- Israel says the buffer zone is part of a broader plan for Gaza
- According to sources, Israel sent plans to Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates
- Saudi Arabia, which has no relations with Israel, is also informed, it is said
- Arabs and US reject any move that reduces Palestinian land
DUBAI/CAIRO/LONDON, Dec 1 (Portal) – Israel has informed several Arab states that it wants to establish a buffer zone on the Palestinian side of the Gaza border to prevent future attacks as part of proposals for the post-war enclave Egypt and regional sources said.
According to three regional sources, Israel’s plans referred to its neighbors Egypt and Jordan, as well as the United Arab Emirates, which normalized relations with Israel in 2020.
They also said Saudi Arabia, which has no ties with Israel and halted a U.S.-brokered normalization process after the Gaza war broke out on Oct. 7, had been informed. The sources did not say how the information reached Riyadh, which officially has no direct communication channels with Israel. According to the sources, non-Arab Turkey was also informed.
The initiative does not indicate an early end to the Israeli offensive, which resumed on Friday after a seven-day ceasefire. However, it shows that Israel is moving beyond established Arab mediators such as Egypt or Qatar in Gaza in its attempt to shape a post-war period.
No Arab states have shown any willingness to monitor or administer Gaza in the future, and most have strongly condemned Israel’s offensive, which has killed more than 15,000 people and leveled large swaths of Gaza’s urban areas. In its Oct. 7 attack, Hamas killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages.
“Israel wants this buffer zone between Gaza and Israel from the north to the south to prevent Hamas or other militants from infiltrating or attacking Israel,” said a senior regional security official, one of three regional sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jordanian officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
A UAE official did not respond directly to a question about whether Abu Dhabi had been informed about the buffer zone, but said: “The UAE will support any future post-war arrangements agreed to by all parties concerned” to achieve stability and a Palestinian state .
Asked about plans for a buffer zone, Ophir Falk, foreign policy adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Portal: “The plan is more detailed. It is based on a three-step process for the day after Hamas.”
Outlining the Israeli government’s position, he said the three stages included the destruction of Hamas, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and the de-radicalization of the enclave.
“A buffer zone could be part of the demilitarization process,” he said. He declined to provide details when asked whether these plans had been discussed with international partners
Arabic states.
Arab states have dismissed Israel’s goal of wiping out Hamas as impossible, saying it is more than just a militant force that can be defeated.
EXPRESS PALESTINIANS
Israel has indicated in the past that it is considering a buffer zone within the Gaza Strip, but the sources said it will now present it to Arab states as part of its future security plans for Gaza. In 2005, Israeli troops withdrew from the enclave.
A U.S. official, who did not want to be named, said Israel had “floated” the idea of a buffer zone, without saying to whom. However, the official also reiterated Washington’s opposition to any plan that reduces the size of Palestinian territory.
Jordan, Egypt and other Arab states have expressed fears that Israel is seeking to push Palestinians out of Gaza, repeating the land dispossession suffered by Palestinians when Israel was founded in 1948. The Israeli government denies such a goal.
A senior Israeli security source said the idea of a buffer zone was “being examined,” adding: “At the moment it is not clear how deep it will be and whether it could be 1 km or 2 km or hundreds of meters (within the Gaza Strip). “”
Any intervention in Gaza, which is about 40 km (25 miles) long and between about 5 km (3 miles) and 12 km (7.5 miles) wide, would push its 2.3 million people into an even smaller area.
In Washington, an Israeli official said the Israeli Defense Ministry was talking about “some kind of security buffer on the Gaza side of the border so that Hamas cannot gather military capabilities near the border and surprise Israel again.”
“It is a security measure, not a political one,” the official said on condition of anonymity. “We have no plans to stay on the Gaza side of the border.”
So far, Egypt, the first Arab state to sign a peace agreement with Israel, and Qatar, which has no formal relations but keeps communication channels open, have been at the center of mediation talks with Israel that have involved exchanging hostages from Hamas for Palestinians Israeli prisons.
SHIFTING FOCUS
Two Egyptian security sources said Israel had raised the idea of disarming the northern Gaza Strip and establishing a buffer zone in the northern Gaza Strip under international supervision in mediation talks with Egypt and Qatar.
According to the sources, several Arab states rejected this. While Arab states may not object to erecting a security barrier between the two sides, there is disagreement over where it will be erected, they added.
The Egyptian sources said Israel said at a meeting in Cairo in November that Hamas leaders should be tried internationally in return for a full ceasefire. The mediators said the matter should be postponed until after the war to avoid a breakdown in talks on the release of hostages, the sources said.
A source in the Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment on the reports, adding: “Netanyahu’s war cabinet has defined the war missions: destroy Hamas and bring all the hostages home, and we will continue until we complete our missions.”
One of the Egyptian sources said Israel had shifted in its talks with Egypt and Qatar from a focus on retaliation early in the crisis to a greater willingness to “reconsider its demands as mediation continued.”
The regional sources compared the Gaza buffer zone plan to the “safe zone” Israel once had in southern Lebanon. Israel evacuated this roughly 15 km (10 mile) deep zone in 2000 after years of fighting and attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
They also said Israel’s plan for postwar Gaza included deporting Hamas leaders, an action that would also mirror Israel’s campaign in Lebanon in the 1980s when it expelled the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which Attacks from Lebanon had launched Lebanon to Israel.
“Israel is willing to pay a high price to completely expel Hamas from Gaza to other countries in the region, similar to what it did in Lebanon, but it is not the same. Getting rid of Hamas is difficult and not safe,” said another of the regional officials familiar with the discussions.
A senior Israeli official said Israel does not view Hamas as anything like the PLO and does not believe it would behave like the PLO.
Former Gaza security chief Mohammad Dahlan of the Palestinian Fatah faction, which was forced out of the enclave when Hamas took control in 2007, said Israel’s buffer zone plan was unrealistic and would not protect Israeli forces.
“The buffer zone could make (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s forces a target in the zone as well,” he said.
Reporting by Samia Nakhoul in Dubai, Ahmed Mohamed Hassan in Cairo and Jonathan Saul in London; Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem, Aidan Lewis in London and Humeyra Pamuk, Steve Holland and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Diane Craft
Our standards: The Thomson Portal Trust Principles.
Acquire license rights, opens new tab