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Nothing seems capable of curbing the madness of a man who has turned bloodshed into state policy. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has surrounded himself with the most extreme Cabinet in Israel’s history — a coalition of ultranationalists, messianic zealots and settler ideologues who treat Palestinian existence as an obstacle to be removed. Together, they have transformed the war on Gaza into a campaign of extermination masked as “self-defense.”

Sometimes Netanyahu destroys hospitals, sometimes his war machine flattens shelters, sometimes he starves families by targeting aid convoys. Now, after killing tens of thousands and turning entire neighborhoods into rubble, he is threatening to unleash his warplanes on Gaza’s remaining high-rise buildings, wiping away the last fragments of a besieged society. His message to the people of Gaza is clear: nothing remains for you here; your existence itself is intolerable.

To understand this campaign, one must understand the ideology of Netanyahu’s coalition. Figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich do not merely tolerate Palestinian suffering, they openly call for expulsion and annexation. Their rhetoric is genocidal, their agenda nakedly colonial. They dream of a “Greater Israel” purged of Palestinians and Gaza is their testing ground.

By empowering radicals, he deflects accountability and paints himself as the indispensable centrist holding Israel together

Hani Hazaimeh

Netanyahu, a master manipulator, enables and weaponizes these voices. For him, their extremism is politically useful — an iron wall against domestic opposition and a distraction from his corruption trial. By empowering radicals, he deflects accountability and paints himself as the indispensable centrist holding Israel together. In reality, he has surrendered the state to extremists who see ethnic cleansing not as a byproduct of war but as its central aim.

The Israeli war on Gaza is not aimed at Hamas alone, it is aimed at the infrastructure of Palestinian life itself. Hospitals, schools, power stations, water networks and food distribution centers have been systematically destroyed. Starvation has become a weapon of war. Aid convoys are blocked or attacked. High-rises that house displaced families are threatened with bombardment. This is not deterrence — it is deliberate erasure.

Netanyahu and his allies are implementing, step by step, a blueprint for displacing Gaza’s population and reasserting Israeli control. What is tested in Gaza will be expanded to the West Bank, where settlement expansion, land seizures and settler violence already follow the same logic.

Behind this brutality lies Netanyahu’s personal desperation. Indicted on corruption charges and facing a fractured political landscape, he relies on perpetual crisis to survive. War shields him from accountability, unites his supporters and postpones his legal reckoning. For Netanyahu, the blood of Gaza’s children is not a tragedy — it is political capital.

His extremist Cabinet, meanwhile, ensures that escalation is always the path forward. Ministers who thrive on incitement push policies of maximal destruction and Netanyahu, fearing the collapse of his coalition, indulges them. The result is a government where policy is indistinguishable from fanaticism.

The same leaders who preach democracy and human rights elsewhere avert their eyes from Gaza’s mass graves

Hani Hazaimeh

The extremism of Netanyahu’s Cabinet would not be possible without Western indulgence. The US continues to provide weapons, diplomatic cover and political legitimacy, while European governments oscillate between timid concern and silence. The same leaders who preach democracy and human rights elsewhere avert their eyes from Gaza’s mass graves.

This complicity emboldens Netanyahu and his allies. It tells them there is no red line they cannot cross, no atrocity too severe, no crime too blatant.

Gaza has become the ultimate test — not only of Israel’s moral bankruptcy under Netanyahu and his extremist Cabinet, but also of the world’s capacity to enforce the principles it claims to defend. The international community cannot allow a state to erase an entire population under the pretext of security.

If Netanyahu succeeds, the precedent will haunt the global order: a message to authoritarian leaders everywhere that genocide can be masked as defense and rewarded with silence.

Netanyahu and his extremist Cabinet are not defending Israel, they are destroying its moral fabric while annihilating Gaza. Their policies of starvation, bombardment and displacement are not accidents of war but deliberate strategies. And the world’s failure to confront them makes it complicit.

History will not remember the excuses of Western governments, nor the legal maneuvers that shielded Netanyahu. It will remember the children starved, the hospitals bombed, the families buried under rubble — and the extremist government that orchestrated it all.

The question is no longer whether Netanyahu and his Cabinet will escalate. They already have. The question is whether the world will finally decide to stop them — or whether silence will remain the deadliest weapon of all.

• Hani Hazaimeh is a senior editor based in Amman. X: @hanihazaimeh