The Israeli war on the Gaza Strip: post-war scenarios
The 7 October 2023 attack was a pivotal event locally and internationally, and the heading of a new era in the Palestinian people's life and the conflict with the Israeli occupation — the first surprise attack on Israel by fighters of armed organisations rather than a regular army.
- Author
- The editorial team
- Date
- 2024-05-11
The attack of the seventh of October 2023 was a pivotal event at the local and international levels, and the headline of a new era in the life of the Palestinian people and in the conflict with the Israeli occupation. It was the first time in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict that Israel came under a surprise attack by fighters belonging to armed organisations rather than an organised army — breaching the border, reaching some 14 small towns in southern Israel, inflicting numbers of Israeli and foreign civilian and military casualties, and abducting dozens of civilians, soldiers, and non-Israeli foreigners, holding them as hostages.
The Hamas–Jihad attack was a shocking surprise to everyone: Israel, the world east and west, the Palestinian people, and a large part of the leadership and membership of the Hamas movement itself and Palestinian society at large — for no indicator had foretold such an event. Within a few hours of the attack, Israel launched its war on the Gaza Strip in general and on Hamas and Islamic Jihad in particular. That war continues to this, its 205th day, as these lines are written — a war in which Israel has used every means of killing, destruction, death, and starvation, reaching the degree of extermination, with a case submitted to the International Court of Justice by the state of South Africa.
The Israeli government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu and the war council set objectives for the war: first, freeing the hostages held in the Gaza Strip; second, eliminating the Hamas movement, particularly its military capabilities, and dismantling the system of rule it administers in the Gaza Strip; and third, guaranteeing that Gaza will pose no future threat to Israel's security.1 These objectives — should they be achieved — will necessarily produce radical changes in the system of governance in the Gaza Strip, with effects continuing over the long term. Research centres and policy-analysis institutes have been studying conceptions and scenarios of this war's outcomes and their consequences over the near, medium, and long terms. Israel has come to view the survival of Hamas rule in Gaza as an existential threat: Prime Minister Netanyahu remarked that the battle in Gaza resembles a second war of independence for the State of Israel2 — just as the Palestinian Nakba was the first — and the term “the day after the war on the Gaza Strip” became common currency among Israeli politicians as a term signalling a future for Gaza beyond Hamas's existence. Yet the Israeli government, represented by its poles, and the war council, proved unable to offer a clear vision of that future — though they voiced some of its features in the course of the military campaign, such as Israeli ministers declaring more than once their unwillingness to see UNRWA, the Palestinian National Authority, or the Fatah movement take part in Gaza's future. These Israeli objectives partly intersected with the United States' vision for engaging the war on Gaza, embodied in the vision of Secretary of State Blinken3: first, defeating Hamas, with the United States unwilling to see Hamas as part of Gaza's future; second, rejecting the displacement of the population; third, rejecting a permanent reoccupation of Gaza. Talk of the day after the war thus became one of the principal products of this convergence on the desire to defeat Hamas — while acknowledging that the answer to the question “what comes after the day after?” carried divergent viewpoints between the United States, which wants to see a Palestinian National Authority with radical reforms in the Gaza Strip,4 and Israel, which opposes the Palestinian Authority's presence in the Gaza Strip and does not wish to see the Palestinian political system unified.
The day after the war: the possible scenarios
This paper attempts to look ahead by setting out the possible scenarios for administering the Gaza Strip after the war ends, and analysing the enablers and obstacles of each. Before surveying these scenarios, it should be noted that the question of the day after the war on Gaza became an important one requiring an Israeli answer after the failure of the plan to displace the population of the Gaza Strip into Egypt. Israel attempted, by harvesting Western sympathy in the first days of the war, to push through the displacement scheme for Gaza's population, but the scheme was thwarted by the Arab and international position rejecting it — above all the Egyptian position, which refused with utmost firmness to open its territory to the Israeli transfer of the Strip's population — in addition to the steadfastness of Gaza's people and their refusal to be displaced once again. Netanyahu, and behind him the Israeli war council, turned instead to destroying every form of life in the Gaza Strip: targeting all the foundations of basic life, from the water, energy, and sanitation networks, to striking hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques, in addition to destroying all government institutions and headquarters, the residential towers, and hundreds of thousands of housing units, refusing the entry of fuel and rationing the entry of food and medical aid — what we might call the subjugation of life to the power of death in the Gaza Strip. Strikingly, it is the American administration that has taken the initiative, up to this moment, in drafting conceptions and scenarios for governing the Strip after the end of the war Israel has waged since the seventh of October 2023 — a war that developed, by its twentieth day, toward reoccupation and control of the Gaza Strip.
The repeated visits of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region across the months of the war came in the frame of offering conceptions for governing the Gaza Strip after the war's end. The American administration aligns with the occupying state on ending Hamas's rule of the Strip, and clearly continues to back Israel in its war against the Palestinian people in the Strip by every means. Reports indicate that the US Secretary of State had proposed, in his meeting with the Arab foreign ministers in Jordan, the idea of administering the Gaza Strip through a joint Arab force, but the conception met rejection from the foreign ministers — which drove him to visit the president of the Palestinian National Authority to put the matter before him: to accept the administration and governance of the Gaza Strip. President Mahmoud Abbas expressed a conditional acceptance of governing and administering the Strip within a political track leading to a Palestinian state according to the resolutions of international legitimacy — something Israel assuredly rejects and tries to steer away from. Amid these shifts, the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has thrown the door wide open to every possible scenario for administering governance in the Strip, and the principal possible scenarios for administering the Gaza Strip now run as follows:
- The scenario of containing Hamas:
This scenario assumes that the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip will not succeed — whether by design or by incapacity — in eliminating the Hamas movement, but that the continuous Israeli pressure upon it, using every instrument of war, killing, destruction, starvation, and humiliation, will push it toward offering substantial concessions touching the movement's foundations and constants. These concessions consist of recognising Israel's right to exist, renouncing violence, and accepting the political-negotiating course. The movement might then gain the chance of survival, preserving what remains of its capabilities, taking part in governing the Gaza Strip, and engaging in its reconstruction on new political foundations. Should Israel succeed in achieving this, it will have managed to domesticate the Palestinian situation entirely.
In the most recent statement by Hamas's leadership, Khalil al-Hayya said the movement is prepared to abandon the military course and lay down its arms should a Palestinian state be agreed.
It can be said that this position of Hamas — its most recent — represents a radical change from its previous positions.
Driving Hamas to abandon its military programme is the strategic objective Israel is trying to achieve in this war; if achieved, Israel will have won it. It would mean Hamas entering the settlement track and abandoning armed struggle — the very scenario of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1982, after Israel's invasion of Beirut and the departure of the PLO's forces and its then chairman Yasser Arafat. Israel would thereby have succeeded in preserving the separation of the Strip from the West Bank and keeping the Palestinian political division in place — and would thus not be compelled to answer the international and regional calls for opening a political track for the conflict ending in the two-state solution. This scenario likewise guarantees Israel freedom of security and military action in the Gaza Strip — incursions, arrests, and the suppression of any Palestinian resistance — without an actual military presence of Israeli forces on the ground. This scenario carries strong probability because it accords with Israel's traditional policy toward Hamas since its takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007 — the policy of mowing the grass, not uprooting it. A change was observed in the declared objective of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip: from eliminating the Hamas movement and toppling its rule, to destroying the movement's military capabilities so as to prevent it repeating a new 7 October attack. In a report published by Al Jazeera titled “Israeli analysts: Hamas will remain in Gaza after the war”, the report recounts the views of some Israeli experts that Hamas will remain on the day after the war, that no authority can fill the vacuum, and that any authority will have to share the civil affairs of Gazans with this movement.5 The realisation of this scenario depends on the outcome of the battle raging on the ground in the Gaza Strip, how and when it ends, and whether Hamas will manage to survive and secure some achievements that give it cards of strength.
Parties of influence over Hamas — Qatar and Turkey specifically — might help persuade the movement's leadership abroad to accept it, but this scenario would cost Hamas the support and allegiance of the resistance-axis powers such as Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Such a course would greatly affect the movement's future, especially before its supporters, and its doctrinal position toward Israel, and might lead to a partial collapse and a split within the movement — beyond the great fracture that could open between the movement and the rest of the resistance factions such as Islamic Jihad, and behind it the resistance axis (Hezbollah and Iran). This scenario would also meet fierce opposition from some Arab parties such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, which prefer Hamas's disappearance from the scene and its absorption into the Palestinian institutional order — states at odds with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
- Phased international-regional-local supervision of the Gaza Strip:
This scenario assumes that, upon the war's end, and to fill the vacuum that may arise from the collapse of the system of rule in the Gaza Strip, the influential powers (America, the European Union, and the Arab states of weight in the Palestinian situation — Egypt and Jordan especially) may be compelled to form an Arab and international force, with the participation of local representatives from the Gaza Strip, to administer the Strip. This body would manage the reconstruction process and supervise sectors such as education and health, and it might be backed by an external military force to preserve security, such as UN peacekeeping forces.6 This course requires a mandate from the Palestinian National Authority, under the pretext that it is a temporary arrangement until conditions settle, allowing the Authority to take the reins later.
It is clear this scenario is strongly on the table: Arab states have announced their readiness to send forces to the Gaza Strip to help secure it.7 Its realisation is tied principally to Israel succeeding in achieving all its objectives and actually eliminating Hamas or weakening it beyond the capacity to resist — and the resistance factions have declared their rejection of this proposal.8 Though on the table, accepting this scenario requires legitimate cover from the Arab League or the United Nations, and Palestinian acceptance from the Palestinian Authority, which may see in it a bypassing of itself, especially given the legitimacy of Palestinian representation vested in the Palestine Liberation Organization. It is natural to ask what roles the Arabs wish to play in the Gaza Strip — particularly as they may not be eager to wade into the quagmire of Gaza without a lasting political solution.9 Under this scenario the Authority will be unable to extend its control from the West Bank over the Strip; with time and the drift of events, its presence in the West Bank would be wound down, whether by moving its centre to the Strip or by replacing it entirely with another in the Strip. The destination of this course may be the realisation of (the two-state solution) by establishing the Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip, enjoying defined aspects of sovereignty. The price would be leaving the status of Jerusalem and the West Bank suspended and severed from the Strip's status, while keeping a flame of hope burning, according to a step-by-step policy, with that region's fate to be addressed in days to come. And of course, the gnawing of the land, the Judaisation, and the settlement would continue, until the matter ends with Israel swallowing the entire West Bank, Jerusalem included.
- The scenario of returning the Authority to the Gaza Strip:
This scenario requires Israel's agreement to enable the Palestinian National Authority to reorganise itself in the Gaza Strip, including security control of the Strip — which may require recruiting local elements, bringing in forces from the West Bank or the diaspora camps, or absorbing the security forces existing in the Gaza Strip on new foundations and a new security doctrine. The Palestinian Authority clearly prefers this scenario and has prepared itself for it in advance: Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh submitted his resignation to President Abbas, and Mr Mohammad Mustafa was then charged with forming a new government of a predominantly expert, technocratic character, in response to repeated calls from the European Union and the United States for reform of the Palestinian Authority. This scenario requires of the Palestinians the building of a genuine Palestinian reconciliation and the formation of a national technocratic government whose task is the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip — enjoying international sponsorship, working to rein in aggressive Israeli policies, laying the ground for Palestinian elections and political reforms in the structure of the political system, in a way that prevents the inflaming of conflict, unifies the Palestinian decision in peace and war, and paves the way for opening a political track in the future.
The Israeli government earlier declared it would not permit a (Fatahstan) state in the Gaza Strip10 — since this scenario forces Israel toward a comprehensive political process leading ultimately to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Strip. The Israeli obstacle will therefore greatly impede this scenario; yet a change in Israel's position toward the National Authority has appeared plainly with secret meetings held between influential Palestinian security figures and Israel. Against these shifts in Israeli orientations, it is worth pondering the price Israel will demand of the Palestinian Authority for permitting it to administer the Gaza Strip after the war — a price that will fall within completing Israel's mission of eliminating the pockets of resistance and preventing their rearmament.
Hamas's survival as an active part of the Palestinian political system, should this scenario prevail, depends on three factors. The first is Hamas's acceptance of full integration into the structure of the political system, abandoning allegiance to the resistance axis and committing to the PLO's agreements, without being bound to explicit recognition of the State of Israel. The second is the degree of the international community's enthusiasm for accepting Hamas's presence in the Palestinian political system on the day after the war. The third is Fatah's acceptance of Hamas's presence in the political system after its defeat and the ebbing of its strength — for Fatah doubtless views Hamas as a political rival that has more than once put itself forward as an alternative to Fatah in leading the Palestinian people, and Fatah may see the day after the war as an opportunity to be rid of Hamas, its traditional rival, as an influential force, and to press on weakening it politically.
- The scenario of the return of the Israeli civil administration in the Gaza Strip:
This scenario assumes the Israeli army will remain present — permanently or temporarily — in the Gaza Strip on the day after the war. It would be imposed in defined parts of the Strip, such as the northern area and Gaza City down to the Strip's centre, without being applied in the southern area comprising the governorates of Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah — requiring the re-establishment of the civil administration in the manner by which the occupation forces administered the Gaza Strip before withdrawing from it in 1994 under the Oslo accord. Under this scenario the occupation forces would deliver services to the Strip's residents, while the army and the Shabak would hold security administration of the Strip. This scenario is pressed forward by the measures the Israeli army is taking on the ground in force: it has built what is known as the logistical road linking Israel to Gaza City, which has become akin to the border of a buffer zone between Gaza's north and south — especially as this road is fitted with two military positions on Gaza's shore and near Salah al-Din road, both equipped with air-conditioned rooms and soldiers' sleeping quarters like those it built in the West Bank — alongside the erection of the pier in the area south of Gaza City, which signals that the measures taken are not for the near term but may remain in force over the long term.
This scenario requires the complete elimination of Hamas's strength in the Gaza Strip, especially in Gaza City and the Strip's north. In any case, Israel has long experience in the civil administration of the Palestinian National Authority's areas and would not start from zero — particularly with its turn in recent years to launching several mobile applications addressing Palestinian citizens directly and easing contact with them, such as the “Coordinator” app. Yet the exorbitant cost of this option to Israel in people and money — especially with the deterioration of citizens' living conditions in the Gaza Strip after the war, the cost of reconstruction, and its bearing full responsibility for delivering services to citizens as the occupying power — in addition to popular resistance and the Palestinian, regional, and international rejection of reoccupation, keeps this option extremely weak. This option would make Israel the occupier of the entire Palestinian territories — a return to before Oslo — and would mean the end of the two-state solution. This scenario was rejected by the United States and Europe, which demanded plainly of Israel that it not remain in the Gaza Strip and that the National Authority must return to it. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in mid-February 2024 the United States' rejection of any “new occupation” of Gaza after the war's end, in reply to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement of a plan for the contours of the situation after the end of the war raging in the Strip.11
- Reviving the village leagues under Israeli military rule:
This scenario rests on forming a set of local Palestinian administrations from family, clan, and community figures to manage the daily affairs of Palestinian citizens in the areas of these administrations' influence and to cooperate with the international community in rebuilding the Gaza Strip — while the matter of keeping security remains in the hands of the Israeli army, on the model of the administrative formations Israel created in 1978 to administer the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and manufacture a locally acceptable alternative leadership to the PLO. It should be noted here that since November 2023 the occupation forces have been contacting clan figures to explore the prospects of administering the Gaza Strip through local collaborators working at this stage on managing the humanitarian-aid file; yet up to the date of this paper's preparation, the occupation forces have achieved no serious breakthrough in this matter, in light of a public refusal to cooperate with the occupation on this front. The assembly of Gaza's mukhtars declared their refusal to cooperate with the Israeli war government in administering the affairs of the Gaza Strip, and Gaza's clans and families declared their rejection of the Israeli proposal in an official statement titled: we refuse to be a substitute for any political system.12 Hamas likewise rejected this scenario, describing Israel's attempt to contact the mukhtars and clans in Gaza as “a treason we will not permit”.13 This scenario is hard to realise for two reasons: first, Israel will find in the Gaza Strip no family or local figures of acceptance, influence, and clan and tribal respect willing to play this role, seen as national treason — in addition to the rejection of it by the Palestinian Authority and the Arab states of the region — quite apart from the fact that it would inflame popular resistance in the Strip against it. This scenario proved its failure before, when Israel tried to form village leagues in the West Bank as a substitute for the Palestinian leadership.14
- The scenario of Egyptian administration of the Gaza Strip:
The Gaza Strip is strategic depth for the Arab Republic of Egypt, which previously administered the Strip from 1948 until June 1967, when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt may find itself compelled to play this role to plug any vacuum arising from Hamas's military defeat, and out of fear that extremist terrorist forces would fill that vacuum — for Egypt has a bitter experience of war with terrorism in Sinai, whose border joins the south of the Gaza Strip. Egypt need not administer the Gaza Strip directly; it might do so by widening the influence of the Egyptian intelligence service in the Strip, as it currently does in the areas of eastern Libya controlled by General Khalifa Haftar without any actual Egyptian administration. This means Egypt may view the border Israel is trying to impose in the north of the Gaza Strip, via what is known as Route 749, as the boundary of its national-security zone — resembling the line it drew in 2020, naming it the Sirte–Jufra line and declaring it its zone of influence and a red line for its national security.15
Although this option is not attractive from the Egyptian standpoint at present, important factors — (1) Egyptian national security, (2) the desire to benefit from the gas fields off the Gaza Strip, where Egypt, represented by the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS), previously signed an agreement with the Palestinian National Authority to develop the Gaza Marine gas field,16 and (3) Egypt's desire to manage the reconstruction process and benefit from the wide-scale infrastructure-rehabilitation contracts expected to launch after the war on Gaza — may push Egypt to consider this scenario in one form or another. On the Palestinian side in particular, Hamas may view Egypt's administration of the Gaza Strip as a gateway to preserving its existence from dissolution under an occupation of the Strip. But this scenario will find no welcome from the Palestinian Authority, which considers the Gaza Strip a fundamental part of the territory of the Palestinian state — giving it the exclusive right to govern in the Gaza Strip.
The perspective of what Gazans aspire to on the day after the war
In surveying the many expected scenarios for the situation in the Gaza Strip on the day after the war's end, account must be taken of what the residents of the Gaza Strip themselves aspire to and look toward — they being the first and most important stakeholders in this context. After the war ends, the civilians of the Gaza Strip look toward a future filled with peace and prosperity. The wars and escalations that continued across the past seventeen years cast their bloody shadow over the residents' daily life, and the Palestinian people in Gaza hold fast to their earnest desire to end the cycle of violence and build a bright future for the coming generations. Many demonstrations went out in various areas of the Gaza Strip, despite the bombardment, demanding a stop to the war.17 The position of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip comes down to stopping the war and having a Palestinian leadership able to bring peace and stability to civilians, to advance reconstruction and deliver development projects that restore to the Strip its health system, food security, work opportunities, and freedom of travel — demands they have never ceased pressing since the blockade was imposed on the Strip in June 2007.
The humanitarian crises the residents of the Gaza Strip suffer now warn of grave health catastrophes threatening the lives of hundreds of civilians — on top of the horrors of the war the people of Gaza lived through, which destroyed their economic life and the future of thousands of young people. The residents of the Gaza Strip aspire to recover the democracy they have been denied since 2007, guaranteeing the holding of parliamentary and presidential elections and university councils. On the tenth anniversary of the division, in 2017, Pal-Think for Strategic Studies took the initiative of publishing a memorandum signed by 52 civil institutions demanding that the Palestinian government hold local-government elections in the Gaza Strip.
Then would come the passage to a phase of stability and development, with a unified, youthful Palestinian political system working by every available means and instrument to achieve the political and developmental goals and build a better future for all. This is what the research paper published by the MIFTAH foundation in 2021 affirmed, which included the following: civil-society institutions affirm their position that local-authority elections must be held according to the requirements of the law, and consider that time still remains for the government and the political forces and parties to halt the first stage and not fragment the elections, holding them on a single day and in all governorates.
Gazans also aspire to the start of rebuilding what the many wars destroyed, wars that caused a great deterioration in every economic and social indicator. The citizens of the Gaza Strip recognise that the years of blockade and the many wars achieved no political goal for the Palestinian people — they were rather an enormous burden upon them and upon the present and future of the Palestinian national project. Worth mentioning here: the preparations for the legislative elections that had been set for May 2021 saw 36 electoral lists submitted for participation, 26 of them formed by young people who were not well known and not of the traditional Palestinian political establishment — confirming the desire of the majority of the Palestinian people, of whom youth form some 62 per cent, to elect a young Palestinian leadership.18 The residents of the Gaza Strip are part of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and since the division occurred and the nascent democratic process halted they have never ceased demanding an end to the division and the holding of elections.
The citizens of the Gaza Strip see that the best — indeed the only — scenario for them is to be under an elected Palestinian national leadership that represents them and achieves their goals.
Conclusion:
It may be easy to start a war, but it is not easy to end one — and harder still to decide the day after its end. This applies to the Israeli war running on the Gaza Strip for seven months. At the war's start the objectives were clear, as the Israeli war council announced them; but with the passage of time and the war entering its seventh month, those objectives look less clear and unachieved. Hamas has not been wholly defeated, the hostages have not been freed, and the residents of the Gaza Strip have not been driven from it. The obscurity over how to end the war and decide the day after springs from the fact that most of the propositions are far from reality and fall under what might be called “wishes”. True, the attack of the seventh of October was a watershed event of which it can be said that what follows it is the headline of a new historical era in the life of the Palestinian people — the era currently expressed by the term “the day after the war on Gaza”. That term has become a synonym for Gaza's unknown future, not from the Palestinian perspective alone but from the Israeli and regional perspectives: positions diverged within the Israeli government, and within the war council too, over Gaza's future — likewise within the corridors of Western and Arab politics. This means that discussing the question of the day after the war on Gaza may carry us a little toward pondering the future of the current Israeli government, whose probable fall would be a fall of the forces of the extremist Israeli right, and a fall of the Israeli propositions of displacing the population of the Gaza Strip. It might likewise be a fall of the propositions of normalisation between some Arab states and Israel without solving the Palestinian cause. It can be said with full confidence that the war on Gaza has not destroyed the Gaza Strip alone — it extends to destroying political ideas and extremist propositions that some in Israel and the region imagined achievable.
We must therefore go toward the scenario most realistic and most consistent with the principles of law and international legitimacy — the one founded on ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and enabling the Palestinians to recover their unity and decide the shape of the political system they want, and the way to achieve it, freely and without external interference. The war on the Gaza Strip, with all the killing and destruction it has caused, must furnish a historic opportunity to begin a new road toward a historic settlement that ends the conflict standing for a hundred years and brings stability and peace to the Middle East region.