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As Israel marked one month since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, its elected leader addressed the nation. Israeli troops were encircling Gaza City, Benjamin Netanyahu said, and would not allow a cease-fire with Hamas until hostages were released. “We will not stop,” the Israeli prime minister said.
But even now, four weeks after one of the most shocking attacks on civilians in Israel’s history, Netanyahu is still failing to articulate any kind of long-term plan for Gaza and the 2.3 million people in it. To many critics, it was part of a pattern that had gone on too long to be excusable.
Under Netanyahu’s leadership, the Israeli government had spoken of hitting back swiftly at Hamas leadership after Oct. 7. But it took weeks for Israel to begin its ground offensive in Gaza, allowing global anger over the civilian death toll from Israeli airstrikes and anguish over hostages to take root.
Netanyahu and his allies have spoken vaguely about cutting off Gaza from Israel, winning some international support in the process. “Israel cannot reassume control and responsibility for Gaza,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week. “And it’s important to note that Israel has made clear it has no intention or desire to do that.”
But on Monday, Netanyahu appeared to take a step in another direction.
“I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security responsibility because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it,” he told ABC News. “When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine.”
With these remarks, Netanyahu sparked more questions around the world. Would this mean that Israel is reoccupying Gaza, from which it had militarily withdrawn in 2005? Does this mean that Israel will have to take responsibility for other concerns in Gaza, including humanitarian ones?
And why did Israel’s leader make this apparently significant policy announcement in an English-language interview with a U.S. news organization?
There are no immediate answers. But there are some hard truths.
If Netanyahu’s remarks are taken at face value, the prime minister is committing Israel to a costly occupation that will sap its military at a time when it is facing renewed regional threats. Anthony King, a professor at the University of Exeter and an expert on urban warfare, estimated that if the threat remains high that likely means 40,000 Israeli troops in Gaza “for years.”
Meanwhile, whether Israel takes responsibility for Gaza or not, the needs of the population there will be immense. “However this ends, it will be one of the biggest reconstruction projects ever undertaken,” my colleagues William Booth and Hazem Balousha reported on Tuesday.
Many fear that Israel could seek to force significant numbers of Palestinians out of Gaza, even if this is viewed as a violation of international law and an alarming echo of the Arab displacement that followed the 1948 war that established Israel.
But Israeli officials have suggested that they simply hope to maintain their own security while leaving responsibility for governing the strip to someone else.
“We don’t want to govern Gaza. We don’t want to run their lives. We just want to protect our people,” Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told the Wall Street Journal in an article published Wednesday.
But who would that be? The easiest option — that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority could reassume responsibility for whatever is left of Gaza — strikes many as absurd, despite being favored by Washington. As Booth and Balousha noted, “the Palestinian Authority leadership is too old, too corrupt, too unpopular, analysts pointed out, and is barely clinging to relevance in Ramallah.”
Publicly, the United States has backed Netanyahu’s government. But privately, U.S. officials are frustrated by the lack of clarity about the goals of the operation and “what they expect the future in Gaza to look like if they are able to succeed in their aim of destroying Hamas,” The Post’s Yasmeen Abutaleb reported this week.
After Netanyahu’s latest remarks, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that there were still conversations to be had about what future governance in Gaza looks like. “The president maintains his position that a reoccupation by Israeli forces is not the right thing to do,” Kirby said. “We’ll let them speak to their intentions.”
Israel leans into World War II rhetoric to justify Gaza war
But Netanyahu’s biggest worry is not in Washington, or in Arab capitals, or even in Gaza. As he spoke Tuesday, thousands of Israelis were resuming their regular protests at the Knesset and other locations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, voicing their anger at his government.
Multiple polls have shown Netanyahu’s support plummeting after the Oct. 7 attacks, the opposite of what happened to President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Polls show that nearly 8 out of 10 Israelis think Netanyahu should resign and about two-thirds said Israel should hold elections immediately after the war.
Cynically, you could argue that Netanyahu has an interest in dragging out the conflict. At the least, while Israeli security officials have accepted some culpability for the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, the Israeli prime minister has dodged any indication he could be blamed. He has largely avoided his most powerful critics, the families of hostages.
As Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer told the Associated Press last week, the Israeli prime minister was “fighting a personal battle of survival and that takes precedence over fighting Israel’s war against Hamas.”
But while the Israeli leader could be stalling, it’s also a return to form. Netanyahu has never shown much interest in the long-term future of the Palestinian Territories. It’s not surprising that he isn’t doing so now, even if the short-term, improvisational policies he pursued are now increasingly viewed as proven failures.