VSIt has now been six months since Benyamin Netanyahu has advocated “total victory” against Hamas in Gaza, without this seeming an achievable objective, even after the death of more than 33,000 Palestinians, including at least 13,000 children.
But the Israeli Prime Minister remains just as intractable in his refusal to accept, despite American incentives, the return of Gaza to the fold of the Palestinian Authority (PA) of Mahmoud Abbas, because he sees the risk, in his eyes. unbearable, of the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
It was already to bury the prospect of such a state that his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had refused in 2005 to negotiate with the PA the conditions of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which had initially led to the takeover of the Palestinian enclave by Hamas, then to the rise in power of the most extremist Islamists.
“Local entities with managerial experience”
Despite these terrible lessons of the recent past, lessons which are intimately linked to the terrorist bloodbath of October 7, 2023, Netanyahu persists in his refusal, purely ideological, to let the PA reestablish its administration of Gaza. But he is thus confronted with his own contradiction between the inexpiable fight against Hamas, on the one hand, and the opposition to the return of the PA, the historic rival of the Palestinian Islamists, on the other hand.
However, the Prime Minister took more than four months before publishing, on February 23, his vision of “day after Hamas” in Gaza. In this one-page document, Netanyahu pledges to preserve “freedom of action indefinitely” from Israel “in all areas of the Gaza Strip ». He advocates maintaining the blockade of the Palestinian enclave, in force since 2007, with the collaboration of Egypt on the southern border. And he remains inflexible on Israel’s exclusive control over Gaza’s airspace and maritime outlet.
The “day after Hamas” in Gaza thus closely resembles the situation prevailing before October 7, 2023, with the major difference that Hamas is supposed to have been “dismantled” And “eradicated” by the current offensive. To avoid the resurgence of the Islamist movement, Netanyahu plans to entrust “civil management and responsibility for public order” has “local entities with managerial experience”.
Behind this sanitized formula hides a bet on certain powerful local families, linked to the Israeli intelligence services and involved in various criminal, even mafia, activities. These families would thus use their traditional influence against Hamas, but also against supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the PA. Once again, the Israeli army, despite its excess of technology and expertise, is only recycling formulas already tried, in vain, during the thirty-eight years of occupation of the Gaza Strip, from 1967 to 2005 .
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