Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fifth principle for concluding the war in Gaza, among those he laid out at a press conference in Jerusalem on Aug. 10, was a Gaza run by a “non-Israeli peaceful civil administration.”

Analysts JNS spoke with are split on the feasibility of the plan.

Netanyahu said that Israel would remain in charge of overall security, but a civilian administration, one that doesn’t indoctrinate children, pay terrorists or launch attacks against Israel, would run its civil affairs.

“That’s what we want to see in Gaza. So it’s neither Hamas nor the P.A. [Palestinian Authority],” he said.

Earlier, on Aug. 7, the prime minister told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer that the civil administration would be comprised of “Arab forces,” who would provide Gazans “a good life,” and “govern it properly” while not threatening Israel.

Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, doubts the plan’s viability, in large part due to a lack of international support.

“This whole idea appears to be undercooked and not ready for implementation,” Conricus told JNS, adding that as long as Hamas remains armed and influential, the possibility of a country or organization taking responsibility for governing Gaza is virtually zero.

Mordechai Kedar, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, disagreed, pointing to Egypt as a country that could step up to handle Gaza’s day-to-day civilian affairs, as a large segment of its public identifies ideologically with Gazans.

“It’s estimated that at least one-third of the population in Egypt identify totally with the Muslim Brotherhood,” Kedar told JNS. “They definitely want Gaza to be built again. They want the Gazans to live normal lives.”

These Muslim Brotherhood supporters will bring pressure to bear on Egypt’s government to help run Gaza. These are not like the Hamas leadership, “which wants to survive even at the expense of the life of every Gazan.” They want to see an end to the war and the suffering.

“There are many in the Arab world who understand that Hamas should be removed,” Kedar added, speculating that Israel’s recently announced plan to take over Gaza is meant to increase pressure on Hamas from those Arab states.

For Conricus, the idea of handing Gaza’s civil administration over to someone else is itself less than ideal. If the goal is to change hearts and minds, then the best alternative is for Israel to run the place.

To deradicalize the Gaza Strip is a “generational challenge,” he said, an effort of 30 to 60 years. “To achieve sustainable long-term change in Gaza means that you must totally reform the education system, the religious services system, the mosques, etc.

“If we are honest, what needs to be done is for Israel to take control of the Gaza Strip, to govern it with everything that entails, to provide a civil administration—sanitation, food, medical, education and everything,” he said.

“If you want it done, you have to do it yourself. I don’t believe that any other organization or country will step in and do it for Israel,” Conricus said.

Conricus held up the efforts of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a model. “He understood that Saudi schools and mosques were a fertile breeding ground for the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabi terrorism. He overhauled those two systems with an iron fist. That’s what Israel needs to focus on.”

To start, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a “front organization” for terror groups, must be expunged. “In Gaza, UNRWA cannot be allowed to continue to exist, to be the biggest employer, to poison the minds of Gazan children and turn them into future willing shaheeds [martyrs],” he said.

Conricus admitted that the odds of Israel taking charge are low as running civilian affairs would be “resource intensive” and would be a divisive issue within Israel.

Kedar agreed that the likelihood of Israeli control is remote. “I don’t know many Israelis who would like to go to Gaza to work there. It is dangerous. Whether justified or not, they hate us,” he said.

He’s also skeptical that deradicalization can be imposed from above, no matter who runs Gaza’s civil affairs. It requires a change in thinking among the society’s elders. In Gaza, that change may come when the older generation understands that Hamas brought destruction upon them, he said. It won’t come from changing schoolbooks.

Conricus and Kedar agree that world opposition to Israel’s war has complicated matters.

Judging from Israel’s failure to achieve its war aims in nearly two years of fighting, Conricus has concluded that the problem is a lack of strategy—”leadership [needs] to define what the end state is, how it will look and how we’re going to get there.”

Conricus said a plan should be set forth with clearly defined stages that “future stakeholders” can get behind. Those stakeholders would take over the Strip.

The problem has been aggravated as Israel see-saws when pressure is applied, most recently caving under international pressure over Hamas’s “fake starvation campaign,” he said. When Israel opened the floodgates to aid, which ended up in the hands of Hamas, it set back months of IDF gains, he added.

“Israel needs to defeat Hamas decisively. It must make clear to the entire Middle East that if you attack Israel like Hamas did, you don’t have a future,” he said.

Kedar acknowledged that the war has dragged on and in retrospect, it would have been better to have defeated Hamas at the outset in an all-out offensive.

However, he said Netanyahu was contending with numerous pressures, not least of which was a reluctance on the part of Israel’s military leadership to act decisively to eradicate Hamas. The generals believed that less would suffice to unseat the terror group, he said.

But there are still larger reasons for the world’s anti-Israel turn that has to do with the success of Qatari propaganda spread through that country’s news outlet Al Jazeera; antisemitic attitudes among Muslims and Christians; and the rise of Muslim populations in Europe, constituencies to which European politicians pander.

“What you see recently is Islam taking over Europe. I didn’t expect it to be so early. I thought in 2035, maybe 2040, when the Muslim populations would be significantly bigger than the old Europeans. However, these days the Europeans are actually being governed by the Islamic streets,” Kedar said.

Source: JNS