Benjamin Netanyahu believes he has finally found a solution for Gaza. Total reoccupation of the 365 sq km (141 sq miles) of territory and the mass evacuation of its population in a “takeover” that mutilates Israel’s internal democracy and risks placing it near the very top of pariah nations.
This is a defining moment that could further divide Europe from America, where Donald Trump is reported to have been briefed in advance on the Gaza plan.
Israel’s military and intelligence establishment know that they’re being marched into a trap set by Hamas, but on Netanyahu’s instructions.
Hamas is opposed to a two-state deal that would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel because it wants the Jewish state to vanish. Israel’s further occupation of Gaza guarantees that a two-state solution is impossible.
Israel’s prime minister is interested, though, only in the short-term tactical survival of Israel’s prime minister. And he is prepared to risk Israel’s long-term survival to ensure it.
He doesn’t care that, as Israel rolls the tanks into Gaza City – said to be completed by 7 October this year – Israel’s claims to be a democracy will be over. Worse still for Israel, given the international condemnation that has followed Netanyahu’s “forever war” decision, is that the Jewish state will inevitably face sanctions by the year’s end.
It is difficult to see how it will swerve the outrage Netanyahu will generate, given the worldwide collapse in support for Israel’s actions in Gaza so far.
Already, Germany, which has been defensive of Netanyahu and Israel’s policies, has moved to ban the sales of any weapons from Germany that could be used in Gaza.
That could affect the export licences for military equipment to Israel worth €485m ($564m) granted between 7 October 2023 and 13 May 2025.
European economic sanctions and travel bans on Israelis will, or should, come as the killing of Gazans continues. Australia has condemned Netanyahu’s decision. South Africa is leading the efforts to prosecute Israelis for alleged war crimes.
According to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the US provided Israel with $22.8bn (£16.8bn) in military aid in the first year of its Gaza campaign.
“Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310bn (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance,” read a November 2024 report by the US Council on Foreign Relations.
In other words, Israel cannot forge ahead with its new plans in Gaza without American money – and weapons.
For now, the US seems prepared to continue to supply both, but at the risk of domestic political turmoil. A July Gallup poll found that 60 per cent of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza – and that was before the latest escalation.
However much Europe and the rest of the world is horrified by what Netanyahu is doing, so far the Trump administration has been supportive. It is reported to be planning to help with Israel’s next phase with “humanitarian” efforts to care for Gaza’s population.
The current US-Israeli effort, through what’s known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), has been an unmitigated catastrophe which Medecins sans Frontieres has condemned amid allegations of “orchestrated killings” by Israeli forces and US mercenaries.
“Children shot in the chest while reaching for food. People crushed or suffocated in stampedes. Entire crowds gunned down at distribution points,” Raquel Ayora, MSF general director, has alleged.
“In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operations, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians. The GHF distribution sites masquerading as ‘aid’ have morphed into a laboratory of cruelty.”
GHF denied all of the MSF allegations as ”false and disgraceful – amplifying a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Hamas-linked Gaza Health Ministry”.
But there is no denying the scale of the horrors in Gaza, or that Israel’s decision to increase its military efforts there will intensify the bloodletting and entrench Israel’s occupation.
And as human beings are forced into ever more concentrated camps, Israel’s drift to authoritarianism becomes a sprint. Netanyahu has already undermined the country’s judicial independence with legislation subordinating it to politicians. He recently fired the attorney general who is in charge of the prosecution against him.
Israel will have to continue to mobilise vast numbers of conscripts and reservists for a military operation the top officers think is a stupid, dangerous plan.
IDF army chief of staff Eyal Zamir is reported to have resorted to shouting in the security cabinet and warning that the reoccupation plan would cause the deaths of all hostages.
Reservists are refusing to fight in Gaza in growing numbers. Although Israel’s media hides much of the truth of what’s happening in the enclave from most of the population, the reality of what is unfolding there is starting to filter back.
Many soldiers are also just plain exhausted by what now looks like Netanyahu’s forever war.
It will be years of combat before Israel can establish anything like “control” over Gaza. It will take tens of thousands of troops to run checkpoints and police whatever is left of the population there.
But still, Netanyahu’s security cabinet agreed to the plan after an all-night session in which Zamir also argued for a plan to encircle Hamas and release the remaining 20 or so hostages still alive after they were captured 22 months ago.
Netanyahu won through with a scheme based on five principles.
The war aims, officially, are to disarm Hamas; save the hostages; demilitarise Gaza entirely; keep Israeli security control over the whole enclave; and then impose a civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority (which administers some of the Israeli-occupied West Bank).
The truth is that this is a plan to reoccupy Gaza just as permanently as the temporary occupation of the West Bank after the 1967 six-day war has lasted until today.
The West Bank, where the Palestinians have been encouraged to think they would one day establish a state, has been broken up into urban areas under the Palestinian Authority, which gives non-Jews limited self-government. The rest of the land is being chewed up by Jewish-only settlements. This is a system of grand apartheid as pioneered by South Africa’s white racist postwar governments.
Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet want to see Gaza permanently resettled by Israelis.
At least a million of Gaza’s 2.1 million people will be forced to move in the first phase of this reoccupation campaign. This is a population that the UN says is already on the verge of famine.
Netanyahu is assuming that it is an outcome that American taxpayers are willing to pay for.
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