Israel, which has promised to eradicate Hamas, and its ally in the US are working on the post-war Gaza Strip, with Washington conjuring up a return of the Palestinian Authority, for which the idea of retaking a devastated territory is raised in the wake of Israel’s tanks being a real deterrent .
American Secretary of State Antony Blinken estimated in late October that President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority would regain control of the Gaza Strip after the end of the war and that international third parties could also play a role in the meantime.
Currently, the Palestinian Authority exercises limited power in the West Bank. She was expelled from Gaza by Hamas in 2007.
But Mr. Abbas rejected this during a Nov. 5 interview with Mr. Blinken in Ramallah, making a Palestinian Authority return to Gaza conditional on a “comprehensive” settlement that also includes Israel’s other occupied territories: the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem .
The head of American diplomacy proposed this scenario again a few days later, expressing the desire to “unify” the Gaza Strip with the West Bank after the war.
“On a tank”
The Israeli army has been shelling the Gaza Strip for more than a month to “destroy” Hamas, which is in power in Gaza, in retaliation for an unprecedented bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israeli soil on October 7.
On the Israeli side, the war has claimed around 1,200 lives, most of them civilians killed on the day of the Hamas attack, according to a new official figure revised downward by authorities on Friday.
According to the Hamas Health Ministry, Israeli bombings in Gaza have claimed more than 11,000 lives, mostly civilians. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people and turned entire parts of the small Palestinian territory into fields of rubble.
“I do not believe that any actor will agree to govern Gaza under these circumstances. No Palestinian, no sensible person will agree to return to Gaza with an American or Israeli tank,” said Hassan Khreicha, former number two in the dissolved Palestinian Authority parliament.
In a recent memo, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said there was little hope that the already deeply unpopular Palestinian Authority could return to Gaza after an Israeli invasion and not be “treated like an enemy.”
A senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdane, reiterated on November 6 that his movement would not accept “a Vichy government” in the area, a reference to the French collaborationist regime under Nazi occupation during World War II.
“Our people will not allow the United States to impose its plans to create a government that suits them and the occupation (Israel),” he added.
“Post-Palestine”
For the movement’s number two, Saleh Arouri, “those who speak to the Palestinian Authority and leaders of the post-Hamas region are waging a psychological war.”
“To talk about post-Hamas is to talk about post-Palestine,” he claimed.
On Friday it was the turn of Islamic Jihad, an influential armed group that operates in the shadow of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, rejecting any future takeover there.
“If an international force were deployed to rule Gaza on behalf of the occupier, it would be considered an occupying force and would be opposed by the Palestinian people,” said the group’s number two, Mohammad al-Hindi from Beirut.
“After all these massacres, how could the Palestinian Authority return with an Israeli tank to rule the Gaza Strip? Who will rebuild all the destroyed cities? Even a new Marshall Plan will not be enough,” he added, referring to the American plan launched after World War II to rebuild Europe.
Jamal Al-Fadi, a professor of international relations at the University of Gaza, believes that even if the Palestinian Authority were to turn around and agree to regain control of Gaza, it would not do so without agreement, even tacit, from Hamas .
“The Palestinian Authority wants a solution that Hamas would participate in or at least agree to. Without this there would be a risk of a new civil war,” he told AFP.
For Majed al-Arouri, a well-known civil society figure in Ramallah, all of the scenarios mentioned currently remain plans for the future, with no foreseeable outcome of the war.
“We all know how the war started, but no one knows how or in what territory it will end,” said Mr. Arouri, who runs an NGO for judicial independence.