also noted US trade with Russia.
“It is revealing that the very nations criticizing India are themselves indulging in trade with Russia,” the statement said.