Netanyahu never had a plan for when the fighting stops. So how can the war end?

And still there is no plan for the day after. Perhaps the most egregious of all Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic failures in prosecuting his war against Hamas in Gaza has been the absence of a plan for the day after the fighting.

This lack of a coherent plan was again on display in his latest interview with Fox News, just before his cabinet approved his call for an expanded occupation of Gaza. Israel, Netanyahu said, didn’t want to keep Gaza. It wanted to create a security perimeter and then “hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly, without threatening us, and giving the Gazans a good life”.

Exactly which Arab forces would be willing to accept a handover of Gazan security and governance from the Israeli military was never articulated. Because there is no such force, and no country that would want to administer what will be left of Gaza after Israel departs.

Israel’s international reputation has been besmirched by the continuation of a war that was forced upon it by the actions of Hamas, but which long ago surpassed what was militarily necessary to achieve its security aims. Its use of humanitarian aid, or access to it, as a tool of its military campaign says much about a government that has lost the moral high ground that it stood upon when its response to Hamas’ bloody terrorist attack began. So, too, is the lack of proportionality that is another bedrock of international humanitarian law.

Israel lost the information campaign long ago. Vague strategic goals such as destroying Hamas – practically unachievable, and which impose a horrendous cost on the population of Gaza – have won Israel no friends. But Netanyahu has little room to manoeuvre if he wants to survive politically. He leads a government in which two of his far-right political allies, on whose support he relies for power, are sanctioned by many Western countries.

While Israel has sought to control the information flow from Gaza, Hamas seeks to exploit the world’s increasing discomfort at the cost Israel is imposing on Gazans for ever-dwindling military outcomes. The government has prevented or tightly orchestrated any opportunities for Western journalists to enter Gaza. But even the very limited footage from recent humanitarian aid drops exposed the scale of destruction below.

If global public opinion has turned against Israel based on such limited information and vision, there will likely be even greater anti-Israel sentiment once international media has unfettered access to Gaza. The scale of destruction will be judged against Israel’s twin mantras of conducting precision strikes and, in Netanyahu’s words, having the “most moral army” in the world. Global headlines and airtime will be devoted to Gazans’ first-hand accounts of people killed seeking food, of whole families wiped out by Israeli bombs.

Although the conflict is far away, and the Jewish and Palestinian populations in Australia are relatively small, the Gaza conflict has resonated here as it has elsewhere in the West. There are several reasons for this, not the least being our prime minister’s longstanding interest in the Palestine question. He helped establish the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine Group more than a quarter of a century ago. By mainstream Australian political standards, at least, he has been a critic of Israeli actions against Palestinian aspirations over the years.

Anthony Albanese’s views were tempered, publicly at least, as he rose up the political ranks. But his interest in the issue is not manufactured and, given the weight of public opinion against Israel’s current prosecution of the war in Gaza, he has felt emboldened to send clear diplomatic messages to Israel, either through changes to voting patterns at the United Nations or by proscribing Israeli politicians or settlers.

With like-minded Western countries, Australia’s message to Israel is made stronger.

The latest policy adjustment being tested publicly is recognition of Palestine. Doing so has little practical or legal consequences, but it would overturn Australia’s longstanding policy that such recognition would come as a result of the “two-state” solution in which borders for Israel and Palestine are recognised and accepted. There is a growing move, however, to recognise Palestine – before its formal creation – at the United Nations General Assembly in September. France has led the charge. The United Kingdom and Canada have stated they, too, will recognise Palestine, albeit with significant caveats. Britain says it will hold off if Israel agrees to a ceasefire – but that prospect appears vanishingly thin given Israel’s just-declared plans to control Gaza.

The Albanese government has indicated it is a matter of when – and not if – it will recognise Palestine. The political ground is certainly being prepared for Australia to do this in next month, but any such announcement is also likely to come with significant caveats.

Nothing is ever straightforward in the Middle East, but Netanyahu will not be happy that old Western friends are seeing the Palestine issue with a new clarity.

Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst.