Picture this. You’re huddled with your children and extended family in a tent where you’ve been living for the past four months. The tent’s not real, it’s makeshift, so it leaks, and the river of sewage outside the front flap seeps up through the bottom. The dimensions would sleep three comfortably, but there are nine of you in there. The only reason your two children ate this week is because you didn’t. And two children is one less than you had in January. The third’s buried under the rubble of your old house.

That’s how it’s looking for countless Gazans sheltering and camping in Rafah, where the remnants of Hamas’s military wing are holed up, presumably with Yahya Sinwar and whoever’s left of the hostages.

The Biden administration spent most of March and April trying to convince Benjamin Netanyahu that going into the city guns blazin’ is a bad idea, fraught with all manner of risk not least of which is additional condemnation from an anxious international community among which Israel counts fewer indubitable allies than it did six months ago.

But agreeing to send Israel billions in new “defense” money with no strings attached (as the US did last month, when House Speaker Mike Johnson finally mustered the courage to tell his erstwhile MAGA compatriots hell-bent on blocking aid to Ukraine to go f–k themselves) is a funny way to express reservations about the conduct of the war. Netanyahu will be forgiven for thinking Biden’s all bark and no bite.

On Sunday, during a short speech at Israel’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Netanyahu told the world the IDF intends to take the fight to Israel’s “genocidal enemies” wherever they are, including and especially Rafah. I guess he’s never heard that old saying: A genocide for a genocide leaves everybody genocide‘d.

Netanyahu broke into English only once during his speech and that was to say, in no uncertain terms, that although he’d appreciate international support, he’s not begging. And when it comes to the war, he’s not asking. “If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he declared, adding that all the same, Israel knows it’s “not alone because countless decent people around the world support our just cause.”

In reality, Israel is pretty much alone. At least when it comes to Rafah. Exactly nobody, anywhere is thrilled about the prospect of a grand finale where Netanyahu paints the streets with Hamas’s remaining “battalions,” the IDF’s somewhat farcical description of the group’s residuum.

Last week, Netanyahu said, explicitly, that Israel would go into Rafah, hostage deal or no hostage deal. That meant ongoing cease fire negotiations were for all intents and purposes meaningless. It’s not at all clear that Netanyahu even wants a deal. Hamas agreed to a cease fire brokered by Egypt and Qatar late Monday, but Israel’s war cabinet rejected it almost immediately.

Netanyahu has nothing to lose politically from perpetuating the war. He’s unpopular domestically, but outside observers harbor misconceptions as to exactly why. Without getting into the specifics, suffice to say another 5,000 dead Gazans in pursuit of “final victory” isn’t going to be decisive for Netanyahu’s post-war political fortunes. If he’s doomed politically (and he is), it won’t be because the death toll in Gaza rose from 34,000 to 40,000 before it was all said, bombed and done.

It wouldn’t be strictly accurate to say Netanyahu has “everything to gain and nothing to lose” from sending the IDF on a reputational kamikaze mission to pull Sinwar’s lifeless, bullet-riddled body out of a hole and drag it behind a tank through a river of blood in the streets of Rafah. But it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate either.

As for Sinwar, you could argue he failed. If the correct interpretation of October 7 is that Hamas’s on-the-ground leadership in Gaza decided it was time for actions to speak louder than the words of its comfortably situated political leadership in Qatar, and that the attacks were designed to spark a wider war, that dream’s slipping away.

Hezbollah, for all the bluster, has assiduously avoided an outright war with the IDF, and as we saw last month, Israel and Iran aren’t ready to fight the big war, even if some IRGC commanders and the most extreme elements of Netanyahu’s coalition certainly are.

Meanwhile, there are now renewed discussions around a Saudi accord that would see Mohamed Bin Salman back away from his burgeoning bilateral bromance with Xi Jinping and leave the door open to normalizing ties with Israel (contingent on a viable path to Palestinian statehood) in exchange for new, expanded US security guarantees. Israel won’t join any such deal immediately, but they might later. And as ever, nobody will demand much in the way of specifics when it comes to what counts as a viable plan for statehood. That’s the sort of arrangement Hamas’s hardliners (assuming you can differentiate between hardliners in tunnels and “moderates” in Qatari hotels) were keen to undermine in October.

Ultimately, a bloodbath in Rafah may be the last chance for Sinwar to get the existential result he was after. He’s not going to make it out of Rafah alive, assuming that’s were he is. If he hasn’t accepted that, he’s delusional. Maybe Israel would be content to arrest him, but something tells me Sinwar’s determined to go out with a bang rather than be Saddam in Ad-Dawr.

For the million or more Gazans staring down an imminent Israeli offensive in Rafah, the terrifying reality is that notwithstanding Israeli officials’ allusions to safeguarding civilians, there’s no evacuation plan. If you’re a non-combatant — a category which, contrary to the collective punishment narrative foisted upon the world by extreme elements of the Netanyahu government, includes nearly everyone in Gaza — the only advice the IDF has is run. Run for your life, and for the lives of your children.

On Monday, the Israeli military said it was using “posters, SMS messages, phone calls and media broadcasts in Arabic” to advise more than 100,000 Gazans sheltering in eastern Rafah to evacuate “temporarily” to a new “humanitarian area.”

Hours later, the military dropped leaflets. “The IDF will act with extreme force against terrorist organizations in your areas of residence,” they said. “Anyone who is close to terrorist organizations puts his life and the life of his family at risk.”

Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesman, said Israel isn’t calling for a “widespread evacuation of Rafah.” Yet. “This is a very specific operation at the moment,” he said.

In remarks conveyed to The Washington Post, Suhail al-Hindi, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said Rafah will be “a graveyard” for Israeli soldiers.

It’ll be a graveyard all right. The vast majority of people unceremoniously buried there won’t be soldiers, though.