Why Israel’s Planned Takeover of Gaza City Is a Mistake

Palestinians understandably fear that Israel intends to annex Gaza

For 22 months, the Israeli regime has said in the clearest of terms what its intention for Gaza is.

Ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population & takeover of the land.

Every step of the way soldiers, ministers, senior politicians have reiterated this.

There should be no…

— Dr. Yara Hawari د. يارا هواري (@yarahawari) August 8, 2025

Netanyahu says Israel doesn’t want to rule over Gaza; Israeli leaders instead want a coalition of Arab countries to fulfill that role, despite the other enormous challenges that would present. But full annexation is definitely the goal of his right-wing settler allies, and as the Washington Post reports, taking over Gaza City would pave the way for a phased military takeover of all of Gaza:

The evacuation of Gaza City residents to other areas is expected to take around two months, according to a person familiar with the details of the cabinet meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the media. Gaza City is the most populous city in the enclave — before the war, it was more tightly packed than New York City, with more than 650,000 people living within its 18 square miles.

“Where does he want to push us? Gaza is tiny,” said Adam Ahmed Salem, a 35-year-old father of three, who returned to Gaza City after being displaced in the south earlier in the war. “Life like this … it’s just too hard.” …

Netanyahu said as recently as Thursday evening that he intended to take control of all of Gaza — something long demanded by far-right members of his coalition, who represent a minority in Israel and since the start of the war have argued that the only way to defeat Hamas is to reestablish Israeli settlements in the enclave.

This was a proposal opposed by the IDF, which argued this would have endangered hostages and put an immense strain on the military, and which proposed an alternative that would have involved striking and besieging — but not holding — Gaza City. The plan ultimately approved by Israel’s security cabinet appeared to stop short of full-scale occupation of Gaza but did support “Israeli security control over the Gaza Strip” as a condition of ending the war.

A doomed plan Israel can’t even afford

That’s what a former commander of Israeli forces in Gaza told the New York Times:

The retired Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, one of the last commanders of Israeli forces in Gaza before it withdrew from the territory in 2005, said Mr. Netanyahu’s plan was “more of the same.” It would result in the deaths of more soldiers and hostages, further isolate Israel on the international stage, and deepen the rift between the government and the military, he said.

“This won’t bring progress in any way at all,” he said. “This won’t bring back the hostages and it won’t lead to the defeat of Hamas or make it give up its weapons.”

Since the start of the war, the Israeli military has raided Gaza City several times. But each time, Hamas fighters succeeded in regrouping in neighborhoods where Israeli soldiers had conducted operations.

General Shamni said another raid on Gaza City would fail to bring about a fundamental change to Hamas’s power in Gaza or its position in cease-fire negotiations. And if Israel planned to take over the city ahead of a potential long-term occupation of Gaza, he said, it would take years before the military managed to set up a functioning military government and to degrade Hamas enough to stabilize the situation.

“The state of Israel doesn’t even have the resources for such a thing,” he said. “Where will Israel get all of the money for this?”

Netanyahu’s primary goal is staying in power

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp notes that there is widespread agreement across the political spectrum that Israel’s effort to starve Hamas by starving Gazans has been a strategic failure:

If the policy is such an obvious disaster, both morally evil and strategically disastrous, then why did Israel do it all?

In some sense, this is the question of the entire war, which Israeli generals concluded over a year ago was no longer improving the country’s security. The answer, in both cases, is the same: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on Israel’s extreme right to stay in office, and they support ever-more-brutal war policies to further their project of Israel reconquering and resettling the Gaza Strip. The new proposal to assert control over all of Gaza is yet another sop to this faction — one that, if implemented, could be a major step toward a disastrous permanent occupation of Gaza.

Netanyahu, in short, is deliberately causing mass suffering and inflicting a strategic disaster on the country he leads — all for the purpose of appeasing a handful of fanatics who hold his future in their hands.

It’s not just Netanyahu

At Slate, Fred Kaplan explains that both Israel and Hamas “have vital interests in this war, and the peace proposals offered by each — whether or not sincerely — have threatened the interests of the other”:

At various points in the war, Netanyahu offered or ceded to ceasefires and exchanges of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners—but he always insisted on Israel’s right to resume the fighting after all the hostages were freed. Hamas’ leaders have insisted that any such ceasefire be permanent; otherwise, they feared (correctly) that Israel would intensify its military campaign after the last hostage was released.

Another conflict of interest: Israel insists (quite rightly) that Hamas must disarm and be stripped of all political power as part of any peace plan; Hamas (understandably) wants to retain power.

These interests are both rational and irreconcilable, meaning that the war is likely to continue, unless one side is defeated or both sides are pressured to stop fighting. 

He also notes that Netanyahu’s self-interest isn’t the only problem:

Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief for Bloomberg News (and one of the most experienced American reporters in the Middle East), says it’s a mistake to place the blame entirely on the prime minister. Bronner writes that not just Netanyahu but Israel’s entire government “believes deep in its bones that if it does not destroy and eliminate Hamas as a ruling military force in Gaza, that it will have failed its people.” This is seen as “an existential challenge.”

But Kaplan also argues that Netanyahu — and many other Israelis — doesn’t actually want to end the war:

Netanyahu had a moment when he could have scuttled the pressure from his right-wing partners, formed a new government, taken real steps to end the war in Gaza, made a bold overture to the Saudi royal family (who were eager to accept such a move), and used all of these moves to reset relations with once friendly but increasingly disenchanted political parties in Europe and the United States.

He didn’t do any of this, and the only plausible reason is that he didn’t want to. Netanyahu isn’t just kowtowing to the right wing or protecting his political power; he believes the things he says about the need to wipe out Hamas, and according to Bronner and other reporters, many if not most Israeli Jews believe those things too. At least for now, as long as the notion of living side by side with Palestinians seems suicidal to them, the idea of a two-state solution is untenable.

A hard-line fantasy that has become everyone else’s nightmare

Israel Policy Forum’s Michael Koplow marvels at how the Israeli government continues to be blind to its own quagmire:

It is stunning and tragic the extent to which Israeli leadership is still peddling fantasies about how the Gaza war will end and what the aftermath will bring. It is hard to find evidence of lessons learned and resulting recalibration, even as the strategic mess deepens.

We are somehow still hearing outsized pledges about how the next thing will force Hamas’s surrender. Remember in December ‘23 when operations were going to imminently wrap up? Or Rafah as the decisive battle? Or taking Philadelphia? Or Gideon’s Chariots? Or establishing the GHF? Every threat to open the gates of hell on Hamas has resulted in Israel further mired in Gaza. The new plan to conquer and directly administer it will be no different. Israel set itself up to fail by establishing an impossible standard and seeing everything as a military op.

And without an ounce of shame or self awareness, Netanyahu is still repeating the myth that Israel can flatten even more of Gaza despite regional objections, and at the end those same objectors will swoop in and assume responsibility for the mess left behind. It’s easy to see how this continues. It’s a combination of an Israeli PM whose priority is staying where he is and a coalition that is not even a little responsive to the wishes of the Israeli public, and a hands-off U.S. administration unwilling to use its tremendous leverage.

The mystery here is not why such an intolerable situation continues. The mystery is why anyone still buys into the evidence-free claims that Netanyahu and other ministers are making, and why anyone is willing to give them an airing and treat them at face value.

Israel will just be making it easier for Hamas to recruit more fighters

As part of his Foreign Affairs analysis of how Israel’s punishment of Gazan civilians has been a strategic failure, Robert A. Pape explains how additional occupation could backfire:

[T]he polling suggests that Israel has not succeeded in severing the connection between Gazans and Hamas. Far from dwindling, support for Hamas has grown or remained the same, and the willingness of Palestinians to attack Israeli civilians remains high enough to satisfy Hamas’s recruiting needs, despite the most brutal punishment campaign by a Western democracy in history. For Israel’s security, the tragic reality is that Hamas likely retains the key asset that could allow it to carry out another major attack down the road: vast numbers of fighters willing to fight and die for the cause. …

Israel’s announced intention to seize control of at least 75 percent of Gaza and then confine Gazans to a small portion of territory won’t succeed in divorcing the population from Hamas. As Palestinians are driven into a small corner of the enclave, Hamas will just move with them; this plan is no more likely to defeat Hamas than were the previous population transfers that forced people from area to area inside Gaza. Indeed, such Israeli actions will cause more suffering among civilians—and produce more terrorists. Israel could go further still, expelling Gazans into the Sinai Desert, but such a drastic measure would stoke the possibility of future retributive violence targeting Israelis. And most damaging for long-term Israeli security, throwing Gazans out of the territory would leave Israel open to accusations of engaging in ethnic cleansing, undermining any moral case for supporting the country.

Military operations that, intentionally or not, result in historic levels of civilian deaths are ultimately leading to a more dangerous situation for Israel, making it a less desirable home for Jews and a more likely target for those seeking revenge. Instead, Israel should establish a new security perimeter between Israeli civilian population centers and the Palestinians in Gaza, allowing Gazans enough space to rebuild their lives, letting humanitarian and economic aid to flow into the territory unimpeded, and working with international allies to foster alternative political arrangements to Hamas or Israeli control in Gaza.

We don’t actually know how many people in Gaza have already died

Any major Israeli operation in Gaza City, let alone a full military occupation, on top of the current famine, will undoubtedly add to the already massive death toll from the war. Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi argues that the Gaza Health Ministry’s count of more than 61,000 dead, which some cast doubt on because the ministry is run by Hamas, “is also almost certainly a massive underestimate”:

It is far more likely that the real death toll is in the hundreds of thousands. And by “real death toll” I mean direct deaths from military campaigns and indirect deaths due to the famine created by Israel’s siege on Gaza, as well as deaths from preventable illnesses or medical conditions that couldn’t be treated due to Israel’s blockade on medical supplies and destruction of hospitals. It also means bodies that are rotting under the rubble and may never be formally identified. In January of this year, it was estimated there were at least 10,000 bodies buried under the wreckage of Gaza.

Trying to figure out the real death toll is difficult — by design. Infrastructure in Gaza has been almost completely obliterated: the UN estimates up to 92% of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the conflict. Many of the hospitals, which played a key part in counting the dead, have been destroyed or are barely functioning. Israeli strikes have repeatedly caused internet and phone blackouts. Gaza, more generally, has become what Israel’s leaders and influencers promised to make it from the very beginning: a place where no human being can live.

Meanwhile, Israel has refused to allow foreign reporters free access into Gaza (although it takes some on heavily curated propaganda trips), systematically murdered Palestinian journalists on the ground and hampered efforts for independent third-party investigations into mass graves and suspected war crimes.