Trump threatens to let loose hell on Middle East

At Al-Ahli Arab hospital, also known as the Baptist hospital yesterday, a boy cries as he holds the shoes of a toddler who was killed from shrapnel following an Israeli strike in Gaza City. AFP

The United States President-elect, Donald Trump, read the riot act this week, warning Hamas—by extension all Palestinian civilians trapped in the Gaza Strip—that if the hostages are not released by the time he is in office, there will be “all hell to pay in the Middle East”.

The warning from Trump should be taken seriously, though he seems to portray himself as a peacenik. He cares less about international laws and ethics do not cover his actions. Consequences, adverse or otherwise, of his actions do not worry him. He seems to believe that the Middle East has no other way except how he defines it.

For Trump and his team, the Gaza war is not about genocide, the massacre of children, or the Israel-made famine. It is about Israel and the release of the 100-odd Israeli hostages in the custody of Hamas and other Palestinian groups. They are the remainder of the 250 hostages the Palestinian resistance groups took prisoner during the daring raid on a border town on October 7, 2023. For the Trump team, the release of the hostages is a top priority, even if it means the annihilation of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

Trump wrote in Truth Social—a social media platform run by Trump Media and Technology Group—this week that nothing was being done to free those being held by the Iran-backed terror group since Oct. 7, 2023...”Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire world in the Middle East—but it’s all talk and no action.

“If the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”

Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups link the release of the hostages to an immediate and permanent ceasefire that will allow food and other essentials to flow into Gaza and the release of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel has not agreed to this condition, though the temporary ceasefire worked out during the early stages of the Gaza war in November last year saw the release of several hundred Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 100 Israeli hostages.

Trump’s warning came soon after Hamas released a video clip in which a 20-year-old Israeli-American hostage was seen tearfully appealing to Israel’s Prime Minister and International Criminal Court war crimes suspect Benjamin Netanyahu to cut a deal for the hostages’ release.

Trump and his team demonstrate no interest in ending the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza and Israel’s genocide, in which nearly 45,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them being children and women. They accuse the Biden administration of not doing enough to get the hostages released. 

Trump’s warning to Hamas was manna to Netanyahu. He heaped praises on Trump for his strong statement. Though outgoing US president Joe Biden gave Netanyahu whatever he wanted to carry out the genocide in Gaza, it was no secret that Netanyahu was yearning for a Trump victory.

Despite protests by family members of the hostages, Netanyahu shows no urgency to strike a deal with Hamas. He often accuses Hamas of not having any interest in striking a deal. But analysts believe that Netanyahu is prolonging the war to boost his chances at the next election, with the Israeli public mood swinging in favour of the war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The war also helps him to defer his corruption trial and a possible inquiry into the Hamas attack.

Trump’s warning also comes at a time when the pro-genocide Western media has succeeded in normalising Palestinian suffering. Rarely do the daily deaths of Palestinians due to Israeli attacks make news in Western media outlets with global reach. Trump is unpredictable, but what is predictable is his eccentric behaviour. After he takes office on January 20, 2025, he may even redraw the map of the Middle East, with, who knows, Palestine being completely wiped out. If Trump recognises the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as exclusively part of Israel, which world power dares to challenge it? Which Middle Eastern nation has the capability or the willpower to go to war with nuclear power Israel to liberate Palestine, even if the Gaza Palestinians were forced into Sinai in Egypt and the West Bank Palestinians into Jordan? Even if Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest mosque, is demolished during the Trump presidency to build the Jewish Third Temple that will hasten the arrival of the long-awaited Jewish messiah, there will not be an Arab-Israeli war. Let the events take their course: this appears to be the mood of the Arab world. The Palestinians have become expendable.

During his first term from 2017-2021, Trump recognised Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, disregarding the international law position that Jerusalem is an occupied territory and the international consensus that East Jerusalem is where Palestinians will set up their capital when they have full control of their state with clearly defined boundaries. Instead of undoing these mistakes, Biden legitimised them.

Await far more atrocious decisions in Trump’s second term. He has packed his team with Israeli vassals. His Secretary of State will be Marco Rubio, who is being backed by Zionist billionaires. He has vowed to extend unconditional support to Israel. He stands by the apartheid Zionist expansionist state, no matter what wrong it does. 

Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for the national security advisor post, is another diehard Israeli supporter and Iran hawk. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s choice for the United Nations envoy post, has threatened the United Nations even before she has assumed office. She has slammed the UN as “corrupt and anti-Semitic” and threatened to cut funds to the UN Human Rights Council, which she sees as anti-Israel.

Add to this team Vivek Ramaswamy, who, together with SpaceX and X billionaire Elon Musk, will run Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, has said Israel should not be restrained. Trump’s Israeli ambassador pick, Mike Huckabee, has said there are no such things as Gaza and the West Bank. “They are Judea and Samaria.There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as occupation,” he told CNN in 2017. With such hawks and admirers of genocide and injustice dominating the Trump team, tarnishing the Republican Party, which is but a shadow of its former self when it upheld values and global justice, Palestinians’ fate is more or less sealed. When world history’s chapter on Palestinian genocide is written, the US will surely go down as the country that made it happen, though it had the power to stop it.