Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans for a new military push in the Gaza Strip have raised warnings from the army leadership, opposition from hostage families and concerns that more Palestinians will be killed, and risk isolating the country even further.
As the security cabinet prepared to meet to discuss the proposals, Netanyahu gave an interview to Fox News in which he said Israel intended to take full control of Gaza, in order to assure its security, remove Hamas from power and enable the transfer of the governance of the civilian population to another party, without giving details.
But he suggested that Israel did not want to keep the territory.
“We don’t want to govern it,” Netanyahu said, in English. “We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces.”
He did not give details about possible arrangements or which countries could be involved; still, this was a rare indication of what he might be envisioning for a post-war Gaza.
For now, however, Netanyahu wants an expanded offensive that is likely to see the Israeli military, which says it controls about 75% of the territory, operating in Gaza City and the camps in the central part of the strip, where around one million Palestinians live and the hostages are thought to be held.
The potential operations, which could take months, would mean the mass displacement of people with the potential to worsen the humanitarian crisis there.
This could spark fresh condemnation from countries that have expressed anger over the situation in Gaza and urged Israel to end the nearly two-year war, which started as a response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023.
In a sign of major divergencies between the political and military leadership, the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, told Netanyahu that the full occupation of Gaza was “tantamount to walking into a trap”, according to reports in Israeli media.
Zamir, the reports said, warned that the offensive would endanger the lives of the 20 hostages who are believed to be alive and soldiers, who are exhausted.
Many of the hostage families share those concerns, and say the only way to guarantee the release of the hostages is through a negotiated deal with Hamas.
According to the Maariv newspaper, the “prevailing assessment is that most and possibly all of the living hostages [will] die” during an expanded offensive, either killed by their captors or accidentally by Israeli soldiers.
Speculation over an expanded offensive have also exposed divergences between some of Israel’s international allies.
The British ambassador to Israel, Simon Walter, said the full occupation of Gaza would be a “huge mistake”, while also pushing back against US and Israeli allegations that a possible recognition of Palestinian statehood by the UK was a reward for Hamas.
Meanwhile, the US envoy, Mike Huckabee, a staunch supporter of Israel, said it was up to the Israeli government to decide whether to fully take over the Strip. “It’s not our job to tell them what they should or should not do,” he told CBS News, the BBC’s news partner in the US.
Netanyahu has, so far, failed to offer a vision for Gaza after the war apart from refusing to accept a governing role for the Palestinian Authority, the body that governs the occupied West Bank and recognises Israel.
Polls suggest most of the Israeli public favours a deal with Hamas for the release of the hostages and the end of the war.
Israeli leaders say Hamas, for now, is not interested in negotiating as, in their view, the group is feeling emboldened by the international pressure on Israel.
The threat of a full occupation could be part of a strategy to try to force the group into making concessions in stalled talks.
But many here believe that Netanyahu is prolonging the conflict to guarantee the survival of his coalition, which relies on the support of ultranationalist ministers who have threatened to quit the government if there is any deal with Hamas.
Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have also publicly defended expelling Palestinians from Gaza – which could amount to the forced displacement of civilians, a war crime – and resettling it with Jews.
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which is run by Hamas.
The Hamas 7 October attacks on Israel killed about 1,200 people, while 251 were taken to Gaza as hostages.