Israel’s defence minister has laid out the bare bones of a plan for Gaza once the war with Hamas is over – with pressure growing from Western nations to set out concrete proposals for what happens when the conflict ends.
Yoav Gallant said Israel would keep control of security in Gaza in place of Hamas, with an ill-defined Palestinian body, guided by Israel, running day-to-day administration of the territory, and the US, European Union and regional partners taking responsibility for reconstruction. Neighbouring Egypt would also have an unspecified role to play under the proposal.
“Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against the state of Israel,” Mr Gallant’s outline said, without providing detail.
Under Mr Gallant’s plan, which is not official policy and has yet to be submitted to other ministers, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza would continue until all of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas in the 7 October attack inside Israel were freed, and Hamas’s “military and governing capabilities” dismantled.
Governance would then be assumed by what would likely be Palestinian civil bodies and communal leaders, a system that Mr Gallant said would build “on the capabilities of the existing administrative mechanism in Gaza of local non-hostile actors”.
In recent days, Israeli media reported that military and intelligence officials favoured dividing Gaza into regions overseen by civilian authorities, with the distribution of humanitarian aid in each area handed to local leaders. Mr Gallant said that Israel would reserve the right to operate inside the territory, but that there would be “no Israeli civilian presence in the Gaza Strip after the goals of the war have been achieved”.
Video footage showing Israeli soldiers in Gaza— ( Israel Defense Forces/Reuters)
The plan contains more practical elements than the suggestions offered by hardline members of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, and differs from Washington’s call for a reformed Palestinian Authority to take control of Gaza alongside fresh negotiations towards creating a Palestinian state. Mr Netanyahu has ruled out a role for the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian leaders are also likely to reject Mr Gallant’s plan, instead pushing for Palestinians themselves to take control of the territory.
The proposals come as US secretary of state Antony Blinken begins his fourth visit to the region in three months. His visit will take him to Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Egypt. His priorities will include pressing for a dramatic increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza and an effort to rein in the violence carried out against Palestinians in the West Bank by Jewish settlers.
Western nations also fear that the war in Gaza could spread and become a wider regional conflict, after a suspected Israeli drone strike killed a senior Hamas leader in Lebanon earlier this week. “It is in no one’s interest, not Israel’s, not the region’s, not the world’s, for this conflict to spread beyond Gaza,” US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said ahead of Mr Blinken’s trip.
The key elements to preventing this will be deterring attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on commercial Red Sea shipping, deterring attacks on Israel by Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, and deterring attacks on US military facilities and interests by Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, was due to arrive in Lebanon on Friday to discuss the situation at the Israeli-Lebanese border.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, who will visit Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories from Sunday, called for a new humanitarian pause. People in Lebanon “fear that just one more spark could ignite the entire region. Such a regional conflagration must not happen,” she said.
The US has also called on Israel to protect civilian lives in Gaza by moving to a more targeted approach against Hamas. In the wake of the 7 October attack, Israel launched an aerial bombardment of Gaza that health officials in the Hamas-run territory say has killed more than 22,000 people. The UN and aid agencies say that around 85 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes.
Mr Gallant’s plan outlined what he called a more targeted approach for the next phase of Israel’s war, seemingly taking on board US concerns. “In the northern region of the Gaza Strip, we will transition to a new combat approach in accordance with military achievements on the ground,” Mr Gallant’s office said. It said operations would include raids, demolishing tunnels, air and ground strikes, and special forces operations.
In the south of the besieged enclave, where most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are now living after being forced from their homes by Israel’s airstrikes, the operation would continue to try to eliminate Hamas leaders and rescue Israeli hostages. “It will continue for as long as is deemed necessary,” the statement said.
The aerial bombardment has been backed by ground operations and a blockade that has left supplies of food, water, fuel and medicine running low. Some 162 people were killed in Gaza across the past 24 hours, according to officials from the Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry.
“The Israeli government claims democracy and humanity but is inhumane,” Abdel Razek Abu Sinjar told Reuters as he cried over the shrouded bodies of his wife and children, killed in a Thursday strike on his house in Rafah.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
