In the midst of a renewed Israeli military campaign and a U.S. proposal to take ownership of the Gaza Strip, a senior Israeli diplomat has told Newsweek that the country had no plans to govern the war-battered Palestinian territory once Hamas was defeated.
“I can assure you one thing,” Israeli Deputy Consul General in New York Tsach Saar told Newsweek. “We don’t want to be in Gaza in the postwar situation. We don’t want to be there. It will not be Hamas. It will not be Israel.”
He added: “But in order to ensure our people’s security, in order to make sure that we will not face the danger of another October 7 from Gaza, Hamas has to be eradicated, or at least its military power and its governance in the Gaza Strip. So, it will not be Hamas, it will not be Israel. Then we have to work with our closest allies and partners, both the United States and other players in the region in order to find a solution for that next day.”
The comments came as Israel pressed on with a new offensive in Gaza, scrapping a ceasefire deal that failed to reach its second phase amid dueling accusations from both sides of the conflict. Meanwhile, uncertainty lingers over a territory that has been under Hamas rule for nearly 18 years.
Alternatives Unknown
Saar said Israel was studying a number of potential plans for Gaza, including those being broadcast from the White House. President Donald Trump has repeatedly proposed the transfer of the roughly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza to other countries in order to pursue real estate development opportunities in the Mediterranean territory. He has further suggested that the U.S. may establish direct control over Gaza.
The concept has drawn severe backlash in the Arab world, but it has caught the attention of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called it “the first good idea I’ve heard” on the issue during a joint press conference with the U.S. leader at the White House last month.
Since first introducing the idea, Trump has shifted his messaging to emphasize that he would seek for Palestinians to leave voluntarily rather than be forcibly expelled. This was also Saar’s understanding of the plan, which he called “reasonable,” as he praised the U.S. effort to find a new solution to the conflict.
“There are many plans and really, I have to say, we have very, very close conversations with the Americans,” Saar said. “And they are trying to explore any possibility to bring peace to the region, the wider region, and really doing everything in their power to bring back the hostages.”
Since the beginning of the conflict, Netanyahu has consistently outlined his nation’s wartime goals as securing the release of all hostages in Gaza, eliminating Hamas as a functioning military and political entity and rendering the territory incapable of posing a future threat to Israel.
Of the 251 people taken prisoner by Hamas during its initial large-scale surprise attack that sparked the war on October 7, 2023, some 59, including five U.S. nationals, are believed to remain in the group’s captivity. More than 50,000 Palestinians and 1,600 Israelis have died throughout the conflict, according to records kept by the respective institutions of the two sides.
With Israel having already established effective control over large parts of Gaza, Trump’s controversial proposal has also prompted Arab nations to scramble for an alternative solution. One such framework, drafted by Egypt and endorsed by the Arab League, was presented earlier this month.
The plan would see the establishment of an administrative committee of independent Palestinians to take charge of Gaza for a limited period of time before handing over the territory to a reformed Palestinian National Authority (PA), the rival government to Hamas that currently wields limited control of the West Bank. The project also explored the idea of an international peacekeeping force to be deployed to Gaza and the West Bank.
Hamas and the PA welcomed the Arab initiative. Yet Netanyahu’s administration, which has also rejected a role for the PA in Gaza, dismissed the plan as it “fails to address the realities of the situation following 7 October 2023, remaining rooted in outdated perspectives,” according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Rather, the ministry said, “with President Trump’s idea, there is an opportunity for the Gazans to have free choice based on their free will. This should be encouraged!”
White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes issued a similar dismissal at the time, saying the plan does “not address the reality that Gaza is currently uninhabitable, and residents cannot humanely live in a territory covered in debris and unexploded ordnance.” He asserted that Trump “stands by his vision to rebuild Gaza free from Hamas.”
In response, Hamas Political Bureau member and spokesperson Basem Naim told Newsweek that “Netanyahu, backed by the Trump administration, has a real goal: to expel the Palestinians from their land and control it. This has been declared and planned for years before October 7.”
“The optimal solution, not just for the Gaza Strip but for all Palestinian territories, is the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the formation of a Palestinian government that represents all Palestinians after free and fair elections, or the formation of an independent body of independent technocrats to manage all civil affairs in the Gaza Strip,” Naim said.
A Tale of Two Proposals
Saar and Naim also disagreed over the narrative surrounding the collapse of the ceasefire arrangement, part of a deal first outlined by then-President Joe Biden last May and ultimately won only after Trump sent his own team to support negotiations in the wake of his November election victory. The first stage of the three-phase deal went into effect a day before Trump took office and featured heavily in his messaging on inauguration day.
Despite frequent instances of both sides accusing one another of violating the truce, the elusive breakthrough led to the longest cessation of hostilities since the war began, as well as the release of 33 Israelis from Hamas captivity and nearly 2,000 Palestinians from Israeli prisons. As the deadline passed, however, Israel called for new terms to extend the first phase of the ceasefire, while Hamas sought to stick to the existing plan to proceed to phase two, which would necessitate Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza and a lasting end to the war.
“Israel fulfilled its commitments in the first phase,” Saar said. “Afterwards, after the 42nd day, Hamas had rejected, actually, two U.S.-backed proposal to extend or to have some more phases of the previous ceasefire. That’s what actually brought us to resume the fighting.”
While Saar declined to get into the details of the negotiations, he argued that Israeli officials “are exploring every possible way, every solution that we can find, every understanding that we can find with the different players, because we’re not directly negotiating with Hamas, but to bring more hostages home. That’s what is guiding us.”
“At the same time, when we saw that there is a deadline and Hamas is rebuilding its capabilities and also threatening out loud to commit the October 7 atrocities again and again, we’re not going to sit quiet there and wait for them to do that. We have to act,” Saar said. “There’s no free ceasefire. We are going to bring our hostages home. And it’s in one way or another.”
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who proved instrumental in pushing both sides to sign the truce in January, appeared to back this telling of the behind-the-scenes wrangling over the fate of the deal during his March 12 visit to Doha. He told Fox News Sunday that “Hamas had every opportunity to demilitarize, to accept the bridging proposal that would have given us a 40- or 50-day ceasefire where we could have discussed demilitarization and a final truce,” yet “they elected not to.”
But Naim hit back at what he called “a false narrative.”
“First, Hamas did not reject any proposal or initiative,” Naim said. “However, Hamas stated that it is committed to the agreement signed by both parties under the auspices of mediators. Why would we resort to new agreements, especially since Netanyahu openly declares that he only wants a prisoner exchange and a continuation of the war?”
“This is unacceptable to any Palestinian,” he added. “We want an end to the war, the withdrawal of hostile forces from our land, and a prisoner exchange.”
The Right to Rule
For all of the attention paid to the disputed holy city of Jerusalem (even Hamas refers to its ongoing war as the “Al-Aqsa Flood” after the sacred Islamic site), the 25-mile Mediterranean territory that constitutes the modern Gaza Strip has played an outsized role in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Occupied by neighboring Egypt after the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Gaza was seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. It remained under Israeli military occupation for some 38 years, during which Hamas first emerged as a splinter of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement during the First Intifada uprising of the 1980s.
After another wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence amid the Second Intifada, Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza in 2005, paving the way for Palestinian elections in which Hamas came out as the most popular party the following year. The group briefly entered into a unity government with the PA’s dominant Fatah faction, but a violent rift ensued, resulting in Hamas’ successful takeover of Gaza in 2007.
While the PA has yet to hold another vote, Hamas has continued to lead in opinion polls against Fatah, even amid the current conflict. Rare public displays of criticism of the group manifested in a protest on Tuesday, but it remains entrenched, despite suffering staggering casualties, including the loss of much of its core leadership.
Saar acknowledged that “Hamas still controls the Gaza Strip,” even if its power “is definitely degraded.”
“The plan we’re focused on right now is destroying Hamas and returning the hostages, and any solution will have to ensure that,” Saar said. “These goals are the same goals from the start, and we had no daylight between Israel and the American administration, the previous one or the current one, about the goals, and this is very important to emphasize.”
“And we have to work also with the international community, primarily, as I mentioned, across the United States, in order to find a permanent solution, but also some other countries in the region,” he added.
Saar argued that, “if we manage to find a replacement for Hamas, even in an interim time, there may be hope, and the people in Gaza, also they deserve to live in peace.”
Naim, while also calling for greater international solidarity, particularly across the Arab and Muslim worlds, placed the emphasis on a grassroots solution to the fate of Gaza as well as the Palestinian territories as a whole.
“As for the Gaza Strip, it is part of the Palestinian territories, and only the Palestinians have the right to determine their fate and future,” Naim said. “No one else has the right to determine the future of the residents of the Gaza Strip.”
“We, as Palestinians, have been victims of ongoing Israeli aggression for more than 76 years, and we need guarantees that Israel will not attack us, especially since the real threat does not come from light weapons that Palestinians possess to defend themselves, but rather from a major regional power possessing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (weapons of mass destruction),” Naim said. “This is what we see daily, not only in Gaza but also in the occupied West Bank, where there is no October 7, and Hamas does not rule.”
The post Israeli Official Says Neither Israel nor Hamas Will Rule Gaza After War appeared first on Newsweek.
