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Building a New Security Reality for Israel in Gaza

(Foreign Affairs) Dennis Ross - Oct. 7 changed Israel, inflicting trauma and hardening Israelis' belief that they cannot live with Hamas in control of Gaza. Israel needs a strategy for ensuring that its military efforts and achievements in Gaza translate into a new political reality that means Israel will no longer be threatened from the strip. Israel does not want to be responsible for the Palestinians living in Gaza. However, Israel should not leave Gaza before it knows that Hamas is not in a position to reconstitute itself, its military means, and its political control. This requires that Hamas' military infrastructure, weapons depots, military industrial base, systems of command and control, and organizational coherence are largely destroyed. Israel's objective - and that of the U.S. - needs to be a permanently demilitarized Gaza, which can never again be used as a platform for attacks against Israel. As long as 91% of Palestinians believe that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas should resign and 80% are convinced that the PA is corrupt, it is pointless to talk about a political horizon or an endgame involving the PA. Everyone knows that Hamas will seek to divert the assistance and to reconstitute itself and its military machine. No donor will invest in Gaza if Hamas is in control or siphoning away supplies. So a condition for reconstruction must be a genuinely different administration in Gaza. The writer, Counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a professor at Georgetown University, is a former U.S. Envoy to the Middle East.
2024-03-14 00:00:00
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