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Gaza City occupation plan ‘a repetition of flawed strategy’
The plan to occupy Gaza City is a continuation of policies that have failed before, according to Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“It’s not a surprising development, it’s a repeat of what we’ve seen for many months,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that the scope of the plan remains unclear.
“In some sense, it doesn’t matter, it’s a repetition of the flawed strategy we’ve seen over.”
Weinstein said that more than 500 Israeli security officials, including former heads of Mossad, Shin Bet and the army, wrote a letter to Donald Trump to appeal for an end to the war.
“So, clearly, the Israeli security establishment doesn’t support this. It’s incomprehensible, it’s just more suffering in pursuit of a strategy that makes no sense,” he said.
However, the analyst believes Netanyahu and his cabinet are committed to the strategy and they face no real pressure from Washington to stop it. There is some pressure from the families of captives held in Gaza but that is a small segment of the Israeli society, he said.
“Netanyahu is taking a political gamble and he thinks his political future relies on continuation of this war, so I think he’s willing to assume those risks.”
US seems to have approved Israeli plan to occupy Gaza City
Sultan Barakat, a senior professor in public policy at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University, has told Al Jazeera that Israeli plans to occupy Gaza City started to materialise in late February, early March.
“There were many things that paved the way for this, including the cutting of the international aid to the Palestinians, then the creation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation with the four specific points to attract Palestinians to walk to the aid, to displace them into those areas,” he said.
Barakat added that “the new and dangerous part” is that the plan was announced after the visit of US envoy Steve Witkoff to Israel.
“We can only assume that he approved the plan and the United States is backing it up,” he said.
“It could be that Israel is rushing to bring an end to the war in Gaza. Netanyahu is working towards a soft deadline in the form of September when many countries are threatening to recognise the Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly,” Barakat added.
Netanyahu aligns himself with most far-right elements of government
The ground was laid a few days before with all the leaks in Israeli media about the possibility of occupying Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went against his own military chief of staff, the families of the captives and growing public opinion, who have had enough of the war and are beginning to wonder about the aims of all these moves.
He aligned himself with the far-right elements of the government, mainly Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have been calling for the occupation of Gaza, along with the settler movement, ever since the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on southern Israeli on October 7, 2023.
This is going to be a very difficult operation for the prime minister.
His chief of staff has told him again and again that after 22 months of war, the troops are tired, the reservists are also tired, and that they would have to redeploy troops from elsewhere, including the occupied West Bank or the border with Lebanon or in Syria.
