As pressure mounts, Israel’s minister proposes a plan for post-war Gaza
As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the Middle East on Friday in an effort to defuse escalating tensions, Israel’s Defense Minister presented a post-war plan for the Gaza Strip that exposed divisions in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wartime government.
The proposal from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a moderate member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, was widely seen as a trial balloon, but it showed the pressure Israel faced as Washington and others pushed for a shift to politics. a less intense phase of the war.
Further complicating diplomatic efforts in the region, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the powerful armed group Hezbollah, which has clashed with Israeli forces along the Israel-Lebanon border, on Friday ruled out any negotiations to stop the fighting until the war in Gaza is over. .
Mr Gallant’s proposal, shared at a stormy meeting of Israel’s security cabinet on Thursday, is based on the army’s defeat of Hamas in Gaza. It calls on Israel to maintain military control of Gaza’s borders while a “multinational task force” oversees reconstruction and economic development in the territory, which has been devastated by nearly three months of brutal Israeli airstrikes.
Under the plan, Gaza residents with no ties to Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, would handle civil affairs in the enclave, according to details of the cabinet meeting reported to the United States has been leaked. Israeli news media. But there would be no role for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and no resettlement of Israelis in Gaza – an idea that far-right Israelis support.
The proposal appeared to be an attempt to find a middle ground between the post-war plans of the United States and members of Israel’s far right. The Biden administration has called for a “renewed and revitalized” Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza after the war, seeing this as a path to a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, a proposal that many Israelis on the right are against it.
In a Facebook post, a far-right Israeli leader, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, criticized Mr. Gallant’s plan and suggested it risked a repeat of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7. He reiterated his call for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinian citizens from Gaza, where most of the 2.2 million residents have been driven from their homes. Many are hungry, sick and living in dilapidated tents.
In recent days, Mr. Smotrich and another far-right Israeli leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, have suggested that Palestinians should leave Gaza and that Israelis should resettle the enclave as part of a long-term solution to the war. .
France, Germany and the United States denounced the comments, which the Foreign Ministry called “inflammatory and irresponsible.”
Israeli news media described the Israeli security cabinet meeting as turbulent, saying it had ended in an outburst after several ministers attacked army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi for forming a committee to investigate military failures that led to the attack. The October 7 attacks killed about 1,200 people and abducted 240 others to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. The ministers criticized the composition of the committee and questioned whether the investigation should be conducted while Israel was at war.
Netanyahu’s governing coalition has a fragile majority, with 64 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Days after the October 7 attack, some of Netanyahu’s centrist rivals joined him to form an emergency government and strengthen his small war cabinet. But they have not signed any coalition agreement, and they have said they will leave the government when they see fit.
With his popularity at a new low, largely due to the October 7 security scare, Netanyahu is reluctant to see elections anytime soon and needs to keep his governing coalition together to stay in office.
In a speech on Friday, Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, addressed Israelis directly, telling them: “You must demand your government to stop the offensive.”
“There will be no dialogue unless the aggression in Gaza stops,” he added, warning: “You will be the first to pay the price.”
The statement came as Mr Blinken embarked on a tour of the Middle East aimed at preventing a wider regional war following Tuesday’s killing of a senior Hamas official in a suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut.
Israel has not publicly accepted or denied responsibility for the killing, but two senior Lebanese security officials, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss an active investigation, said Israel carried out the attack using six missiles , two of which failed to explode.
The caretaker government of Lebanon said Friday that it had filed a complaint with the UN Security Council over the strike, calling it the “most dangerous phase” yet of the conflict and a violation of its territorial sovereignty.
Mr. Nasrallah reiterated a message he delivered in a speech on Wednesday in which he vowed that Hezbollah would avenge the killing of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri, whom he described as a “dear friend.”
“This will not go unpunished,” Mr Nasrallah said on Friday. “We cannot remain silent. ”
But he did not say how or when Hezbollah would respond. And while clashes have intensified along the Israel-Lebanon border, none have yet signaled a clear escalation.
Michael Levenson contributed reporting from New York.