Israel has set as its goal the destruction of the Islamic organization Hamas (if one can understand the destruction of an organization with a decentralized structure of leadership, organization, financing and geographical spread outside the borders of the Gaza Strip). However, the scenarios of the Israeli leadership, which dreams of severing all relations with the Palestinian enclave, for the future of the Gaza Strip are nebulous and undefined.

“One thing is clear. Gaza will no longer be run by Hamas when this war is overy”, assures the Israeli government spokesman Eilon Levi, while the Israeli army declares that it is accelerating preparations for a ground attack.

One is the constant in all the scenarios that Israel has announced in response to the October 7 attacks. “Elimination of Hamas”, the Palestinian organization who assumed command of the Palestinian enclave in 2007, two years after the Israeli army withdrew from Gaza and after the intra-Palestinian civil war that ended with the ousting of Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbass from the narrow strip of land of 362 square kilometers where 2.4 million Palestinians live crammed.

Israel, which controls the de facto borders of Gaza, is considered by the international community to be responsible for meeting the enclave’s basic needs.

New reality

The population of Gaza, 80% of which already has refugee statushas been living for 16 days under the state of incessant Israeli bombardment, which has caused the death of 4,600 people and he fears that at the end of this war he will be forced to leave the enclave, possibly to Egyptian territory, knowing a new Nakba (catastrophe), as with the exodus of 1948.

Israel has not clarified what will happen in the Gaza Strip if it achieves the goal of “eliminating Hamas.”

“We are discussing various possibilities with our partners,” says the Israeli government spokesman.

In 16 years, the Israeli government has never set the goal of “eliminating Hamas”, despite repeated wars in Gaza.

The only thing that is certain is that Israel never once invoked the possibility of a new military occupation and even more of a political occupation of the enclave.

And no one foresees that Israel will itself bear the responsibility, the financial cost and the risk of re-establishing Israeli control over a population of 2.4 million Palestinians.

Instead, Israel trumpets that its ultimate goal is “the end of Israel’s responsibility for the fate of the Gaza Strip and the establishment of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel“, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Galand said for the first time in the Knesset on Friday.

Israel would like to “hand over the keys” of the Gaza Strip to a “third party”, which could be Egypt. However, there is no indication that Cairo would accept such a scenario, which it has rejected for decades, an unnamed Israeli Foreign Ministry source told AFP. Nor is it considered at all likely that any other Arab or Muslim government would accept such a role.

Another scenario, this one promoted by the leader of the Israeli opposition Yair Lapid, is the handover of the governance of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, with which Israel cooperates in the management of the West Bank.

“But there is no hope that the Palestinian Authority, already extremely unpopular and weakened, can return to Gaza after an Israeli invasion and not be treated as an enemy”, according to Crisis Group experts.

The Americans babysit the war council

Another scenario that can be put on the table, the establishment of a hybrid scheme of international guardianship.

“The version that Israelis and Americans would prefer would be an international scheme together with the Palestinian Authority and with, for example, Saudi resources, with American or European administrative assistance,” according to Eitan Samir, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. But he believes that “basically what the Americans decide will happen in Gaza.”

After the October 7 massacres in southern Israel, “the Americans have entered our war council and you can say that they are overseeing the operations, that is, they are babysitting the council,” says Eitan Shamir.

But in the face of the absence of plans for the future of Gaza after the much-publicized invasion, Joe Biden asks Israel to think carefully about what to do next.

“There are various ideas about what could happen next, but all of this will have to be sorted out even as Israel faces the current threat,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken insisted.