Vatican newspaper analyzes continued failure of Gaza negotiations, calls for ‘more resolute’ US diplomacy

June 03, 2025

In a front-page article, “Negoziati senza fine e senza esito“ [Conflict without end and without outcome], L’Osservatore Romano rued the continued lack of progress toward a truce in the conflict in Gaza, which—the newspaper noted—“has already caused almost 60,000 deaths.”

“The feeling of a possible truce in Gaza lasted a few hours,” Middle East correspondent Roberto Cetera wrote in the Vatican newspaper’s June 2 edition. “This time too according to a script that has already been tried many, too many times. The mediator on duty—be it Egypt, Qatar or Washington—announces every time that a truce plan is substantially accepted by both parties, then awaits its formalization, but then only a few hours pass and, together with a superficial approval, also the distinctions arrive that inevitably cause the parties to walk away from the table. A scene whose predictability now borders on pathetic boredom.”

Cetera continued:

The script calls for Hamas to integrate the agreement with the proposal not to limit itself to a temporary truce but to ask for a definitive end to all fighting and the exit of Israeli troops from the Strip. On the other hand, the Israeli government replies that no lasting peace can be achieved until even the last Hamas militant has left Gaza, and instead makes no secret of its desire to nurture the project of a permanent occupation of the Strip, of a deportation of the Palestinian population, and of an annexation of the territory through the reintroduction of colonies of Jewish settlers.

This Israeli threat is not a propaganda threat from a media war, but a well-defined strategy without possible mediation, whose best interpreter in recent weeks has been the Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. It was therefore quite obvious that on this occasion too the hopes of a conclusion to this war—the longest and bloodiest among those fought since 1948—would be frustrated. So Hamas declared its approval of the plan presented by Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, adding however the request for a truce lasting at least 7 years, guaranteed by the United States. A point on which Israel, once again, backed down.

“The issue on which the two sides are opposed remains always and only that of the definitive conclusion of the war and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza,” Cetera added. “On this, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is not willing to give in, also so as not to break the pact that binds him to the extreme religious right of Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.”

Continuing his analysis, Cetera wrote that

the inability to reach an agreement in reality seems to be motivated by persistent internal political conveniences, rather than by the desire to prevail over the adversary. For both. For Hamas, aware that the end of the war would imply its disappearance, not only militarily, from the Palestinian political scene. And for Israel, for which it would mean the early defeat of the far-right coalition composed of Likud, a religious Zionist party, Judaism united in the Torah, and Shas, which won the November 2022 elections, and above all it would clear away the obstacles that today stand in the way of the corruption trials in which Prime Minister Netanyahu is accused.

“It is horrifying to think that these ‘shop calculations’ and these perverse logics of power still do not allow us to consider the almost 60,000 victims reached so far as sufficient,” Cetera added. “This absurd repetition of mediations destined to fail has also taught us that every time the negotiation becomes more urgent and close to a result, the bombings also become more intense and violent, and the number of innocent victims even higher.”

Cetera concluded:

What can reverse this blocked situation of inconclusive negotiations with the same script over and over again? What can stop the continuation of the massacre of civilians in Gaza and allow the return of Israeli hostages? At the moment the only realistic and desirable option is a more resolute intervention by the American administration against Netanyahu. To be exercised even more on the diplomatic level than on that of military support for Israel.

 

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Further information:

• Negoziati senza fine e senza esito (L’Osservatore Romano)