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On January 10, 2024, just over three months after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a short speech to clarify Israel’s war aims in Gaza. The first point he stressed was that Israel had “no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.” He insisted that Israel was “fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population” and stated that the country’s objectives were simply “to rid Gaza of Hamas terrorists and free our hostages.”
Now, twenty months into a war that has killed more than 56,000 in Gaza — and that has swept Iran, too, into war with Israel and the United States — those declared aims appear to have been overridden, if not reversed. Since breaking this winter’s brief cease-fire in March 2025, Israeli forces have begun seizing large parts of Gaza, while moving and confining the territory’s population of 2.2 million into ever-smaller areas. The government has also unleashed a crushing campaign to limit and control the flow of humanitarian aid, including a total blockade that lasted for more than ten weeks. Yet despite its renewed onslaught, Israel has failed to secure freedom for any of the remaining 50 hostages, just 20 of whom are believed to be still alive. (The release in May of Edan Alexander, an Israeli soldier who is also an American citizen, was secured separately by American negotiators.) Nor does it appear to be in a hurry to reach a cease-fire agreement to bring them home.
This dramatic shift in objectives is apparent not only on the ground. In public statements, Netanyahu has made clear that his government now has other, more ambitious goals for the Gaza war. At a rare press conference on May 22, the prime minister stated that Israel no longer aims merely to free hostages and obliterate Hamas. When the war is over, he said, Israel will be in “full security control of Gaza.” He also enthusiastically endorsed U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal, announced in February, to relocate Gazans to other countries and redevelop the war-ravaged territory into a new Riviera — which he called “brilliant” and “revolutionary.” In other words, the Israeli government appears to be seeking precisely the outcomes that Netanyahu ruled out in January 2024: not only long-term military occupation of Gaza but also the large-scale displacement — or even expulsion — of its civilian population.
In a war marked by extreme violence and extraordinary privation inflicted on civilians, it may seem a distraction to focus on a scenario that many consider fantastical and that Trump himself has appeared to back away from. But for the Israeli cabinet, the so-called Trump plan for Gaza is not a passing fancy. In late March, shortly after the resumption of the military campaign, the Israeli government established a special office to oversee “voluntary emigration” from Gaza, and other members of the government have been even more explicit than Netanyahu in stating the end goal. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to . . . the south to a humanitarian zone . . . and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in early May.
As the world’s attention has been diverted by the so-called “twelve day” war between Israel and Iran and the decision of the United States to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, it is especially important not to lose sight of Israel’s rapidly unfolding plan for Gaza and Gazans. Under the Geneva Conventions, a forced exodus from an occupied territory would be considered a war crime. It would not only condemn Palestinians to exile but condemn the Israelis who crafted and carried out the policy. They would bear responsibility for a criminal act that would, in addition, probably mean sacrificing the remaining Israeli hostages. But with the right combination of international pressure — especially from the United States, which has so far been more of an enabler of this Israeli government’s excess than a restraint — this outcome might still be prevented. There may not be much time left. As Israeli military reporters have noted, the process is already underway; it is approaching at speed.
To grasp the extent to which Israel’s military operations in Gaza are now overwhelmingly focused on pressuring the civilian population, it is crucial to understand the various components of the revised war plan, called Gideon’s Chariots. One of them is control of food. Having already destroyed the farmland that supplied most of Gaza’s protein, fruit, and vegetables, Israel has now taken extraordinary action to limit the flow of civilian aid into Gaza.
At the beginning of March, the Netanyahu government imposed a total blockade of all food, medicine, and fuel for Gaza. This lasted for 80 days, bringing the population to the brink of starvation. In mid-May, responding to mounting international pressure, the government began to allow in a trickle of aid using the well-established independent distribution channels run by the UN and a variety of humanitarian organizations that have long sustained Gaza. That meant, at best, fewer than 100 trucks a day of supplies, compared with some 600 during the short-lived cease-fire from January to March this year. This minimal supply has been further reduced by widespread looting, often carried out in zones that Israel controls by gangs that, according to both Palestinian and official Israeli accounts, operate under Israeli protection.
In late May, Israel rolled out a controversial scheme that sidelines established routes and allows Israel to control and calibrate all aid delivery. In place of the international humanitarian organizations that have kept Gaza alive through the war so far, the bulk of food aid — and eventually all of it — will from now on, in theory, be provided by a newly formed private charity. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), endorsed and promoted by the Trump administration and staffed on the ground by U.S. mercenaries, in practice functions as an arm of Israeli military operations. According to a New York Times investigation, GHF was conceived by Israeli officials and is being closely supervised by Israel. Neither the organization nor the Israeli government has disclosed the source of its funding. Its own documentation suggests that the GHF plans to supply only packaged foods, with no provision for medicines or other desperately needed supplies, at a target level of 1700 calories per day — below medically established norms.
Israel has taken extraordinary action to limit the flow of civilian aid into Gaza.
Thus far, the plan has proved disastrous. On the eve of its launch, GHF’s American chief executive resigned, citing the organization’s inability to maintain minimum international humanitarian standards. His replacement, Johnnie Moore, is an evangelical reverend with no experience in humanitarian work, who has openly backed plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza. During its first month of operations, the foundation’s distribution points were repeatedly plunged into chaos, with more than 500 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli forces as they tried to reach them — killings that seem inexplicable and unprecedented in an aid-delivery context, even in a war zone.
According to the Israeli government, the new program is needed because Hamas had been siphoning off aid supplied through traditional channels. But international aid groups and Western officials — including David Satterfield, a career diplomat who served as the United States’ special envoy for humanitarian issues in Gaza during the Biden administration, and Cindy McCain, the American head of the World Food Program — have pointed out that Israel has not offered evidence to support this claim. In an interview shortly before GHF went into operation, a senior Western diplomat in Israel flatly dismissed the allegations as a lie.
As the UN has warned, the architecture of the new aid program also appears aimed at furthering the displacement of Gaza’s civilian population. With just eight fenced-in distribution points planned, GHF is replacing a decades-old aid distribution network that involved dozens of highly experienced agencies, hundreds of distribution sites, and thousands of workers spread over the entire territory. That model has been based on the international humanitarian principle that aid should be brought directly to the areas most in need. By contrast, the new system forces Gazans to walk long distances to reach isolated, heavily guarded sites where boxes of dry goods are left on trestle tables. GHF’s first feeding centers opened in the far south of Gaza, where Israel plans eventually to herd large numbers of people. The intent to use the operation as a carrot to encourage movement was made explicit by a report broadcast by Israeli army radio on May 29. The opening of a new distribution point in the Netzarim Corridor, a wide, flattened military access zone that bisects the strip at its waist, the radio report announced, was “designed to prompt the civilian population in Gaza City and elsewhere in the northern Gaza Strip to head south.”
In its direct impact on Gaza’s civilian population, the military component of Gideon’s Chariots is even more drastic. As limited aid distribution is luring Gazans into confined areas in the south and in coastal areas of the territory, bombs, rockets, tank fire, and drone attacks are driving them there as well. Since resuming military operations on March 18, Israeli forces have newly displaced some 660,000 Palestinians, a third of Gaza’s people, and killed some 5,000 — a rate of more than 50 deaths per day. This surge is partly a tactical adjustment: since resuming military operations in March, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has been targeting remaining members of Hamas’s civil administration as well as its fighters, in an effort to smash the group’s capacity to govern. Many of these people have been hit in their homes or tents, along with their families. But as has been the case since the beginning of the war, an overwhelming majority of casualties are collateral victims. According to the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, out of the 56,000 confirmed Palestinian to have died since October 7, 2023, 32,000 are women, children, and the elderly.
Far from indiscriminate, this relentless toll has been concentrated in areas that Israel wants civilians to leave. In April, after Israeli forces forcibly expelled the entire population of Gaza’s third-biggest town, Rafah, the city was razed to the ground. The now empty ruin-field is where the GHF set up its first food handouts. Now Israeli officials openly talk of replicating the “Rafah model” in the last remaining urban enclaves in the strip. Once most civilians have fled, Israeli ground forces will presumably move into the emptied areas, hunting down remaining gunmen, blowing up tunnels, and demolishing every standing structure.
At the end of May, Israeli forces issued “evacuation orders” — leaflets and text messages accompanied by detailed maps — warning all residents of central Gaza City in the north and Khan Yunis in the south to abandon their homes. These are Gaza’s densest urban areas, and about the only places left with standing buildings. Both are now under relentless bombardment. According to UN estimates, 82.5 percent of Gaza is now either already occupied by the Israeli army or has fallen under evacuation orders, and so lies in free-fire zones. Not all these areas have been fully abandoned yet, and some residents, mistrustful of Israeli orders or simply exhausted by endless displacement, are determined to stay. If the Israeli government succeeds in its goal, however, more than two million people will be confined to just one-fifth of Gaza’s area, a space the size of the island of Manhattan (which has a substantially smaller population). Israeli reporters who have been briefed by the army say that, in a future phase, the plan is to squash people into three even smaller enclaves, and then possibly to filter them through checkpoints into “Hamas-free” zones. The IDF itself has announced that it intends to displace “most of the population of Gaza.”
To achieve these aims, the IDF has amassed five full divisions inside Gaza: 50,000 to 60,000 troops, along with hundreds of battle tanks, dozens of armored bulldozers, and a full array of close air support. Notably, this force is made up almost entirely of regular army draftees and includes many of the elite IDF brigades, plus commandos and paratroopers. Israel’s reserve forces — citizens who are called up for service as needed — traditionally supply most of the country’s fighting force, but have largely been left out of the current fighting in Gaza, possibly to preserve morale among Israelis in expectation of a rise in casualties as the IDF pins Hamas into a tighter corner. In recent months, there have also been growing concerns in the military about reservists declining to show up for duty, either because they oppose the continuation of the war or because they are fed up with repeated call-ups in what has become Israel’s longest war.
For now, the Israeli government appears to be basking in the apparent success of its U.S.-aided campaign in Iran. Yet the catastrophic results of its war strategy in Gaza will not go away. Before the Iran campaign, parts of the Israeli security establishment as well as the general public were beginning to express growing outrage at the new war plan. They join a growing international chorus, which now includes EU diplomats, as well as the International Court of Justice and UN officials. The EU, Israel’s most important trading partner, has threatened to
suspend parts of its association agreement with Israel as a result of human rights violations in Gaza.
In Israel, prominent opposition figures, former statesmen, retired security chiefs, and 1,300 Israeli university faculty have in recent weeks voiced demands to stop the slaughter in Gaza. In April, more than 250 former members and three former leaders of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, published a rare open letter calling for the return of the hostages and an end to the war. At the end of
May, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly accused the Israeli government of committing war crimes in Gaza. And in June, just days before the Iran campaign began, more than 40 members of Israel’s military intelligence signed a letter calling the government’s actions in the war “clearly illegal.”
But despite the prominence of these critics, their voices have had negligible impact on the government’s policies. Earlier in June, dissent within in Netanyahu’s governing coalition nearly brought down the government, but the disagreement was not about his management of the war but over a long-standing controversy about exemption from military service for ultra-orthodox youths. Netanyahu’s coalition is, ironically, strengthened by reliance on extremist parties that have nothing to gain from its fall. It may yet become one of the few governments in Israeli history to serve out its full term, which ends in the fall of 2026. Any significant pressure on Israeli policy, therefore, will likely have to come from other quarters.
Casualties have been concentrated in areas that Israel wants civilians to leave.
One faint hope is that strong pressure from the United States could persuade Netanyahu to wind down the fighting before its worst outcomes are realized. In recent weeks, President Trump has expressed growing displeasure at the war. In May, he said that “a lot of people are starving in Gaza,” and in a phone call with Netanyahu in early June, he told the Israeli leader that he must bring the war to a permanent end, according to the Times of Israel. Some daylight has begun to emerge between Jerusalem and Washington on Gaza as well as on other issues, including the Houthis in Yemen, the new government in Syria, and even to some extent on Iran, notwithstanding the U.S. intervention. Despite ordering American bombers to strike the Fordow enrichment facility and two other nuclear sites on June 21, Trump abruptly imposed a ceasefire and criticized both sides for breaking it, indicating he has no interest in achieving broader Israeli aims. But it is far from clear whether the U.S. administration is prepared to back tough words on Gaza with actions.
If the Trump administration truly wanted to end the Gaza war, it could simply declare that Netanyahu’s strategy of “negotiating under fire” — that is, starving and bombing the population of Gaza — has failed. Instead, it could insist on a return to the previous cease-fire formula, negotiated with intense U.S. involvement by both the Biden and Trump administrations over many months, which led to the January-March truce. That formula was not a silver bullet and left many crucial issues, including the nature of a future Palestinian leadership, still to be negotiated. But during the brief pause in fighting, it brought freedom for 33 Israeli hostages and an urgent reprieve to Gaza’s immiserated people. It also began to focus high-level regional and international attention on pragmatic, equitable approaches for Gaza’s “day after.” Arab states stepped up to propose a plan for rebuilding and administering, with their support, a post-Hamas Gaza. Hamas itself had indicated that it was prepared to relinquish its role in a future government, and Western diplomats were beginning to explore ways to disarm the group and neutralize its threat to Israeli security.
Absent extraordinary U.S. pressure on Netanyahu, the chances of getting back on this track look slim. Netanyahu’s pugnacious rhetoric, his growing reliance on the war and on his hard-right allies for his political survival, and the IDF’s conduct on the ground all suggest a preference for fighting on. And so Israel’s war plans appear likely to go ahead. They may prove successful, to a degree. It is possible that at least some of the surviving hostages will be retrieved in a blaze of gunfire, that more Hamas fighters will be killed, that the Israeli army will assert full control, and that the exhausted, traumatized people of Gaza will be persuaded in large numbers to leave. Netanyahu may be able to declare victory.
But the cost of all this could be appalling. Many more people in Gaza would die, and possibly also many more Israelis. As the IDF is forced to switch from a high-tech fight at stand-off distance — as the war has mostly been so far — to close urban combat in the Stalingrad-scape of Gaza’s ruins, Israeli casualty numbers are sure to soar. Meanwhile, the enclave’s 2.2 million survivors will be crammed in camps under Israeli guard, dependent entirely on highly restricted Israeli food handouts. Having pushed out international institutions, established humanitarian aid organizations, and all remnants of Palestinian civil society, the Israeli government may soon find that the fate of this huge population will rest squarely on its own shoulders.
