The Israeli army has developed plans to win back Gaza in order to finally defeat Hamas, paving the way for a long occupation of the besieged enclave.
The proposal – to be approved by the Israeli security firm – was formulated by the new Chief of the Defense Forces of Israel with the unofficial support of the far -right ministers who has long demanded radically harsher tactics to combat the militant group, said several people informed the plans.
Two officials said the plans had been made possible by the return of US President Donald Trump to the White House, who released Israel from the insistence of the Biden administration so as not to reoccupy the territory of Gaza or annex.
“The previous administration wanted us to finish war. Trump wants us to win war,” said a third Israeli official. “There is also an American supreme interest in the defeat of Hamas.”
According to the plan, the FDI would call several combat divisions to reintegrate and control Hamas, take control of large expanses of the enclave and force the population of 2.2 million in the territory in a small so -called humanitarian area along the Mediterranean coast.
The Israeli army would then administer Gaza, these officials said, reappearing the febrile territory 20 years after its release. Israel occupied the enclave for almost four decades until 2005, after capturing it in the 1967 war.
Such a plan would uproot millions of Palestinian civilians and hug them in an even smaller extent of sterile land, depending on food aid to survive. He also risks causing a long insurrection against Israeli troops. The Israeli army did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
One of the familiar people with the deliberations said that Israel could resume the distribution of all humanitarian aid and recently assessed the number of calories that each Palestinian would need. Another said that the military envisaged options, including the distribution of aid directly, or through private entrepreneurs, to ensure that Hamas could not benefit from it.
The UN said on Monday that it would withdraw a third of its international Gaza staff after determining that an Israeli reservoir had fired in a UN complex last week, killing a European acid worker and injuring five others, according to spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric. The FDI denied having attacked the compound.
The plans of a renewed invasion, reported for the first time by the Journal Ha’aretz, would be a change in relation to the way in which Israel continued the war under the former security officials, including the former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and the recently retired chief of staff Herzi Halevi.
Until now, Israel’s approach has focused on high intensity combat episodes, after which its forces would repeatedly attack different areas of the band to eliminate the remains of Hamas, then leave.
“This is a completely different type of fighting,” said a main military reservist, who has now been invited to prepare for several months of combat operations involving “a fight, a victory and an administration,” he said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised to destroy Hamas after the attack on the militant group on October 7, 2023 against Israel, in which local officials say that 1,200 people were killed and some 250 people took the hostage.
The Israeli army has continued to waste a large part of the enclave, to cause a humanitarian crisis and to kill more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to local officials.
Meanwhile, the FDIs said they had dismantled most of Hamas’ military structure, destroyed large parts of an underground tunnel network and killed a large part of his management, notably the chief of Gaza Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, who plotted the attack on October 7.
But at the end of January, after Israel had to accept a fragile ceasefire to guarantee the release of the hostages in exchange for a fighting of the fighting, Hamas again started to restore control in the band.
Although polls show that the majority of Israelis promote an agreement to put an end to the war and release the 59 hostages remaining in Gaza – less than half of those who are still alive – the inability to Israeli to completely eliminate criticism of the security of former security leaders by Netanyahu allies.
Now, Israeli political and military leaders have clearly indicated that the objective was to hold a territory and to destroy once and for all the military and governess in the strip.
Earlier this month, Bezalel Smotrich, the influential far-right finance minister, said Israeli soldiers should prepare for a long battle to “finish work”. “Gaza will not be the same Gaza that we have learned in recent decades,” he told Israeli public radio.
But defense analysts say that it is not clear if the FDI can achieve these objectives in the space of a few months, given the attrition among its existing forces and the need to deploy what they say to be at least four divisions of combat soldiers.
Israel took his first step last week, breaking the ceasefire with a devastating campaign of air strikes across Gaza and restarting the ground operations.
Last Tuesday, only the air strikes killed 400 people, the majority of women and children, according to preliminary figures from Palestinian health officials.
The FDI said that it was targeting Hamas political and military figures on Sunday, including Ismail Barhoum, a senior group official of the group’s political bureau, in an air strike at the Nasser medical complex.
“The bombings have destroyed all the beds and the entire area in the neighborhood,” said Feroze Sidhwa, a voluntary American trauma surgeon at Nasser. He added that he had managed a little death because he had been called to the intensive care unit of another hospital to cope with an influx of injured patients, most of them.
Additional report by Heba Saleh in Cairo; Cartography of Steven Bernard and data visualization by Aditi Bhandari
