Optimistic plans for post-war Gaza have little basis in reality

When many Western officials talk of the “day after”, they have a specific scenario in mind. It starts with buffing up the Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs parts of the West Bank, so that it may return to Gaza and govern there as well. Israel would commit to ending its half-century occupation and creating a Palestinian state. That would allow Saudi Arabia, the most influential Arab country, to normalise ties with Israel. A ruinous war could give way to a lasting regional peace.

It is a hopeful vision, but also an improbable one. It rests on two questionable assumptions. The first is that the fighting in Gaza will truly end—that there will be a clear line between war and its aftermath. The other is that complex, phased regional diplomacy can bring immediate relief to the 2.2m Gazans who need help urgently.

In fact, the day after may look much like today. Even if there is a truce to facilitate a hostage deal, Israel will eventually resume military raids in Gaza. Hamas will keep fighting. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, will not commit to Palestinian statehood, thus stalling any bigger diplomatic push. Amid all this, someone will have to provide security, distribute aid and start rebuilding an exclave that has slipped ever further into anarchy and misery over the past nine months. No one has a serious plan to make all that happen—only a hope that someone else will do it.

Lawless, homeless, helpless

The scale of the problem is enormous. Start with security. Israeli troops control two corridors in Gaza: one in the centre, the other along the border with Egypt. The rest of the territory is largely ungoverned. Criminals steal humanitarian aid, run extortion schemes at bank machines and loot ruined homes and shops. Crammed into tent camps, civilians have violent (and sometimes deadly) disputes over food and other supplies. The police who kept Gaza safe before the war have mostly disappeared: they are afraid of being targeted by Israel or are busy caring for their families.

Officials in Ramallah, the PA’s administrative capital, say they could field a police force to restore basic law and order. America is keen on this idea. The nucleus of the force might be around 2,500 ex-policemen, who lost their jobs when Hamas took control of the territory from the PA in 2007. They might help reduce crime, although it would take years to train enough officers to patrol the whole territory.

What such a force would not do, however, is fight Hamas. Although Israel has killed many of the militant group’s fighters and leaders, including, it believes, the head of its armed wing, Muhammad Deif, on July 13th, plenty more remain. These remnants might be willing to cede civil authority in Gaza to the PA to let someone else clean up the mess. Disarming is a different story. “If they stop resisting, they stop existing,” says an official from the PA. “Hamas will continue to fight.” That sets up continued fighting with Israel, which would conduct operations to assassinate Hamas’s leaders and stop it regrouping.

Hamas would also be a threat to the PA. In March the authority sent a group of intelligence officers to accompany a humanitarian-aid convoy in Gaza, a pilot scheme of sorts to see if it could help secure deliveries. When Hamas discovered the scheme, it arrested and tortured the officers; three were killed. If Hamas thinks the PA is amassing too much power in Gaza, it will not hesitate to attack its rival.

The solution, argues the PA official, is to bring an Arab peacekeeping force to Gaza. Hamas would not target the PA if it had the backing of powerful Arab states. “It’s about an Arab trusteeship for three or four years, until we can manage or we judge we are capable of ruling Gaza,” he says.

Politicians in Israel have a similar hope. Yair Golan, who leads the Labour Party, thinks “moderate Sunni countries” like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates would help secure and administer parts of Gaza. People close to Mr Netanyahu make similar claims. So does Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister. “Working with President Sisi in a smart way, he’d be willing to do it,” he says, referring to Egypt’s dictator. Israeli lawmakers rarely agree on anything, but they all seem to believe that Arab states will swoop in to stabilise Gaza.

The only sceptics are the putative peacekeepers themselves. It is not that Arab countries rule out any role in Gaza. Gulf states would stump up for reconstruction; Jordan could help train security forces. But they are not keen on sending troops, lest they be seen as abetting Israeli oppression. Even if they did agree, Arab armies have limited experience of peacekeeping and even less of working with one another. A joint force would require an unprecedented degree of co-operation.

Without security, post-war Gaza will be bleak. Lawlessness is already making it hard for the UN to distribute aid—and Gazans cannot survive without it. Fully 79% of them are unemployed, estimates the International Labour Organisation. The economy has been blitzed: GDP has shrunk by 84% since October. Hospitals have mostly stopped working; children have missed almost an entire year of school.

Mohammad Mustafa, the PA’s prime minister, says it is ready to take charge. Over coffee in his office in Ramallah he and his advisers outline plans to restore basic services like education and health care. “This is not some hostile acquisition we’re trying to do. This is our land, our people,” says another Palestinian official.

But it is hard to square this hopeful talk with the PA’s dismal reality. It is broke. Israel is withholding about 6bn shekels ($1.6bn) in tax revenue that it has collected on the authority’s behalf, in part to punish it for transferring money to Gaza. The suspension of work permits for the 160,000 Palestinian labourers with jobs in Israel has further crimped revenues. Civil servants did not receive their May pay until July 10th (and half received only partial wages). Mr Mustafa and his boss, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, are wildly unpopular. The PA, in other words, barely has the capacity to govern the West Bank, let alone Gaza.

Even if it did, Mr Netanyahu would not allow it to. He has resisted months of American pressure to bless a role for the PA in Gaza. Some Israeli officers have instead begun to talk of creating enclaves that would be run by Palestinians unaffiliated with Hamas. Israel would direct aid to those areas. Locals would distribute it; in time, they would set up ad hoc administrative systems to provide basic services. The army calls them “bubbles”. Mr Golan, who was a deputy army chief before he entered politics, refers to them as “islands of hope”. “It’s not enough to destroy the military capabilities of Hamas,” says Mr Golan. “You need to provide an alternative.”

This is a common approach to counter-insurgency, usually called an “ink-spot strategy”. But Palestinian and Western officials say it is a fantasy. Hamas has already killed or assaulted several members of prominent Gazan families to discourage such co-operation. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, has championed a version of the bubble scheme for months, but has found few volunteers. In March six big clans issued a public statement insisting that they had rejected Israeli overtures.

Nor would these sorts of local administrations be up to the task of rebuilding Gaza. More than half of the buildings in the strip have been destroyed, the UN says. Close to 400,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed. Even clearing the rubble will be an unprecedented challenge. The war has created 39m tonnes of debris—more than 107kg for each square metre in Gaza, and 16 times more than was generated by the war in 2014.

The World Bank estimated in April that damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure in the exclave would cost $18.5bn to repair, equal to 97% of Palestine’s pre-war GDP (and much more than today’s output). Donors will not contribute much until Gaza has both security and an administration capable of overseeing a vast reconstruction effort. “Until Hamas is gone, nobody is going to come in,” says an official close to Mr Netanyahu.

As long as there is a chance of Hamas regenerating, the IDF believes it will have to hold on to its corridors inside Gaza and enforce the buffer zone a kilometre or more in width it has cleared all along the Gazan side of the border. An analysis by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, estimated that Israeli troops now control 26% of Gaza’s territory (see map). No one would control the other 74% and Israel’s continued occupation would constitute an obstacle for ceasefire talks.

There is also the question of who controls the border crossings into Gaza, through which aid and eventually building materials for reconstruction must pass. Israel has been reluctant to reopen the crossings from its territory, which handled two-thirds of imports to Gaza before the war. But it also wants some say over the management of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, through which Hamas smuggled most of its weapons.The uncertainty will continue to crimp flows of aid.

The likeliest outcome of all this is that a battered Hamas ends up competing with clans and gangs in a largely lawless Gaza. Crime and violence would be widespread. Aid groups would have to make deals with gunmen to protect their convoys. Charities would try to fix a few bits of vital infrastructure, such as desalination plants, but large-scale reconstruction would remain a distant dream. Some UN officials have taken to calling this scenario “Mogadishu on the Mediterranean”.

An alternative might be called the “West Bank model”. Perhaps Israeli lawmakers instigate a snap election to boot the unpopular Mr Netanyahu from office, and his replacement allows a role for the PA in Gaza, at least in civil matters. Or perhaps, amid so much hardship, necessity will compel Gazans to work with the Israeli army to restart basic services.

Yet even if the Israeli opposition manages to replace Mr Netanyahu, the prospects for a two-state solution are dim. Opposition-party leaders concede that Israelis are currently “too traumatised” by the October 7th massacre to contemplate such an eventuality. A recent survey commissioned by a right-wing think-tank reported that 64% of Israelis are against a Palestinian state, even if that means forgoing a historic peace agreement with Saudi Arabia.

So Israel will probably end up as the occupying power in Gaza, much as it already is in the West Bank. “There will be Palestinians who control the municipal functions,” says Yoaz Hendel, an Israeli former minister and a reserve colonel in the army. “But we will be able to get in and out whenever we like.” Open-ended occupation is perhaps less awful than anarchy. But hopes of regional peace will be dashed, and even reconstruction might be slow. Gulf states, for example, say they will not open their chequebooks without a long-term plan for Palestinian statehood.

Get real

On the outskirts of Cairo, where the city’s chaotic sprawl gives way to barren desert, three women from Gaza have fled the war but not escaped it. They live with their children in a dark apartment, sleeping on donated mattresses, cooking donated food in donated pots. Their husbands are still in Gaza: it was cheaper and easier to send off the women and children alone. The television is permanently tuned to Al Jazeera, and each report of a deadly Israeli strike in Gaza brings a moment of worry. They hope to go home one day, but not if it means going home to a squalid tent camp.

No one knows how many Gazans have fled to Egypt since the war began. One aid worker in Cairo says the number could be as low as 80,000 people, or as high as 300,000—between 4% and 14% of Gaza’s pre-war population. Most have paid extortionate sums to escape, up to $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child, to a company with close ties to Egypt’s security services.

In another sparse apartment, Maha (not her real name) has a story both tragic and typical. Her house in central Gaza was destroyed by Israeli shelling earlier this year; her husband was killed. Life in Cairo has not been easy. Without legal residency, she cannot enroll her two children in school (they are taking virtual classes through a school in Ramallah). But she has no desire to return to Gaza, even after the war: “What is there for me? My life is over.”

Waiting, fear, sorrow: this is life for Gazans, inside or outside the exclave. Talking about the day after the war seems a hopeless abstraction.

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