On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a plan for the administration of Gaza following IDF military operations in the territory. Netanyahu’s plan consists of four pillars: Israeli “security control” in Gaza, administration via Palestinian technocrats, tight control over Gaza’s borders, and reconstruction funded by an international coalition. The vague plan raises several worrying questions that must be answered if security in the region is to be improved.
Who will really administer Gaza?
Without effective administrators, Israel would be opening the door for Hamas to return as Gaza’s shadow government. But finding a sufficient force of technocrats will be a challenge.
Netanyahu’s plan calls for “local stakeholders” without an affiliation “with countries or entities that support terrorism” to administer Gaza. It is not clear who will fit the bill. The call for local stakeholders will make a Palestinian Authority (PA) role difficult, and anyone working in Gaza’s public sector has been working for Hamas, eliminating many locals with relevant experience.
Need for services in post-war Gaza will be enormous. About 80 percent of Palestinians depended on humanitarian aid before Israel’s invasion, and the number is now even higher. Netanyahu’s calls for dissolving the UN agency that coordinates that aid, known as UNRWA, will magnify the burden on Gaza’s administrators. UNRWA had a budget of more than $1 billion in 2022 and employed about 12,000 people in Gaza before the conflict. If Netanyahu dismantles the agency, replacing the services UNRWA provided will be a daunting task for a new administration.
If Israel can’t find administrators to provide these services, opposing groups will seek to win over Gaza’s population by doing so themselves. Given the depth of the need and the difficulty of the task Netanyahu has set, the extremists might reasonably expect to succeed.
How far will Israel go to keep its chosen technocrats in power?
To avoid the rise of another hostile regime in Gaza, Israel will have to prop up its chosen administrators through military and financial support. A key question will therefore be political will—both Israeli and foreign.
Regimes put in place by a foreign government are frequently torn between the demands of two masters—the population they rule and the patron that put them in power. This is one reason so many cases of regime change result in civil war, the overthrow of the new government, or conflict between the patron and the client. Administrators in Gaza will face incentives to adopt Hamas-like policies if they want to avoid being expelled in a repeat of the 2007 Battle of Gaza or merely assassinated by extremists who remain in Gaza after IDF operations conclude.
Israel will have to repress opposition to its chosen administrators if it wants to keep them in power. Israel’s willingness to bear the human, financial, and reputational costs of doing so is currently extremely high, but it will decline as Oct. 7 recedes in memory and new political concerns rise in salience.
Israel also counts on foreign governments to foot the bill for Gaza’s reconstruction. But those governments will find supporting Israel’s de facto occupation of Gaza a bitter pill. Opposition to Israeli activities in Gaza and the West Bank has increased in the United States—the largest provider of aid worldwide and to Palestine—and other major donors have suggested that the possibility of unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state. IDF repression in Gaza will only increase international opposition and decrease the likelihood that its new administrators can win support through reconstruction.
Who will negotiate the future of Palestine?
Absent negotiations over the future of Palestine, Netanyahu’s plan will do little more than turn Gaza into the world’s largest internment camp, with its borders essentially closed and no hope of meaningful self-government. The plan says that a “permanent arrangement” is possible only “through direct negotiation between the parties” even as it denies a role in Gaza for the PA, which is the closest thing Palestine has to a government capable of negotiation.
The plan also undermines the prospects for negotiation in other ways. For example, it does not rule out the possibility that Israeli settlers will return to Gaza. Such settlements would further erode the prospects for negotiations aimed at ending the conflict. It also envisions the creation of a security zone on Gaza’s southern border, which will further inflame Israel’s relationship with Egypt, a key regional player and consistent mediator in Israel’s conflicts with Palestinian groups.
The plan’s obstacles to a negotiated resolution are probably a feature rather than a bug for some right-wingers in Netanyahu’s government, at least one of whom has advocated for a “solution” in which ethnic cleansing plays a major role. But without a negotiated solution, the conflict will continue to undermine the security of Israelis and Palestinians, with the latter bearing the brunt of the violence.
No Easy Answers
None of these questions have easy answers, but that does not mean they can go unaddressed. The vague language in Netanyahu’s plan allows room for maneuver and negotiation as it moves toward implementation. Those who support a lasting peace in Israel and Palestine should push the Israeli government towards a plan that answers these questions in the most productive way possible.
This probably involves a role for a reformed Palestinian Authority in the administration of Gaza, an arrangement that would expand the pool of possible administrators, put a “government” in place that has a chance at threading the needle between Palestinian and Israeli demands, and empower a body that can negotiate with Israel with some credibility. It will also have to prevent the movement of settlers back into Gaza.
The United States has a large role to play in pressuring Israel to make productive changes to the plan, but the region’s difficult politics, Israel’s rightward shift, and the impending U.S. election all represent major barriers to the effective use of U.S. leverage. Even so, the sheer size of U.S. financial, military, and reputational commitment in the region means that it must take an active role in pushing for a plan that is both possible to implement and stands a chance of moving the region toward peace.
Alexander Palmer is an expert in the CSIS Transnational Threat Project.