Occupation Crimes

For the twelfth consecutive month, the Zionist entity has been waging a furious war on the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, killing more than 41,000 Palestinians, wounding more than 150,000, and destroying 80% of the homes, houses, and infrastructure in Gaza. It has not left a place in Gaza that Zionist tanks have not entered, and warplanes have not bombed. It is continuing without stopping, while its declared goals for the end of the war, which are to eliminate Hamas and return the kidnapped, have not been achieved despite the military force it used and the American and European support accompanied by the green light to practice genocide against civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.

Partial Occupation

This war that Netanyahu seeks to prolong for the sake of personal reconciliation, and for fear of the collapse of his far-right coalition supported by Smotrich and Ben Gvir, who encourage the continuation of the war of extermination and the army's presence in Gaza and its military occupation, to achieve their dream of re-settling Gaza and turning it into a safe security zone for the Zionist army in which it carries out its operations and continuous raids as is happening in the West Bank, and seeking to displace its residents or establish a buffer zone in the north and control the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah Crossing in the south and the Netzarim Corridor in the center so that everything entering the Gaza Strip is subject to Zionist inspection and oversight. So the Strip becomes an area surrounded by the entity state from all sides and imposes complete Zionist military and security control over it, the intention of which is for the Zionist army and security to be able to enter whenever it wants. However, it wants any spot in the Gaza Strip, to protect the security of the Zionist state.

Whoever follows the Zionist statements and analyses can see plainly that there is a Zionist intention for a certain military occupation in the Gaza Strip, but its features are not clear yet, nor is its goal, but everyone in the Zionist state confirms that it does not want Hamas to manage the civilian life of the people in the Strip, and therefore another party must take on this task.

The Cost of Complete Control

This war is different from previous wars waged by the Zionist army in Palestine and the region. This is the first time that the entity state has officially declared war in half a century, with goals that confirm the desire to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip and occupy it, and eliminate the Palestinian resistance with all its factions and wings, led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. However, this requires finding a scenario to manage the Strip after the war if the Zionist army wants to actually occupy it. Even if the occupation succeeds in doing so, its ability to remain in the Strip for a long time is questionable for the following reasons:

- The Gaza Strip has always been a problem and a burden on the entity state. The resistance factions in the Strip have not stopped carrying out attacks on it, and the Zionist army has tried all means to subjugate it. Still, it has not been able to do so, meaning that the military solution has not borne fruit. The complete siege and economic restrictions have not been effective in enabling the Zionist entity to control it.

- Gaza remained a center of resistance due to the great momentum of the resistance movements, specifically the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, even after the signing of the Oslo Accords, in which the Palestine Liberation Organization abandoned armed struggle and resistance and began to describe it as terrorism, and thus adopted the approach of peace with the entity state and established security coordination relations that did not succeed in subduing the resistance there.

- The strikes of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the war of attrition it imposed against the Zionist army in Gaza, and the operations of storming the settlements there and the operations of running over and bombing are what imposed the equation of the Zionist withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which was implemented by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and supported by Netanyahu at the time because he considered it the best solution to get out of the quagmire of Gaza and escape its hell, and thus bringing this idea back to mind will require careful consideration of all the aforementioned major challenges that the military occupation of the Gaza Strip will impose once again, and repeating the previous scenario.

- The escalation of the internal Zionist crisis, in addition to the worst thing about it is the loss of a clear vision among the decision-makers in the entity state regarding the best way to deal with the Gaza Strip, as there is no practical and realistic vision regarding the day after the war, and there is no vision that can be imposed to subdue the resistance or prevent Hamas from controlling the Strip and disarming it, nor to provide security for the Gaza envelope areas.

- The exhaustion that the Zionist army is suffering from gives an indication of the extent of the turmoil and confusion that the Zionist political and military establishment is suffering from, a situation accompanied by a disastrous failure in the longest war that the army has fought in its history, so how about a long-term occupation and the army remaining in Gaza in the face of a war of attrition imposed by the resistance in Gaza.

- The large economic cost and the huge sums that the entity state will bear if the occupation of Gaza continues, which will force it to manage the Gaza Strip economically and rebuild it since it does not accept the return of the Palestinian Authority to play its role there.

Serious Repercussions

Therefore, the entity state will seek at this stage to continue its war and control the northern Gaza Strip, up to the Netzarim axis, and displace its residents to the center of the Strip and re-establish Jewish settlement there and annex it, without the need to officially announce this to avoid international opposition, control and economic cost and restore the army's control over humanitarian aid, medicine and food instead of international organizations, and through this control people's lives, and expel the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which it sees as an anti-Zionist project.

In such a situation, with the continuation of the war, killing, destruction, and displacement, Netanyahu and his partners assume that after another winter in tents without basic services or the minimum requirements for human life, two million Palestinians crowded in Rafah, Khan Yunis, and Al-Mawasi will realize that they will not be able to return to their destroyed homes, and it is assumed that despair will incite them against the resistance in Gaza and the rule of "Hamas", and push them to revolt against it or voluntarily emigrate outside the Strip.

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Iyad Al-Qatrawi

Palestinian Professor of Political Science