Lack of plan for governing Gaza provided the backdrop for deadly convoy chaos

Israel’s unwillingness to fill the current leadership vacuum in northern Gaza provided the backdrop for the chaos that led to the deaths of dozens of Palestinians on the Gaza coast on Thursday, analysts and aid workers say.

More than 100 were killed and 700 injured, health officials in Gaza said, after thousands of hungry civilians rushed a convoy of aid trucks, sparking a stampede and prompting Israeli soldiers to fire into the crowd.

The immediate causes of the chaos were extreme hunger and desperation: the United Nations has warned of an impending famine in northern Gaza, where the incident took place. Civilian attempts to ambush aid trucks, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of roads damaged during the war have made it extremely difficult for food to reach the approximately 300,000 civilians still stranded in that region, causing the United States and others to drop aid from the air instead. .

But analysts say this dynamic has been exacerbated by Israel’s failure to put in motion a plan for how the north will be governed.

Although South Gaza remains an active conflict zone, fighting has largely subsided in the north of the enclave. The Israeli army defeated the bulk of Hamas forces there in early January, prompting Israeli soldiers to withdraw from parts of the north.

Now these areas lack a centralized body to coordinate services, maintain public order and protect emergency trucks. To prevent Hamas from rebuilding itself, Israel prevented police officers from the Hamas-led pre-war government from escorting the trucks. But Israel has also postponed the creation of an alternative Palestinian law enforcement agency.

Aid groups have a limited presence and the United Nations is still exploring how to expand their activities there. And Israel has said it will maintain military control of the area indefinitely, without specifying exactly what this will mean on a day-to-day basis.

“This tragic event reflects how Israel lacks a realistic long-term strategy,” said Michael Milstein, an analyst and former Israeli intelligence official. “You can’t just take over Gaza City, leave and then hope that something positive will grow there. Instead there is chaos.”

Since Israel invaded Gaza in October, following the Hamas-led attacks that devastated southern Israel earlier that month, Israeli politicians have debated and disagreed over how Gaza should be governed once the war is over, a period they describe as “ the day after”. ”

In northern Gaza, that moment has essentially already arrived.

When U.N. officials toured the area last week to assess damage there, they did not coordinate their visit with Hamas because Hamas no longer exerts widespread influence in the north, said Scott Anderson, deputy Gaza director of UNRWA, the main aid agency of the UN. in Gaza.

Reports have emerged of some Hamas members trying to restore order in certain neighborhoods. But apart from limited services at several hospitals, Mr Anderson said he saw no sign of civil servants or council officers. Uncollected garbage and sewage lined the streets, he said.

“The leadership in Gaza is literally or figuratively underground, and there is no structure to fill that void,” Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview from Gaza. “That creates an overriding aura of despair and fear,” which makes events like Thursday’s disaster more likely, he said, adding: “It’s very frustrating and difficult to coordinate things when there is no one to coordinate with. ”

Video footage has emerged of armed groups attacking convoys, and diplomats say criminal gangs are beginning to fill the void left by Hamas’s absence.

Without any plan, “the vacuum will either be filled by chaos and lawless gangs and criminals,” says Ahmed Fouad Khatib, an American commentator on Gazan affairs who grew up in Gaza, “or by Hamas, which will manage to reemerge stiches. and try to reconstruct.”

Power vacuums are inevitable after most wars. But critics of the Israeli government say the vacuum in northern Gaza is worse than it could have been because Israeli leaders disagree on what to do next.

The country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a plan in late February that suggested “the administration of civil affairs and the maintenance of law and order will be based on local stakeholders with administrative experience.” But other than saying that these executives cannot be affiliated with “countries or entities that support terrorism,” Mr. Netanyahu provided no further details.

His plan was so vague that it was interpreted as an attempt to delay an impending decision on whether to prioritize the goals of his domestic political base or those of Israel’s strongest foreign ally, the United States.

Vocal sections of Netanyahu’s right-wing base are aggressively pushing for the restoration of Jewish settlements in Gaza, nearly two decades after Israel removed them. Such a plan would necessitate long-term Israeli control of the area, making it impossible to restore Palestinian rule there.

Conversely, the United States and other Western powers and Arab states are pushing for Palestinian leaders in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to be allowed to administer Gaza, as part of a process toward creating a Palestinian state spanning both territories.

Stretched between these two conflicting paths, Netanyahu has chosen neither.

“He’s trying all kinds of maneuvers to keep his government calm,” said Milstein, the former intelligence official. “Because of all the tensions and all the problematic configurations in his administration, he can’t make a really dramatic decision,” Mr. Milstein added.

Mr Netanyahu’s office declined to comment for this article.

Nadav Shtrauchler, a former Netanyahu strategist, dismissed concerns about Netanyahu’s strategy.

“If anyone thinks he doesn’t have a plan in his head, he’s wrong: he has a plan,” Mr. Shtrauchler said. “I think he has two plans. But I’m not sure which one he will ultimately choose, and I’m not sure he knows either.”

For now, Netanyahu is using this ambiguity to delay inevitable confrontations with both his right-wing coalition partners and the United States for as long as possible, Shtrauchler and other analysts said.

Israeli officials have discussed strengthening clans in various parts of Gaza to keep peace in their immediate area and protect aid supplies. But the plan is unproven and unenforced – and foreign diplomats are skeptical about its effectiveness.

Some Palestinians and foreign leaders say several thousand former police officers from the Palestinian Authority, the body that governed Gaza until it was ousted by Hamas in 2007, could be retrained to fill the gap. Others suggest that Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan could send a peacekeeping force to support the authority’s police officers.

In the meantime, “Palestinians living in northern Gaza are dying of hunger,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor from Gaza City. “And basically they try to find food any way they can.”