The last time Israeli troops had a permanent security role inside Gaza, Israel’s prime minister was Ariel Sharon. Twenty-one Israeli settlements were scattered across the Gaza Strip, connected to Israel through a bypass road, used by Israeli surfers at the weekend to reach the coast.
Soldiers manned checkpoints and metal-clad towers. At night, Palestinian children would approach the towers under cover of darkness to throw crude pipe bombs that could be bought for pocket money.
For their part the armed factions in Gaza, Hamas among them, would attempt serious attacks including shootings and suicide bombings.
Now Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has suggested what many Israelis thought unthinkable: a return of security in Gaza to the Israeli administration, a place already half in ruins, with a population of 2.3 million.
“Israel will for an indefinite period have the overall security responsibly,” Netanyahu told ABC news on Monday, “because we have seen what happens when we do not have it.”
Exactly what Netanyahu has in mind remains unclear. Indeed, his comments appear to run contrary to assessments in the US and elsewhere that Israel – which militarily controlled Gaza from 1967 to 2005 – planned to reoccupy Gaza in any fashion and in any case would be opposed by Washington.
“Israel cannot reassume control and responsibility for Gaza,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said last week, adding it was his understanding that “Israel has made clear it has no intention or desire to do that”.
However, Netanyahu’s remarks follow statements by some other Israeli officials who have suggested Israel will need to maintain a military presence inside Gaza as a buffer to protect its civilians.
While Netanyahu has been vague about precisely what this could mean, reporting in the Hebrew media has suggested a rough shape.
The Israel Defence Forces and domestic security agency Shin Bet, it is suggested, would oversee security arrangements with the hope that other countries, not least in the Arab world, would help fund a humanitarian response.
The arrangement would remain until it was felt that the Israeli communities neighbouring Gaza were secure. These are all suggestions burdened with tremendous ifs.
One considerable problem is precisely how Israel would manage to separate any security arrangement on the ground from the wider legal obligations that arrangement would entail. When Israel withdrew troops from Gaza in 2005, it said it had ended its military rule and the occupation – while others, including a 2022 report by United Nations independent international commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, said Gaza remained occupied through other means, including Israeli control over airspace, land crossings and governmental functions such as the management of the Palestinian population registry.
Under international humanitarian law, the prolonged presence of Israeli troops in Gaza would make the occupation of the coastal strip far more obviously concrete and place clear responsibilities on Israel as an occupying force, defined by it having effective control over the territories it is present in.
The fourth Geneva convention, for example, stipulates: “The occupying power has the duty to ensure that the adequate provision of food and medical supplies is provided, as well as clothing, bedding, means of shelter, other supplies essential to the survival of the civilian population of the occupied territory.”
And not everyone in Netanyahu’s cabinet has been relaying the same message.
For his part, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has appeared to suggest exactly the opposite in terms of Gaza’s future administration: that after the fighting is completed in Gaza, Israel needs to end its involvement in responsibility for life in the territory.
And the story of Sharon’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 is an instructive one for today’s Israeli leaders. Like Netanyahu, Sharon was a rightwing prime minister, an ally of the settlers and hugely sceptical about the peace process.
He saw the disengagement first and foremost as a security measure rather than a move in pursuit of the stalled Middle East peace process.
At its centre was the idea that reducing Israel’s civilian and military footprint in Gaza and elsewhere would reduce tensions that had recently been startlingly apparent during the second intifada. By quitting Gaza too, the calculation went, Israel would find it easier to pursue its policies of settlement on the West Bank.
With the disengagement, IDF installations and troops were removed and more than 9,000 Israeli citizens living in 21 settlements were evicted amid protests following a pre-2005 occupation of Gaza that had been costly both in terms of maintaining the Israeli military presence and in terms of lost soldiers’ lives.
Perhaps ironically, Netanyahu was among those who first supported disengagement as a cabinet minister, and then resigned over the issue when it became more politically expedient, saying he refused “to be a partner to a move which ignores reality, and proceeds blindly toward turning the Gaza Strip into a base for Islamic terrorism which will threaten the state”.
In the intervening period, the idea that Israel should fully occupy Gaza has not gone away, through war and blockade, as Hamas emerged as the strip’s ruler.
The rightwing politician Avigdor Lieberman, during his time as foreign minister, was one of those pushing for “a full occupation of the Gaza Strip” to end the threat of Hamas and its missiles.
And whatever Netanyahu’s vision, he may find it easier to win the war against Hamas than to extricate Israel from responsibility for the daily lives of Palestinians in Gaza. A formula, not for security, but rather a different chapter of violence.
