Benjamin Netanyahu is now one of the most important leaders in the world. He can determine the fate of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the immediate future of the Middle East.
So what is his vision for Israelis and Palestinians? And can the world trust him?
While the Israeli public continues to support the mission of their army to "destroy Hamas", Netanyahu's personal approval rating has crashed, according to a recent poll by Bar Ilan University which asked Jewish Israelis their level of trust in their prime minister. Less than 4 per cent of Jewish Israelis rated him as a reliable source of information.
This comes as concerns are growing internationally about how Israel is conducting this war.
The speed with which children are dying is astounding, with almost 1,000 children and babies reported to be killed by Israel on average each week, according to Gaza's Hamas-run Ministry of Health. Israeli officials may dispute this figure – how can you trust anything run by Hamas, they say – but there's no doubt that an enormous number of children are being killed by Israeli bombing.
And then there are the premature babies who have died because the water used with their formula was contaminated, due to Israel's reluctance to allow fresh water into Gaza since Hamas infiltrated Israel on October 7 and performed atrocities, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 240 others.
Israel's conduct of the war is increasingly being challenged – at first Israel urged Gazans to move to the south of Gaza, a small enclave about half the size of Canberra. But many Palestinians were killed as they headed south.
Now, Israel is telling them to move to a tiny section in the south-west – a 14 square kilometre parcel of land that Israel has decreed as safe. Nobody knows how many of Gaza's 2.3 million people will follow this warning, but even if not all take up the warning is it physically possible to herd 1 million, or 1.5 million people, into 14 square kilometres?
Netanyahu's spokesperson Mark Regev says that tens of thousands of people can fit into this space and he's "pretty sure" that the people who move there "won't have to move again". He told the BBC that "hopefully" the area people are being urged to move to will have tents and a field hospital.
Regev, originally from Melbourne, is appearing on TV sets around the world trying to manage Israel's international reputation – after six weeks of images of dead and injured babies and children, the rhetoric of even Israel's supporters is hardening.
Loading...Who is Netanyahu?
So who is the man driving all this, Benjamin Netanyahu?
Netanyahu - Israel's prime minister three times: 1996-1999, 2009-2021 and again since 2022 - is the crucial figure in this war.
He will be the key decision maker about what happens after the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas expires.
That is, whether Israel's bombing of Gaza goes back to its pre-ceasefire level or whether a more targeted approach is adopted. At some points during this war, Israel has been dropping almost 1000 bombs a day on Gaza.
He is also the person who the US needs to persuade if they think that Israel's bombing of Gaza should stop if they deem the humanitarian cost in terms of civilian deaths is too costly.
In terms of Hamas, despite Netanyahu's personal popularity being low, he is reflecting public sentiment.
In the weeks that I spent in Jerusalem, Ashdod and Sderot following the October 7 attack, almost every Israeli I spoke to wanted Hamas to be disabled from launching such an attack on Israel. Although there is debate among Israelis as to what exactly that means and whether that is achievable.
You learn much more about politicians from what they say privately rather than publicly. It's the private comments that give you a glimpse inside the soul of a person.
For Netanyahu, there was one such moment.
But to fully understand that glimpse-into-the-soul moment, it's worth recalling what happened on September 13, 1993.
The handshake that brought hopes for peace
I was lucky enough to be one of the journalists on the south lawn of the White House as then president Bill Clinton, his face beaming, walked across the lawn with Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinians.
Clinton had achieved what presidents before him failed to do – brought together the leaders of this interminable conflict to shake hands and sign a document. This was the beginning of the Oslo peace process.
But just as you can take a horse to water but not force it to drink, so you can bring together the leaders of the Israelis and Palestinians but not force them to like each other. Or even to shake hands.
That morning the word had gone around Washington that while Rabin would grudgingly turn up – after all, which Israeli leader can say no to an invitation from the United States, especially given that they bankroll much of your army – but did not want to shake hands. "His hands are covered with the blood of my people," he is reputed to have said.
As we sat in the sun we were fixated on whether Rabin would shake hands. Clinton stood in the middle, and Arafat extended his hand. Rabin paused – it appeared that Clinton was urging Rabin to reciprocate.
Finally, Rabin shook hands. The south lawn erupted with applause.
The Oslo peace process had begun. The deal included that Israel would hold off building any new settlements in the Palestinian territories in preparation for the creation of a Palestinian state. Peace was on the horizon – finally.
The United Nations had passed Resolution 181 in 1947 that this land would be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state to be called Palestine. The Oslo accords would work towards that.
Clinton had been brutally clear to the Israelis that there should be no new settlements which eat up land earmarked for a Palestinian state. Clinton believed that every new settlement made a Palestinian state more difficult.
My six years living in Israel and travelling to the West Bank confirmed that view – Israel is small but the West Bank and Gaza (known by the Australian government as the Occupied Palestinian Territories) are smaller.
Netanyahu lobbied against it
But the then-opposition leader Netanyahu campaigned against Oslo.
One of Israel's most experienced journalists, Akiva Eldar, watched as Netanyahu campaigned against Clinton's peace process. Eldar told me that in his assessment Netanyahu was "absolutely complicit in incitement against Rabin."
He says that at one rally Netanyahu was filmed on a balcony addressing anti-Oslo protesters, many of whom were carrying mock coffins for Rabin and Olso. Netanyahu addressed another rally at which an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform was held aloft.
Soon after, Jewish extremist Yigal Amir, who was also opposed to a Palestinian state, attended one of Rabin's peace rallies – he pushed his way through the crowd with a hidden gun, got close enough to Rabin and fired three shots into his back, killing Rabin and Israel's best chance for peace.
The New York Times reported that the handshake on the laws of the White House had "spelled the end of the world that Yigal Amir believed God had given the Jews."
The paper reported: "At the Institute for Higher Torah Studies, where Mr Amir was a diligent, argumentative student, the moment of reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders that was greeted so warmly around the world seemed a catastrophe; the celebration at home (in Israel) obscene… Yigal was in a state worse than depression."
After Rabin's assassination his widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and other members of the Likud party for the climate of incitement. Netanyahu called for reconciliation, but Leah said: "It's too late. What happened wasn't a bolt of lightning from the heavens. It grew from the soil, a very particular soil."
Israel's Haaretz newspaper made clear who it thought was responsible for cultivating that soil. "Prime Minister and Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin was slain the wake of systematic incitement led and orchestrated by Netanyahu," the paper's journalist Sefi Rachlevsky wrote. "At the height of the incitement and under his direction, Netanyahu managed to turn a Zionist hero into a figure at which thousands of people shouted 'traitor.', with hoarse throats and leaps of hatred and ecstasy."
If Oslo was to survive – if peace was to come to Israelis and Palestinians – future Israeli Prime Ministers needed to continue the vision.
The impact of settlers
When Netanyahu was elected in 1996 one of the first things he did was to announce a new settlement – Har Homa — which one can see driving from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.
Washington was devastated. The White House tried to convince Netanyahu to hold off new settlements, but Netanyahu refused – and the US was not prepared to do the only thing that would make Israel listen: threaten to cut off military aid.
And so began one of the biggest bursts of new settlements since the creation of Israel.
Under Netanyahu, the "settlement enterprise" was in full bloom. Under Netanyahu, any Jewish settler – even if they had taken private Palestinian land for which the owners had private property deeds – is entitled to guns if they tell the Israeli army they feel at risk. The army will also train them.
Under Netanyahu, a settler who shoots dead a Palestinian will rarely – if ever – be brought to court. If they say that they felt threatened by the Palestinian they will not face prosecution.
Recently, several settlers approached a Palestinian who was harvesting his olives on his ancestral grove and shot him dead. They will almost certainly never face any consequences. Palestinians know this, as do settlers.
Israel says it has a war against Hamas, but more than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7 by Israeli soldiers or settlers. Over my time in the region I regularly saw settlers bash or attack Palestinians and Israeli soldiers stood by and watched.
Under Netanyahu, millions of dollars were allocated to give Israelis living in "Israel proper" an incentive to move into the West Bank – they are given tax incentives.
When I first moved to Israel, I took Hebrew lessons. I soon realised that my teacher lived in Har Homa, now Homat Shmuel – the settlement which was Netanyahu's first settlement in 1997 after the Oslo accords.
And while some settlers take Palestinian land because they say it is their religious calling to do so – as Yigal Amir believed, that God has ordained that they should live in what they call "Judea and Samaria" – my teacher was there because it was cheaper housing.
He told me he could get a three-bedroom apartment in Har Homa for less than the price of a one-bedroom in Jerusalem. And Netanyahu had built a highway system directly from Israel into the various settlements. House and land packages are much cheaper when you don't have to pay for the land part.
Under Netanyahu, a system of roads was established exclusively for settlers and non-Palestinians.
Netanyahu's support for the settlements and his arming of settlers is now bearing fruit.
As former Israeli army commander in Hebron, Yehuda Shaul, who founded the human rights group Breaking the Silence says: "Settlers have complete immunity. There is nothing protecting Palestinians from settler terrorism."
Remarkably, many people who defend Israel are completely ignorant of exactly what Israel does to enforce its occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank.
In my six years living in Israel I saw Netanyahu take many positions to avoid having to agree to a Palestinian state.
In his second term, starting in 2009, he again boosted the settlement expansion. He always had a public reason why Israel could not make peace.
At first, he argued that because Fatah and Hamas were divided – Fatah was in power in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza – Israel could not possibly make peace with divided Palestinians.
Then the Palestinians tried to form a unity government – his response changed: how could Israel possibly make peace with a Palestinian government of which Hamas was part?
Then the Palestinians moved to ensure that none of Hamas' nominations in the government had any previous role with Hamas or its military operations. The Netanyahu government's response: how can we believe that these are not real Hamas people?
All the while Netanyahu undermined the moderate faction of the Palestinians – Fatah, or the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank. Every new settlement showed Palestinians that the leader in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, was weak. The Israelis gave the moderate faction no successes, economic or otherwise.
All the while Hamas grew stronger.
Now, under Netanyahu's third term, some settlers are openly violent.
Since October 7, they have been forcing at gunpoint Palestinians from their homes. Haaretz newspaper recently ran a story under the headline "Settlers Have a Very Effective System for Forcing Palestinians Out of Their Homes".
Of the increasing violence of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the paper said: "Herding sheep into others' fields, preventing access to water, blocking roads, killing animals and breaking into homes in the middle of the night – these and other tactics are part of the daily terror perpetrated by settlers in Palestinian villages."
LoadingNetanyahu's private moment that spoke volumes
As a journalist writing about the Middle East, you realise that most things are contested. It's one of the factors that makes it a difficult posting.
But the view that Netanyahu sabotaged any prospect for peace is not just echoed across the Israeli media but by Benjamin Netanyahu himself – he has stated it very clearly.
In 2001, two years after he lost the prime ministership on a previous term, Netanyahu drove to a settlement in the West Bank. While he had been a huge supporter of new Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, the settlers of Ofra believed that he could have done more to pursue "Greater Israel" – the vision that Israel takes full and permanent control of the West Bank and Gaza and extinguishes once and for all the ambition shared by Australia and most other countries for a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu told the settlers: "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get their way (in terms of a two-state solution). They asked me before the (1996 Israeli) election if I'd honour (the Oslo Accords.) I said I would but… I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders."
To try to get Israel to agree to the Oslo accords, Clinton agreed that genuine "defined military zones" would remain under Israeli control.
As Netanyahu told the settlers: "Why is that important? Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo Accords. How did we do it? Nobody said what 'defined military zones' were. 'Defined military zones' are security zones; as far as I'm concerned the entire Jordan Valley is a 'defined military zone'. Go argue."
Then, in case the settlers still didn't grasp what he'd done to expand settlements and prevent a Palestinian state, he added: "I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords!"
Yet again, after the horrors of Hamas' attack on October 7, a US President is urging a two-state solution. Yet again, Benjamin Netanyahu will not commit.
For Gaza's children, the idea that their fate – their lives – are in the hands of a man who has boasted about sabotaging the peace process is a dreadful prospect.
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