Reoccupying Gaza

In the early morning hours of March 18, Israel unilaterally broke the cease-fire it had agreed to with Hamas in Gaza two months earlier, launching a crushing aerial campaign across the territory. In less than twenty-four hours, Israeli warplanes killed more than four hundred people and wounded hundreds more. 

The assault has continued unabated ever since. On March 31, during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Israel issued an evacuation order that covered much of southern Gaza, displacing more than a hundred thousand people, most of whom have been displaced multiple times before; nearly half a million in total have been forced to leave their homes since the end of the cease-fire. On April 3 Israeli airstrikes killed at least a hundred people across the Strip, including at least twenty-seven who had taken shelter at the Dar al-Arqam school in Gaza City. Just days later they killed at least thirty-two. Since the shattering of the cease-fire, according to health officials in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,500 Palestinians. 

After Israel blocked the entry of all goods and humanitarian aid early last month, conditions in the territory have again become dire. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to live in tents amid the wreckage of their former homes. Israel’s energy ministry has cut off electricity, disabling one of the southern Strip’s main water desalination plants. The World Food Programme’s twenty-five bakeries, which provide subsidized bread across Gaza, have closed for lack of fuel and flour. Basic goods, like sugar and eggs, have become exorbitantly expensive. 

Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that Gaza’s overcrowded hospitals—almost all of which have been damaged by Israeli strikes and shelling—are running out of anesthetics, antibiotics, and blood for transfusions. “We treat patients on the floor, without electricity, without anesthesia. We use our bare hands and flashlights,” a Gazan physician told +972 Magazine.  “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said in early April. “Gaza is a killing field.”

Throughout the Strip, Israeli ground troops have also begun to maneuver, taking up old positions and establishing new ones they may well hold indefinitely. The 2005 unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza is being undone. The next stage in Israel’s destruction of the territory appears to be what many on the country’s hardline right have long urged: a reversion to the pre-disengagement paradigm of direct occupation and siege. 

In countless harrowing videos uploaded to social media, soldiers stand amid the rubble they have wrought and call for a “return to Gush Katif” (the main bloc of Israeli settlements in Gaza, evacuated and demolished in 2005), plant the orange flags of the anti-disengagement movement, or nail mezuzahs to the blackened doorways of ruined Palestinian homes. Israeli officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and other right-wing parties in the coalition have stated outright that Israel must “rule” Gaza at the end of the war. It seems that vision is now being implemented. Defense Minister Israel Katz declared last week that the expanded military operation would aim to “capture extensive territory that will be added to the State of Israel’s security areas.” 

Top Israeli officials, Netanyahu among them, have simultaneously committed to another goal: the mass expulsion of Gaza’s inhabitants. Earlier in March, CBS reported that US and Israeli officials had approached the governments of Sudan, Somalia, and Syria to accept Palestinians expelled from the Strip. (They received no positive responses.) Netanyahu has tasked the Mossad with finding a country that would be willing to do so. In early April a senior government official briefed journalists who were traveling with Netanyahu to Hungary that Israel was in talks with multiple nations to take in Palestinians displaced from Gaza. Several, the official claimed, had even expressed interest in collaborating with Israel in the effort. “They want something in return,” the official said. “Not necessarily money, but also something strategic.”

Earlier this month I spoke with Assaf David, cofounder of the Forum for Regional Thinking, a dovish Israeli think tank. His conclusion was grim. “I think whatever it is the Trump administration allows Israel to do, Israel would do it,” he said. “If they allow Israel to take Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands on buses and drive them out of Gaza, Israel will do it. Israel has no moral restrictions right now.” 

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The few obstacles that had blocked Israel’s reoccupation of Gaza have fallen away. The Biden administration’s minimal pressure barely stayed Netanyahu’s hand; its red lines, it turned out, were meant to be crossed. Trump, however, has no red lines. Whereas Biden repeatedly warned Israel against reoccupying the territory from which it unilaterally withdrew in 2005, Trump has variously suggested that Israel should retake the Strip and that the US should “take over” Gaza and “own it.” He and Steve Witkoff, the administration’s Middle East envoy, share Israel’s position that Hamas’s leadership must either be eliminated or bribed to leave Gaza and the group demilitarized or else destroyed. “Our policy is that Hamas cannot continue to exist here,” Witkoff recently told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In February, Trump even appeared to outflank Netanyahu from the right when he announced his hallucinatory idea of depopulating Gaza and turning it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” which Netanyahu then embraced. Meeting with Trump in the Oval Office earlier this month, the Israeli prime minister repeated his support for what he called the president’s “bold vision.”

Domestically, Netanyahu has pushed for an even more belligerent orientation at the highest levels of Israel’s military bureaucracy. In early March he appointed Eyal Zamir, a former tank commander, as the new army chief. “2025,” Zamir has declared, “will be a year of war.” He has reportedly planned for an extensive ground and air operation that would mobilize as many as five divisions to establish full Israeli military control over Gaza. Israel continues to block any aid from entering the Strip, and the army’s new plan would entail taking direct authority over the distribution of humanitarian aid within Gaza, should it be allowed to enter—a concession to the eliminationist right upon which Netanyahu’s coalition depends, and which has called since the start of the war for the army to seize control over aid and further weaponize access to it. Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister fired by Netanyahu last November, Herzi Halevi, the outgoing IDF chief, and much of the army’s leadership had refused such a plan, arguing that it would cost too many soldiers’ lives. With Zamir’s appointment, Netanyahu has eliminated that opposition.

Although initially chastened by the cease-fire deal in January, the religious-Zionist settler right has continued to press for the rebuilding of Israeli settlements in the Strip. For nearly a year and a half Nachala, the far-right settler group, has been organizing families to live in settlements in Gaza after its reoccupation. Last August politicians from Likud and the Religious Zionism party formed a parliamentary working group to repeal the “disengagement” law, which formally removed Jewish settlements from Gaza and barred Israelis from returning to settle there. Many members of the coalition see constructing new Jewish settlements in Gaza as the culmination of their eschatological vision—the conquest of Greater Israel as the prelude to the dawning of the messianic age—of which reoccupation and mass expulsion are preliminary stages. 

Formal resettlement is for now highly unlikely. Netanyahu has repeatedly called plans to resettle Gaza “unrealistic” and by most accounts would like to prevent them. The army has apprehended several groups of settlers who crossed the separation barrier into Gaza, most recently last week. If the radical settlers do build an outpost—the germ of a settlement—in Gaza, it will because they managed to exploit the Israeli military presence to enter the Strip and refused to leave, as they have done across the hilltops of the West Bank.

The Netanyahu government has, however, shown consistency in laying the groundwork—administrative, military, psychological—for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. On March 23 Israel’s security cabinet approved the creation of a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau for Gaza residents interested in relocating to third countries,” a grotesque euphemism for the agency tasked with preparing for and carrying out the ethnic cleansing of the Strip. A leading candidate to head the agency is, reportedly, the retired brigadier general Ofer Winter, a rising star on the religious-nationalist right, who provoked public outcry in 2014 with an official letter to his subordinate commanders describing that summer’s Israeli offensive in Gaza as a “holy war” against “the terrorist ‘Gazan’ enemy which abuses, blasphemes, and curses the God of Israel.”

Whether Netanyahu acts on his verbal commitment to displacing Palestinians from Gaza en masse may depend largely on whether Israel can convince any other country to participate in the atrocity. It could also hinge on the kind of support he gets from the White House. Despite Trump’s periodic enthusiasm for the idea, there seems to be little consensus within his administration. At times Trump himself has walked it back. “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians,” he said during his mid-March meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff appeared to downplay Trump’s vision as little more than a prod for other countries in the region to draw up alternative proposals. “Trump’s approach to Gaza has engendered a lot of lively discussion,” Witkoff said. “We’re now seeing an Egyptian plan, we’re seeing Saudis put together a white paper.” 

For their part, the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia have made clear that Trump’s plan would not just constitute a grievous violation of international law but also risk igniting a larger regional conflagration. Witkoff, a real-estate investor who has had business dealings worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the Emirati and Qatari sovereign wealth funds, would certainly like to avoid that. Trump’s plan is “not serious,” Michael Milstein, a policy expert who once headed the Department for Palestinian Affairs in Israel’s military intelligence, told me in late March. “No country in the world,” he stressed, “has expressed its readiness” to cooperate with it. 

For now, then, Netanyahu’s repeated invocations of an imminent plan for Gazans’ “voluntary migration”—the preferred Israeli phraseology—amount as much to a kind of psychological warfare as to a concrete policy pronouncement. He and his administration appear to believe sincerely that after enough collective punishment Palestinians in Gaza will somehow turn against Hamas and do Israel’s work for it by forcing the group out. 

Within Israel, meanwhile, the constant references to the mass expulsion plan have become something of a political smokescreen. The idea of displacing Gazans en masse is broadly popular with the Israeli public. A February poll conducted by Channel 12 News found that 69 percent of Israelis support “the Trump plan” for the “evacuation” of Gaza’s residents. (Only a third, however, said they thought it would actually happen.) A separate poll conducted that same month by Channel 13 News found that 67 percent of Israelis supported the completion of the next phases of the previously-agreed-to cease-fire deal. There is less contradiction between these findings than there might seem: many Israelis seem genuinely persuaded that Gaza’s two million residents can simply be “voluntarily” displaced after all the Israeli hostages have been returned. “There are these twisted reports in Israel of Palestinians leaving,” Milstein told me. “It’s a kind of fake news.” By contrast, polls consistently show that Israelis would rather not return to active conflict and thus to protracted counterinsurgency—which is, in practice, what Israel has embarked on. 

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Already the foundation is being laid for a new architecture of occupation. In tandem with the army’s wave of airstrikes in mid-March, its ground forces retook the Netzarim corridor, a four-mile-long road that cuts across Gaza. For much of the last year, Netzarim and its immediate surroundings functioned as a gruesome “exclusion zone” in which Israeli troops shot anyone who entered, as well as a barrier that prevented Palestinians from moving freely between the north and the rest of Gaza. Until its forces partially withdrew last winter and were replaced by private military contractors, Israel had constructed a series of outposts and bases—equipped with showers, electricity, and air-conditioning—along Netzarim and on land that had been cleared through the demolition of Palestinian homes and civilian infrastructure. Last November, before the cease-fire, an IDF officer told Haaretz that, given the scope of the construction, it seemed to him that “the IDF won’t leave Gaza before 2026.”

Other areas of the Strip have remained under occupation simply because the army never left. Almost since the war’s start, Israeli troops have been deployed in what they call “the perimeter”—a kilometer-wide buffer zone adjacent to the Gaza–Israel separation barrier that the Israeli army created by systematically detonating homes, agricultural fields, industrial areas, and entire neighborhoods. In recent testimony collected by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli veterans group, soldiers sent to fight in Gaza described the perimeter as “a kill zone”—with orders to kill any adult male who crossed into it and fire warning shots at women and children. According to Gisha, an Israeli NGO, the perimeter alone now constitutes 17 percent of the total area of the Gaza Strip. Since May 2024, Israeli forces have also occupied the “Philadelphi corridor,” an area along Gaza’s southern border. One of the conditions of the cease-fire’s first phase was that Israel would withdraw from Philadelphi; the army never did.

In addition to these existing positions, Israel has taken new ones. On April 2 Netanyahu announced that Israeli troops had established and occupied the “Morag corridor,” a new road designed to isolate the southern city of Rafah from the rest of the Gaza Strip. According to a recent Haaretz report, the Israeli army has begun turning the entire area between the Philadelphi and Morag corridors, roughly seventy-five square kilometers and a fifth of the Strip, into a buffer zone modeled on “the perimeter.” If completed, this would result in the permanent displacement of Rafah’s prewar population of more than 170,000 people and the likely demolition of the entire city. It would also mean the elimination of Gaza’s border with Egypt and its enclosure on all sides by Israel. Assaf David, of the Forum for Regional Thinking, has suggested that these moves could be a prelude to Gaza’s cantonization into isolated population hubs under renewed Israeli military administration. The “buffer zones” and “security corridors” that Israel has carved throughout Gaza have already divided the Strip into four separate areas. By most estimates, Israeli forces currently occupy roughly a third of the enclave’s territory.

Israeli officials have described the renewed landgrabs, bombings, and incursions as part of a larger strategy aimed at ratcheting up pressure on Hamas. A week into the current offensive, Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a warning to Gaza’s population: “Soon the IDF will operate with might in additional areas in Gaza and you will be forced to flee and will lose more and more territory.” He added that “removing Hamas and freeing the hostages” is “the only way to end the war.” 

Yet for roughly the last year and a half, the Israeli government has demanded conditions for a cease-fire that made returning the hostages and ending the war impossible. Netanyahu has refused any long-term agreement that would leave Hamas in power in Gaza, which would amount to admitting that Israel had failed in achieving its stated goal of “total victory” over the group. He has also declared that Hamas’s central demand—a full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip—is a nonstarter. At the same time, he has rejected any plan that would bring the Palestinian Authority back into Gaza, whether as the sole governing power or as part of another arrangement for Palestinian self-government in the enclave. 

With the signing of the cease-fire in January, Netanyahu vowed to his right-wing coalition partners that he would restart the war after the agreement’s first stage. Although not known to be a man of his word, he has done just that. “You reach a conclusion almost by process of elimination that this is about occupying Gaza for the foreseeable future,” said Alon Pinkas, an Israeli diplomat and former General Consul in New York. “The hostages have been sacrificed.”

To the extent that there is a limit to what Israel could do in Gaza, it will come, perhaps above all, from within the army’s rank and file. After more than a year and a half of intensive deployments, it is not clear that Israel could mobilize the number of reservists it would need for a large-scale occupation. “The army does not really have the force for a long-term war,” Milstein said. “There are more and more reserve soldiers who say they are not willing to join this war, who don’t understand the purpose of this war.” In a belated sign of mounting discontent, on April 10 roughly 970 active-duty reservists and retired personnel in the air force signed a letter calling for a cease-fire and denouncing the continuation of the war, which “will lead to the deaths of the hostages, soldiers, and innocent civilians.” Additional letters from reservists in military intelligence, medical corps, and the Mossad have since followed.

Many units have reported as much as a 30 percent decrease in volunteer rates; some have even resorted to posting recruitment notices on social media. More than at any time since October 7, there is increasing talk of sarvanut afora, or grey refusal—reservists ceasing to volunteer not only or mainly for political reasons but due to personal, financial, and psychological strain. More than two years of constant protest against the Netanyahu government’s attacks on the country’s judiciary and system of rule have also normalized calls for civil disobedience within the broader secular and liberal public, making “refusal” much less of a dirty word than it once was. 

But Israel’s army likely does not need to issue a new sweeping draft order to sustain and even intensify the bloody, grinding counterinsurgency now underway. Twenty years ago Israel maintained brutal military rule over Gaza as it does today in the West Bank; the army’s top brass seems to think that it can restore a similar mode of control through a combination of aerial bombardment, ground incursions, and the merciless, repeated internal displacement of the Strip’s inhabitants, even with a certain measure of dissent within the reservists’ ranks. The techniques of high-tech occupation management, honed over the last two decades in the West Bank, will now be applied to a ravaged, starved, and devastated Gaza. 

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Whether or not Trump actually believes in his obscene neo-imperialist plan for mass population transfer in Gaza, it had the effect of throwing Netanyahu a political lifeline. The prime minister swiftly pivoted and endorsed a scheme that he had never advocated—but around which his fractious, right-wing-religious governing coalition could consolidate. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the Kahanist Jewish Power faction, had pulled his party out of the coalition in protest of the January cease-fire deal, during which Israeli hostages were exchanged for Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli detention facilities, among them dozens of minors. (Rights groups estimate that there are currently more than 3,500 Palestinians imprisoned without charges or trial in Israel.) The renewed Israeli offensive gave Ben-Gvir a pretext to rejoin the government and return to his position as Minister of National Security, bolstering Netanyahu’s majority. 

A few days later the Knesset approved a budget for the coming year, which all but guarantees the government’s survival through the end of its term in 2026. There are no real matters of division that threaten to bring the coalition down from within, and in Israel that is how most coalitions fall. Despite consistently low poll numbers and widespread public discontent over the government’s handling of the war, Netanyahu’s coalition has proved improbably durable throughout the last year and a half. It is perhaps stronger now than at any point since the last elections, in November 2022. 

After his mid-February visit to Washington, Netanyahu returned to Israel inspired by Trump’s attempt to defenestrate much of the federal government and establish rule through executive decree. The next month he fired Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet, after the internal security agency opened an investigation into several Netanyahu aides who were allegedly doing PR work for Qatar. At the same time, his coalition initiated the process of deposing the Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara, who has rubber-stamped a large portion of Israel’s destructive policies in Gaza and the West Bank but attempted to preserve some procedural norms, taking anti-corruption stands and objecting to parts of the Netanyahu government’s attacks on the judiciary. On the eve of purging Bar, Netanyahu posted in English on social media: “In America and Israel, when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will.”

These recent moves have threatened a constitutional crisis. Some of Netanyahu’s ministers and coalition partners have suggested that they are prepared to defy a ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court if it blocks them from replacing the Shin Bet chief; during an April 8 Supreme Court hearing on the matter, Likud MKs and right-wing demonstrators repeatedly interrupted the deliberations. Forced by October 7 and its aftermath to shelve its plan to strip the judiciary of its independence and enable parliament to overrule the Court, the Netanyahu government is advancing its dreams of “judicial overhaul” by other means. 

That Netanyahu restarted the assault on Gaza at the same time he renewed the attacks on the judiciary has led many opposition protesters, finally, to link the two. After demonstrations dwindled in the winter, tens of thousands have been returning to the streets weekly in central Tel Aviv. Still, despite the growing number of signs calling for the end of the war, many of the demonstrators are also there for something else: a return to normality. As in other countries in the throes of right-wing populist state vandalism, the liberal opposition wants to turn back the clock.

For Palestinians, however, normality has long meant military rule, brutal subjugation, siege in Gaza, and apartheid in the West Bank. After a year and a half of relentless collective punishment that has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians, Gaza is in ruins. Its displaced, brutalized people now live a routine of bare survival, all but defenseless in the face of Israel’s overwhelming firepower. “The sound of bombing doesn’t stop for a moment,” a twenty-eight-year-old man named Ahmed Kassab told +972. 

The last stockpiles of aid are running out, and Gaza is again on the brink of starvation. Aid workers have reported treating lactating mothers too hungry to be able to breastfeed. Against the backdrop of the last ferocious bombardment, Feroze Sidhwa, an American surgeon who has spent months volunteering in Gaza’s hospitals, related that he and his colleagues had been forced to set up “a designated area” for mortally wounded children to die “alongside other dying children, where their families can stay with them and pray.”

Meanwhile, as Israel’s new assault on Gaza intensifies and the apparatus of reoccupation begins to shift into gear, much of the country has returned to its old routine. During the two decades after the disengagement, Israeli officials used the macabre euphemism of “mowing the lawn” to describe their strategy of occupation-management: periodic bombardments from above, siege by air, land, and sea. Now it is as if the Israeli public has adjusted to Gaza’s transformation into a new front of indefinite military operation and perpetual violence, a regime of what the scholar Dirk Moses has called “permanent security.” The TV channels have long since ceased their extended news broadcasts and returned to airing reality shows. The start of spring has filled Tel Aviv’s café terraces and courtyards. Forty miles away in Gaza, air strikes are killing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people every day. It is the same ground, but on one side it does not shake.