by Conventional wisdom has generally held that Israel’s government lacks a strategy for the Gaza Strip beyond overthrowing Hamas.
“Israel has no plan for Gaza once war ends, experts warn,” BBC reported in October. In November The Washington Post observed that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has been criticized for not offering a clear plan for what will happen in Gaza if Israel achieves its goal of overthrowing Hamas.” TO headline in Foreign Affairs lamented in December “Israel’s confusing strategy in Gaza.”
But there are signs that some members of the Israeli government do have a strategy, or at least a preference, about what happens next. It is implicit in the type of war Israel has waged, which has made Gaza largely uninhabitable. And a growing number of Israeli officials are saying it out loud: They don’t just want to expel Hamas from Gaza. They want many Gazans to leave too.
Calls for population transfers began long before Gaza was reduced to the ruins it is today. Six days after the massacre of Israelis perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, the Ministry of Intelligence proposed permanently relocate Gazans to the Sinai region of Egypt. On November 14, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich saying He supported “the voluntary emigration of Arabs from Gaza to countries around the world.” Five days later, the Minister of Intelligence, Gila Gamliel backed up “the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside the strip.”
The Israel Hayom newspaper reported On November 30, Netanyahu had asked Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, one of his closest confidants, to develop a plan to “reduce” Gaza’s population “to a minimum” by opening the gates of Egypt and opening sea routes to other countries. Mr. Netanyahu too reportedly urged President Biden and the leaders of Britain and France to pressure Egypt to admit hundreds of thousands of refugees from Gaza.
Israeli officials have at times downplayed or denied these reports. Netanyahu’s office called the Intelligence Ministry transfer plan a mere “Concepts paper” and the Israeli embassy in Washington clarified that the Minister of Intelligence spoke only for herself. Other influential government ministers, such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s rival and former Israeli army chief of staff who joined the government after October 7, oppose moving people from Gaza. outside the strip. according to Israel Hayom. Gallant, as emerged last week, has put forward a proposal that would have Palestinians not connected to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority administer the territory, and have other countries oversee reconstruction.
But in recent days the rumor about the Palestinians leaving Gaza has become stronger. At a Likud party meeting on December 25, a lawmaker urged Netanyahu to create a team to facilitate the “voluntary” departure of Palestinians from Gaza. The prime minister reportedly responded that the government was “working” to find countries willing to accept them.
Similar comments from Israel minister of national security followed, with The Times of Israel affirming on Wednesday that voluntary resettlement from Gaza is gradually becoming “a key official government policy.”
Some might dismiss this talk of population transfer as wartime bluster. But on the ground it is already underway: Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. According to the United Nations, it is estimated 85 percent of Gaza’s population is now displaced. Even if they could return home, many would have little to return to since, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, almost 70 percent of homes in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.
So far, more than 22,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and many more are in serious danger. According to the director of Gaza affairs at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 40 percent of the Strip’s residents are at risk of famine. Given the collapse of Gaza’s health and medical systems, up to a quarter of Gaza’s population could die within a year, mainly from disease or lack of access to medical care, according to a recent estimate by Prof. Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh.
If the fighting in Gaza ends soon, this cataclysm could be alleviated. But in late December, Netanyahu suggested that Israel’s war in Gaza would “last many more months,” albeit with fewer troops. Mr. Gallant has saying It could take years. And as long as hostilities in Gaza continue, Israel will not allow the majority of Gaza’s displaced people to return to their homes, for security reasons, Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal recently said. reported. They may not return for “at least a year,” she suggested.
In other words, the humanitarian catastrophe is likely to persist. And the longer it takes, the more pressure Egypt will feel to ease it by letting Gaza residents in. Israeli officials will most likely continue to describe that migration as voluntary, despite having created the conditions that precipitated it.
Until now, The president of EgyptAbdel Fattah el-Sisi and the biden administration They have said they are adamantly opposed to relocating Gaza’s population. The US State Department last week saying The Israeli government has repeatedly told US officials that resettlement out of Gaza is not its official policy.
But some members of the Israeli government They reportedly believe that Egypt, which owes its creditors a whopping $28 billion in debt payments next year – is vulnerable to pressure. And American policy can always change: Asked last month what should happen to the Palestinians in Gaza, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley answered“They should go to pro-Hamas countries.”
All this has a chilling historical background. Palestinians in Gaza know that if they leave, Israel is unlikely to allow them to return. They know this because most of them are descendants of the expulsion and flight that occurred around the founding of Israel in 1948, which Palestinians call the nakba. They live in Gaza because Israel did not allow their families to return to the places that later became part of Israel. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians were displaced when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. It also did not allow many of those refugees to return.
Israel’s leaders rarely express regret for these mass displacements. Sometimes they even invoke them as a precedent. Addressing Palestinians on Facebook after the killing of three Israelis in the West Bank in 2017, Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s current national security adviser, warned, “This is how a ‘nakba’ begins. Just like this. Remember 48. Remember 67.”
He ended his post with the words: “You have been warned!”
The world has also been warned.
