Gaza in the Fog
The Future of Gaza Held Hostage by Political-Military Power Struggles in the Region
Gaza in the Fog: The future of Gaza after the October 7 conflict has become a major puzzle for international observers, a topic that even has the potential to become one of the longest wars between Israel and the Resistance Axis. Given the impact of this conflict on the region and Iran, we decided to examine the future of Gaza in Iran Gate.
With the failure of negotiations regarding a ceasefire in the Gaza war, it seems that the Israeli government is more seriously pursuing the objectives it initially set for this war: the destruction of Hamas, the release of hostages through military operations without engaging in further deals or exchanges with this group, and eliminating any threat that could arise from Gaza towards Israel.
Whether these objectives are achieved or, conversely, negotiations and even temporary deals between the parties resume does not negate the prediction that, regardless of how the conflict ends, a return to the pre-October 7 status quo and the complete continuation of Hamas’s rule over this area is unlikely, and at least Israel, the United States, and European countries will not accept it.
For several countries in the region that have always had issues with this group, its ideology, actions, and its relationship with the Islamic Republic, it is more or less the same. In this context, alongside the continuation of the war, the discussion on the future administration of Gaza has become part of international diplomatic discussions and visits.
There are countries in the Arab world that insist the issue of Gaza’s administration after the current conflict cannot be resolved even in the short term without outlining a vision for the entire Palestinian issue, and even if resolved, it will not be sustainable and will be prone to the next conflict.
Nevertheless, managing Gaza’s affairs after moving past the current situation is more urgent than making it contingent on resolving the historical Middle East challenge definitively and clearly. In this context, different ideas for even temporary administration of Gaza are being proposed.
Options with different flaws and shortcomings
One option discussed is continuing a situation roughly similar to the one governing Gaza up to October 7, albeit with Hamas significantly weakened and the area under stricter siege, severing all its connections with Israel, including preventing Gaza’s workforce from entering Israel to earn a living, and the people of this strip needing much more international aid.
Some Israeli officials have spoken of the need to shrink Gaza and expand the buffer zone between Israel and this strip to ensure greater security for the residents of southern Israel. This statement might fit within this option or perhaps be a prelude to implementing a more radical option, which will be mentioned later.
In any case, given Israel and its allies’ slogan about the complete destruction of Hamas or decisively denying it access to power structures and management in Palestinian administration, it is unlikely that such an option can be easily implemented or that Tel Aviv will readily agree to it.
Of course, the war might not proceed according to the slogans and objectives of the Israeli government, and Hamas, even if weakened, might still remain a significant factor among the people of Gaza and the West Bank and in the political structure of these areas. However, this is not entirely ruled out, but at least in the current calculations and objectives, its probability is not considered very high at present.
Another option under discussion is the reoccupation and more or less permanent occupation of Gaza by the Israeli army and possibly the establishment of new Jewish settlements in this area, similar to the situation before 2005. Some far-right ministers within the Israeli cabinet have not hesitated to present this option as having historical and legitimate aspects. For example, Mrs. Orit Strock, Israel’s Minister of Settlement Affairs, believes that Gaza is undoubtedly an inseparable part of Israel, and a day will come when we will return there.
This option, especially if the Palestinian residents of Gaza remain there, contradicts the desire of most Israelis, who in recent polls have emphasized their preference for complete separation from Palestinian areas.
Financially and security-wise, the presence of the army in a Gaza that remains inhabited by Palestinians is too costly to be sustainable. These costs led to Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s most right-wing prime ministers, deciding in 2005 to withdraw forces from Gaza and evacuate more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the area.
Evacuating Palestinians from Gaza is a desirable but difficult option
For some Israeli officials and political circles, complete separation from the Palestinians is only possible by expelling the Palestinian residents of Gaza from this area and fully taking over this strip by Israel—a solution that is the darkest and most negative option for the current residents of Gaza. This idea has occasionally been proposed throughout the 75 years since the establishment of the State of Israel.
Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Gaza had an area of 360 square kilometers and a population of 80,000, but by the end of 1948, 160,000 Palestinian refugees were added to Gaza’s population.
A year later, following the signing of an armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt, Gaza’s administration was handed over to Egypt. However, the population increase in this area, whether due to the return of Palestinian refugees who had gone to other countries or the attempts of some of these Palestinians to infiltrate into Israeli territory to retrieve their movable property from their previous homes from which they had been displaced,
Moreover, the belief in having a country from the river to the sea among some of both sides of the conflict, as well as occasional attacks by Gaza refugees on southern Israel, created a security crisis for this country. From this time, the idea of driving Palestinians into the Sinai Desert has been a topic of discussion among some Israeli political and security circles.
In 1950, King Farouk of Egypt opposed the American proposal to purchase the Sinai Peninsula for the settlement of Palestinians. In contrast, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power two years later after toppling the monarchy in Egypt, showed willingness to settle 60,000 Gazans in the northern Sinai Desert.
Cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in this regard was in progress for two years, but dissatisfaction among Gazans with this plan led to widespread protests in 1955 known as the March Uprising, which put an end to this idea and at the same time led to the granting of some political and social freedoms to the people of Gaza by the Egyptian government.
The idea of transfer was abandoned, but other concessions remained unfulfilled, and even the leaders of the uprising were arrested and remained in Egyptian prisons for years. In 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza and the Sinai Desert, the discussion of transferring at least part of the Gaza population to the Sinai Desert resurfaced. In this context, thousands of Gaza residents were transferred to the city of Rafah in the Sinai Desert under Israeli occupation.
In 1979, in the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt regarding the establishment of peace and the withdrawal from the Sinai Desert, it was also agreed that the Gazans who had been moved to Rafah, Egypt, would return to their original residences in Gaza—a decision whose implementation took about ten years.
Since then, the issue of transferring at least parts of the Gaza population to the Sinai Desert has occasionally been raised, whether as an idea or a subject for mainly confidential negotiations among Israeli, American, Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian Authority, and even Hamas officials.
Since the beginning of the ongoing war in Gaza, the discussion of transferring or expelling the people of this region to the Sinai Desert in Egypt has occasionally been raised. Currently, in Israel, two public plans for relocating the people of Gaza are being discussed. One plan is proposed by the Misgav Research Institute, headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, who was previously Netanyahu’s advisor and his representative on special issues. The second plan has been drafted and formulated in the Israeli Ministry of Security Affairs.
The first plan calls for the settlement of Gazans in various cities in Egypt, while the second plan envisions their settlement in the Sinai Desert, with the possibility of some of them being accepted in Western countries. However, both plans consider the first stage to be moving the Gazans to the south of this region. The next stage is that, as living conditions for this population in the south deteriorate, they will have no choice but to flee to the northern Sinai Desert, and Egypt will not be able to close its crossings in the face of such a wave of escape.
Buffer Zone: Solution or Respectful Expulsion
The Israeli government does not officially support such plans, but they are not considered irrelevant as an option. In other words, a Gaza without Gazans and the annexation of this area to Israel is not an unfamiliar idea among some parties and political circles in this country, especially since the statements of various officials with diverse political inclinations do not evoke a clear boundary with such an option. The lack of consideration for the status and health of ordinary and civilian Gazan citizens in the ongoing war and the recklessness in displacing them has practically fueled the suspicion that ultimately such a plan will be implemented.
Yisrael Katz, Israel’s Minister of Energy, announced early in the war that Gaza would be deprived of electricity, fuel, and water pump operation until all hostages returned home—a statement that has largely been implemented during the war. Accusing all the people of Gaza of collaborating with Hamas, repeated in the words of some senior Israeli officials, also supports this suspicion that the end of the war will be marked by settling scores with this entire population and distancing them from Israel.
Simcha Rothman from the Religious Zionist Party, which is a partner in the government coalition, recently stated in an interview that after the war, the world must address the problem of the people of Gaza, implicitly referring to the fact that 75% of Gaza’s population has refugee status and they or their parents and grandparents came there as refugees. He said there is no reason for the United Nations to keep them in Gaza. Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture affiliated with Netanyahu’s Likud Party, has also spoken of a second Nakba or Gaza’s Nakba.
Nakba in Palestinian history refers to the events around 1948, the year of Israel’s establishment, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from the territories of present-day Israel. Many of them took refuge in Gaza, and part of Gaza’s current population are their descendants.
The unprecedented joint action of Ram Ben-Barak, a senior member of the Knesset and former deputy head of Mossad from the opposition party Yesh Atid, and Danny Danon, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and current Knesset member from the ruling Likud party, has also gained attention. They have issued a call in the Wall Street Journal for the voluntary relocation of Gaza’s residents and have asked Western countries to open their doors to Gaza’s residents.
As mentioned, such positions have not yet been officially endorsed. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and his senior advisor Mike Rago have recently spoken about creating a buffer zone around Gaza after the war ends—a buffer zone that should make any armed action from within Gaza against Israel impossible. How many kilometers this zone will cover from the entire small area of Gaza and its details are not yet known, but critics do not rule out that this is another version of pushing Gazans into conditions that ultimately make leaving the area preferable to staying.
However, advancing such a plan, whether officially or unofficially by Israel’s most right-wing political circles, requires not only the cooperation, albeit forced, of Gazans themselves but also the support and cooperation of Israel’s main ally, the United States, and Arab countries, including Egypt, which have firmly opposed any relocation of Gaza’s people.
Part of the concerns about such an occurrence, aside from making a population of over two million homeless worldwide, also relates to the possibility that some extremist right-wing circles in Israel might later want to implement such a plan regarding the West Bank and push the Palestinians of this area to go to Jordan or beyond, thus solving the Palestinian issue once and for all. The hope of extremist right-wing circles is that by implementing this plan, there will be no need to apply a solution based on justice involving the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel or accepting Palestinians as equal citizens of a binational state.
Real but Tougher Options
A less extreme and more realistic option is to entrust Gaza’s affairs to multinational forces with or without the United Nations’ leadership, as happened with Kosovo after 1999 and its de facto separation from Serbia. The problem with this option is that Israel and the United Nations have long been in conflict, both generally and specifically in the recent war, and Tel Aviv considers the organization biased and on the opposite pole due to its criticisms of the war’s conduct.
The possibility of this option being realized with forces from Arab countries trusted by Israel, such as Egypt, the UAE, and Bahrain, is also nearly ruled out, as these countries have so far conditioned resolving the Gaza issue after the war on outlining a specific vision for the complete resolution of the chronic Palestinian issue.
Entrusting Gaza’s affairs to the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank is also not a very likely option for realization. Israeli right-wingers have always had issues with the Palestinian Authority maintaining a significant amount of authority in the West Bank itself. This authority now faces personnel, financial, and structural problems.
The lack of democratic legitimacy of this authority, which has not witnessed elections for years and whose system is even tainted by corruption and weak social support within the West Bank itself, adds to the problem, making it difficult for it to establish itself and take over the management in Gaza.
Even securing democratic legitimacy for the Palestinian Authority through elections is unlikely to be accompanied by the extension of its power over Gaza, as nearly all Palestinian groups emphasize that they are not willing to step forward to resolve the post-war Gaza issue without serious guarantees regarding the resolution of the entire Palestinian problem.
Overall, it can be said that the future of Gaza and the presence or absence of Hamas in this future largely depends on the course and developments of the ongoing war. However, if this war proceeds according to the objectives set by Israel and Hamas is truly eliminated from the Palestinian political scene or marginalized, then it is unlikely that smooth, stable, and conflict-free administration of Gaza can be achieved through its occupation by the Israeli army or the creation of a buffer zone, or that the option of completely expelling Gazans from this area can be implemented.
Meanwhile, considering the approaches and ideas that have emerged internationally and in the region, more realistic options for temporary management of Gaza might not have a chance for complete and successful implementation without addressing the entire longstanding Palestinian problem. Everything might depend on outlining a vision for the definitive resolution of the Middle East’s most chronic issue and the fate of the Palestinians, a vision on which real and lasting security for Israel is also perceived to depend. Otherwise, the cycle of violence, bloodshed, and instability in the region will continue to be the order of the day.