Israel’s New Military Plan for Gaza is Incredibly Dangerous
There have been multiple reports in recent weeks that the Israeli military has drawn up plans for the near complete reoccupation of Gaza. And just yesterday, new statements from the IDF saying it will reoccupy 25% of the Gaza Strip over the next few weeks. Under this plan, all Palestinians would be moved to Mawasi, a small enclave along the southwestern coast of the Strip. Under this plan, Israel would reportedly be responsible for the security and governance of Gaza and for providing humanitarian aid to the population. Multiple IDF officials have been quoted in the press saying that part of the reason they did not execute this plan last year is that the Biden Administration put restraints on Israel by encouraging them to protect the civilian population, and the IDF was also stretched by the need to prepare for a war in the North. But now, the IDF has the capacity to execute this operation.
First, it’s important to note that this military plan has not been approved by Israel’s political leadership. There is a reasonable chance that it is a bluff, being used as a tool of leverage to get a better deal out of Hamas. Let’s hope so. Because this is a terrible idea. Let’s walk through why.
First, if Israel’s priority is to get the hostages home – something 70% of the Israeli public agrees with – this is not the way to do it. Of the 147 hostages that have been released alive so far, only eight have been freed as a result of military operations, and a number have also been killed as a result of Israeli military operations. All of the others have been released as a result of negotiations and diplomatic agreements. A prolonged, new violent phase of the war is unlikely to lead to the release of the remaining estimated 24 living and 35 deceased hostages.
At the strategic level, the plan is likely to fail because there is no “hold force” that has any legitimacy with the local population. The basic tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine are that to displace an insurgent force like Hamas, you need to “clear, hold, and build.” First, you clear the area of insurgents through active military operations. Israel did this the first time it spent a year in Gaza. Then you hold the territory and demonstrate to the local population that you – not the insurgent force – can provide for their security. This is key, because if the local population believes that you are just going to leave and the insurgents will come back, they will never move over to your side and will just continue to support the insurgency providing it with the ability to hide amongst the population. If the population believes that the counterinsurgency force is there for good and will be the ultimate arbiters of their physical security, they will stop providing the insurgents with help (e.g. hiding weapons in their homes) and some may turn on the insurgents and provide intelligence on them. Meanwhile, some insurgent fighters will give up, put down their arms, and melt into the population. Israel didn’t bother to try holding any of Gaza last time. The IDF conducted clearance operations and then left, allowing Hamas to come back. A long term occupation is an effort by the IDF to correct that mistake.
However, what the IDF plan is missing is that a key element of the hold phase of a counterinsurgency campaign is that the hold force must have some legitimacy with the local population. The local population has to not only believe that the force is sticking around to provide for their security, but also needs to trust the force to cooperate with it. The problem with the IDF plan is that the IDF cannot be the hold force because it has no legitimacy with Palestinians. In what world is the IDF going to build trust with the local Gazan population after conducting a second intensive military campaign, which further decimates the Strip? There is way too much history between Israelis and Palestinians for that to be a reality. Without that legitimacy, the local population will never trust the IDF, and so Hamas will be able to continue to recruit, hide amongst the population, and fight a prolonged and costly insurgency for Israel. This problem dooms the current plan.
This challenge of finding a legitimate hold force is not new. The only way to address it is to find local fighters with some legitimacy with the population and get them to take the lead in holding, governing, and rebuilding. This is what the US did during the counter-ISIS campaign. Working with the Syrian Democratic Forces, it over time helped build a Kurdish-Arab force that still governs Northeast Syria today. And in Iraq, it worked with Iraqi Security Forces to enable them to retake, hold, and rebuild in ISIS-held territory. In other cases, including the surge in Iraq in 2006-2008, the war in Afghanistan, and the Vietnam War, the US failed either because it was unable to create a legitimate local security force (Afghanistan), or because it stumbled into a proper counterinsurgency strategy too late in the war and the American public no longer had the patience to support such a costly approach that would take years of investment (Iraq/Vietnam).
This is why for the 15 months that the Biden Administration was in office after October 7th, we pushed for an interim international Arab-led force in Gaza that would ultimately hand over control to Palestinian Security Forces. It is the only option we could develop that actually has a chance of having some support on the ground, which is so necessary to defeating Hamas. But from the beginning, Netanyahu refused to pursue this strategy because it involved ultimate Palestinian control of Gaza, which would be opposed by Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and bring down the Israeli governing coalition. It is also why Netanyahu refused to ever seriously engage in Phase II negotiations on the ceasefire, which would require agreeing to end the war with Palestinian control of Gaza and has instead restarted the war.
The plan will likely be incredibly costly and entirely unsustainable. The reporting right now suggests that the IDF estimates it would take up to five divisions (50,000-75,000 troops) and four to five months to reoccupy all of Gaza, which would then be followed by a prolonged occupation. Let’s get real, a year ago Netanyahu said that the war was almost wrapped up and all that was necessary was finishing Rafah. That obviously didn’t happen and neither will this. Our own experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam also point to the reality that any counterinsurgency fight goes way longer than anyone expects and oftentimes those wars are lost because the public loses patience or the costs become too high. If Israel pursues this approach, it will put itself on a similar trajectory. Already, reservists are raising objections and reservist reporting rates have dropped significantly from the start of the war.
Meanwhile, leaving forces mobilized for what could be years would come at a huge cost to the Israeli economy. The public is already turning on this strategy with 70% preferring an approach that gets the hostages out and ends the war. That support will only drop as this fight continues and drags on. The end result will be the eventual election of a new government and eventual political pressure to withdraw, only after much greater costs to Israelis and Palestinians, and with less hostages surviving.
Finally, it is important to contemplate the one scenario under which this current plan would “work,” because in many ways that approach may present the greatest threat to Israel. If instead of using the approach that democracies and liberal states have used to fight insurgency, the Israeli government decides to remove all restraints associated with the laws of war, it could potentially crush the insurgency. There have been cases like this in the past. Bashar al-Assad used this approach in Syria and it worked for ten years even as he killed 500,000 people, leveled half the country, committed numerous war crimes, and in the long run failed to save himself. Vladamir Putin used the same approach in Chechnya in the early 2000s. Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed a revolt by the Shia population in southern Iraq after the First Gulf War. Hafaz al-Assad used it to suppress a revolt in Hama in the 1980s. And there are numerous other brutal examples of this type of repressive scorched earth campaigns throughout history against insurgents.
If this is the pathway the Israeli military wants to take and is approved by the political echelon, then it might be able to bring Hamas to its knees. However, the civilian cost to Palestinians, who have, according to the Hamas controlled health ministry, already suffered 50,000 deaths – more than 25,000 of them civilians – would be horrific. Israel would likely find itself internationally isolated and being mentioned in the same sentence as some of the most brutal regimes and human rights violators in the world, with genuinely profound consequences for how it engages with the rest of the world going forward. And such a horrific campaign would rip Israeli society apart, while separating it in perhaps permanent ways from the Jewish diaspora. It would be a horrific cost for Israel to bear and a pyrrhic victory over Hamas.