IS ISRAEL ON THE VERGE OF ANNEXATION?Religious extremists may force Netanyahu's hand in Gaza
As the world recoils from the stark photos of the starving Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s religious far right is increasingly insisting in public that the fate of the at least twenty hostages still believed to be alive can no longer delay Israel’s annexation of parts of Gaza that its settlers controlled until 2005. The war of revenge that was started in part to save the then hundreds of hostages captive in Gaza is no longer of interest to the very devout in Israel. In desperate need for the political support of the religious right, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently sent a high-level team to Washington seeking US approval for what I have been told is a take-it-or-leave-it approach to the leadership of Hamas. Their demands include Hamas’s surrender as well as the release of all living hostages and the bodies of the dead within weeks or Israel will begin unilaterally annexing parts of Gaza. Netanyahu’s team in Washington was headed by Ronald Dermer, the American-born Israeli minister of strategic affairs. He is known for his closeness to Netanyahu, and he has met privately this week with national security officials in the White House and the State Department, though no official statements have so far been made public. Dermer was accompanied by Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel's national security adviser, who has supervised Israel’s intelligence agencies. I was told the plan the Israelis are proposing would give the Hamas leadership ten days to two weeks to respond. An informed Israeli said that regardless of the Hamas response—it’s unclear who is currently in charge of the diminished Hamas forces—Israel is planning to construct an expanded one-half-kilometer-wide security zone in Gaza, similar to the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, that will be under the control of the Israel Defense Forces. No Palestinians would be allowed to have access to the security zone. The other areas in Gaza scheduled for immediate annexation under the Netanhayu plan include former Israeli settlements in north Gaza and areas in south Gaza that are adjacent to the Israeli border. A US official with knowledge of the latest Israeli gambit told me that some members of the Trump administration have been following what he called the religious right’s “last-ditch play to force an annexation ultimatum into the negotiations. No backing directly from Bibi,” he said, “but through innuendo he hopes we buy in and he can claim it was an American-Dermer deal he had no choice but to accept. Hamas is essentially finished, and the Israelis are proceeding with what they want to do by simply pretending it’s part of ‘negotiating for the hostages’ rather than a post-conflict political decision on Gaza’s future.” The future of Gaza has been a political touchstone in Israel for decades. Israel’s partial occupation of Gaza was one of the spoils of its overwhelming victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza and ordered the destruction of the twenty-one Israeli settlements there. All major buildings were destroyed and at least eight thousand Israeli settlers there were removed, many forcibly. The major factors behind the decision were Hamas’s continuing confrontations with the settlers and the cost of maintaining the Israeli presence. In an earlier referendum nearly two thirds of Israelis voted against the withdrawal. At the time, Netanyahu, then finance minister, resigned his post in protest and became leader of the opposition Likud Party. I was told that Netanyahu’s current plan for resettlement in Gaza, in the aftermath of an expected military defeat of Hamas, would again be to build Israeli settlements in north Gaza, the area closest to Tel Aviv and other prime rocket targets in Israel. A second step would be to build a string of Israeli settlements in south Gaza adjacent to the border that Hamas penetrated on October 7, 2023. If there are hardcore members of Hamas who survive the war and continue fighting, Israel will “go deeper” with settlements and annexations in Gaza. Outside experts will be called in to deal with the health issues stemming from the constant lack of food, housing, and necessities for the surviving Palestinians in Gaza. The New York Times reported that in a speech on Tuesday in Jerusalem at a conference marking the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the extremist right, declared that Israel was “closer than ever” to rebuilding Jewish settlements in Gaza. He did not discuss the possibility of an ultimatum calling for Hamas to return hostages, dead or alive, but said that the possibility of returning Jewish settlers to Gaza was “real.” “For 20 years,” he said, “we called it wishful thinking. It seems to me it is now a real working plan.” Smotrich apparently did not discuss the unending humanitarian crisis in Gaza that Israel, and perhaps the world’s relief agencies, now stripped of US financing, will face at the end of the war. It seems clear that those advising Netanyahu have vastly underestimated the difficulties of dealing with a post-Hamas Gaza full of Palestinian survivors who have suffered trauma unlike any seen since the end of World War II and the discovery of the German concentration camps. And then is the fate of the hostages. Most of those in Hamas captivity are Israelis. General Eyel Zamir, the IDF chief of the general staff, and other senior Israeli military commanders have publicly made clear that if there is no agreement on the release of hostages any military action to recover them will be “a secondary goal of the war.” In other words, protecting soldiers fighting their way into tunnels will be the first priority. This week Haaretz reported that Orit Strock, the religious extremist minister of settlement and national missions, told a radio interviewer that the fight against Hamas must expand to all of Gaza even if hostages were present and in harm’s way. “There's an entire area the IDF has designated as a ‘do-not-touch zone’ because hostages are being held there,” she said. “You can’t win a war this way. . . . I can’t make the kind of life-and-death arithmetic where one person’s life is worth more than another’s. We’ll do our best to avoid harming [the hostages], but this may indeed happen.” Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2025 Seymour Hersh |