Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced“We’re working with the United States very closely” to find countries that will “give the Palestinians a better future.” “If people want to stay, they can stay,” he explained, “but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.”
Netanyahu’s call for Palestinians to leave fits all too well with a series of Israeli policies that have made Gaza ungovernable and unlivable. Amid renewed discussion of a cease-fire and the lasting defeat of Hamas, the fact remains that Netanyahu has repeatedly prolonged the conflict and prevented the creation of a credible alternative to Hamas.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced“We’re working with the United States very closely” to find countries that will “give the Palestinians a better future.” “If people want to stay, they can stay,” he explained, “but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.”
Netanyahu’s call for Palestinians to leave fits all too well with a series of Israeli policies that have made Gaza ungovernable and unlivable. Amid renewed discussion of a cease-fire and the lasting defeat of Hamas, the fact remains that Netanyahu has repeatedly prolonged the conflict and prevented the creation of a credible alternative to Hamas.
In June, Israeli opposition politicians railed against Netanyahu’s attempts to arm and equip anti-Hamas militias in Gaza. Critics also condemned Israel’s use of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to deliver aid within the territory. And indeed, the outcome of these policies has been disastrous. Over the course of the past month, Israeli-affiliated forces killed nearly 600 Palestinians waiting to receive aid, just the latest manifestation of the territory’s death spiral.
Ostensibly, both Israel’s support for criminal gangs and its incompetent aid rollout look like two separate parts of a broader problem: Without a “day after” plan, Israel’s policies remain shortsighted and ineffective. If, however, Netanyahu’s goal is to increase chaos and suffering in the strip to the point where its residents choose to emigrate “voluntarily,” he has already succeeded.
The best evidence that Israeli policy seeks to sustain anarchy rather than empower a new “deradicalized” leadership in Gaza lies in the Palestinian actors Israel is cooperating with. Netanyahu recently confirmed that Israel had armed a Palestinian “anti-terror service,” led by a man called Yasser Abu Shabab. Netanyahu nonchalantly responded to questions about this policy, by claiming: “[W]e activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What’s wrong with that?”
In fact, there are several things wrong with it. First, Abu Shabab’s militia is not a clan. It is a gang composed mainly of castaways from many of the extended families in Gaza that are often referred to as clans. Many are pariahs for a reason; before Abu Shabab escaped from jail in late 2023, he was serving a twenty-five year sentence for drug trafficking. His own family has disowned him.
Second, his dubious past belies Abu Shabab’s claim that his group are working to protect the aid convoys from looting. His gang has robbed Palestinian civilians in Gaza’s lawless streets. It has regularly looted aid convoys. That it did so in Israeli-controlled parts of Gaza, under the watchful eye of Israel Defense Forces troops, illustrates Tel Aviv’s complicity. According to a senior aid worker stationed in Gaza for over a year who spoke to me anonymously, Israel would ignore Abu Shabab’s forces, while taking action against both Hamas’s police force and clan-affiliated forces seeking to stop them. This was confirmed by a Palestinian diplomat who hails from Gaza.
Israel did not just turn a blind eye; it abetted these activities. In May, U.N. officials accused Israel of directing its aid convoys through parts of Gaza where Abu Shabab’s forces waited to ambush them. The aid worker told me: “I’ve been in meetings with senior [Israeli] military officers who told us that we need to ‘work’ with the gangs, meaning we needed to either pay them or let them steal some aid.”
Another way Israel collaborated with Gaza’s criminal gangs was through cigarette smuggling. Working with their contacts in Egypt, the gangs stashed cartons of cigarettes in aid convoys. At the Gaza border, Israel’s aid monitoring systems miraculously missed the cigarettes. Once the convoys reached Gaza, Israeli-backed militias and gangs would loot them, steal the cigarettes, and sell them on the black market for $200 per pack.
These activities illustrate that Abu Shabab’s gang has little intent to replace Hamas as Gaza’s governing party. It also lacks the ability to do so: The gang may be notorious, but it is a tiny force of around 300 men. Collaborating with Israel, stealing aid, and robbing Palestinians in Gaza have also not enamored them to the territory’s population. According to the aid worker, “Israel has empowered the only people hated in Gaza more than Hamas and Israel.” The Palestinian diplomat claimed: “Hamas is hated in Gaza. But at least they keep law and order.”
in May, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich boasted that “we’re eliminating [Hamas’s] ministers [and] bureaucrats.” Yet rather than search for alternatives, Israel has co-opted thugs with no interest in governance. They are not a poor alternative to Hamas; they are no alternative at all. When given a choice between lawlessness and a semblance of order under Hamas, it is little wonder that Palestinians might choose the latter.
In short, Israel has not mitigated Gaza’s anarchy; it has exacerbated it. This seems increasingly deliberate, given that the number of armed criminal gangs receiving Israeli support has proliferated. Hamas, in turn, has created its own plainclothes militia, ostensibly to fight the criminal gangs. The result is chaos—thugs fighting thugs over aid and thus power over Gaza’s civilians. As one Gaza resident claimed: “I no longer know who belongs to a clan, who’s a criminal, and who’s Hamas.”
Alongside its cooperating with the Abu Shabab gang, Israel’s work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation further suggests a commitment to keeping the strip unlivable. The foundation—a nongovernmental organization with murky origins that is apparently bankrolled by the United States and Israel—pledged to regulate aid delivery in Gaza and, most critically, stop Hamas or other groups from looting and selling it for profit.
The foundation worked with Israel to restrict aid delivery to several sites. These were supposed to be heavily secured by the Israeli military and foreign contractors to keep the peace. The foundation’s employees would use facial recognition scanners on-site to filter out any members of Hamas or other groups on Israel’s blacklist. It would also ensure that the foundation only gave each recipient the exact amount of aid necessary, thereby preventing black market sales.
None of this happened. The sites are understaffed and overburdened. Israeli troops use constant live fire—including mortars and machine guns—to keep aid seekers away. Only when the firing stops can they approach. An Israeli soldier described the sites as “a killing field. … Our form of communication is gunfire.”
The sites have not only failed to prevent gangs from looting the aid, but they have also institutionalized the practice. Alongside Israeli troops and American contractors, Gazan gangs guard the sites, including Abu Shabab’s group. According to the Palestinian diplomat, these individuals get first pick of the aid, allowing them to “take the most expensive items, like flour and sugar, to sell on the black market.” Only when these groups have left can civilians enter. This explains why the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s goods are now commonplace on market stalls throughout the territory.
Then there are the logistical issues. The foundation’s stocks can feed less than half of Gaza’s population. Whether they could even achieve this, however, is doubtful: Whereas the U.N. used to operate around 400 aid sites throughout the territory, the foundation has just four. Three of these sites lie on the border with the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian territory that Israeli officials have repeatedly suggested Palestinians could be expelled to. All four are in no-go evacuation areas that Israel advises Palestinians against entering.
All of these issues were easily foreseeable. That Israel did not act to prevent them hints at either unbelievable incompetence or deliberate design. This is the required context for understanding Israel’s increased support for armed thugs and its disastrous aid rollout. It can provide aid on paper, while making receiving it a life-threatening endeavor in practice. It can claim to be empowering non-Hamas actors, even as doing so actually consolidates support for Hamas.
The truth is hiding in plain sight. Israel’s latest operation in Gaza—Gideon’s Chariots—calls for dramatically increasing and expanding Israel’s military presence throughout Gaza while moving the territory’s population southward toward the Egyptian border. Now, Israel’s defense minister has said the strip’s population will be relocated to a “humanitarian city” while expressing support for a broader “emigration plan.”
This is Israel’s proposed “day after” for Gaza. Whatever cease-fire agreements are discussed or signed in the coming weeks or months, Netanyahu’s policies have already laid the groundwork for the Gazan population’s forced displacement.
