by Gideon Levy 30 May 2026 Haaretz Opinion
A Palestinian boy sits at the site of an overnight Israeli military strike on structures and tents housing displaced families, killing ten Palestinians, in Gaza City, Thursday. Credit: AFP/OMAR AL-QATTAA
Israel does have a postwar plan for Gaza. The notion that it lacked one was badly mistaken. I wish this plan didn't exist. Far from global and Israeli public attention, the implementation of the next phase of Israel's gradual strategy is already well underway.
Now that the genocide has run its course and the Strip has been destroyed almost completely, Israel is advancing confidently toward the next phase of the plan: making the entire population of Gaza permanently disabled, injured, sick, hungry, homeless and unemployed.
Once Gaza's population is reduced to a disparate mass without an organized society, without basic services, essential institutions and, of course, without leadership, the complete disintegration of the social fabric will make it easier for Israel to move to the next phase, which it has never relinquished, the phase of expulsion. Only then will the Gaza problem be finally resolved.
A clear echo of this plan could be heard last week in statements by its two architects and executors: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his "directive" is to expand to 70 percent, from 60 percent, the area of the Strip controlled by Israel.
Defense Minister Israel Katz wrote on X, "We pledged that Hamas will not rule Gaza civilly or militarily, and so it shall be. The voluntary migration plan will also be implemented, all at the proper time and in the proper manner." In other words, the Gazans will be turned into a "herd" that will be easy to transport far away "at the proper time and in the proper manner." After all, order must be maintained.
The "eradication of the Hamas regime" in Gaza isn't aimed at this objective alone. Since Israel has categorically opposed Gaza's governance by any Palestinian body – not the Palestinian Authority, not an international organization, not anything, and is also not willing to govern the Strip itself – the cat is out of the bag: Israel doesn't want any organization to govern in Gaza. It wants 2 million people in tents. It will make their expulsion easier.
A Palestinian man carries a toddler amid makeshift shelters in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, May.Credit: AFP/BASHAR TALEB
When Katz says that Hamas will not rule the Strip civilly, he knows very well that there is no one to govern Gaza except for Hamas, nor will there be, at least not in the foreseeable future. The only alternative to Hamas' civilian rule at the moment is anarchy. That chaos is good for Israel and the realization of its plan.
Israeli propaganda can continue to scream that Gaza equals Hamas and that Hamas equals terrorists. That's a lie, of course. Not only is everyone in Gaza not Hamas, but not everyone defined as Hamas is a terrorist. Israel knows full well that tens of thousands of teachers, doctors, police officers and government officials whose salaries come from the Hamas government aren't terrorists. Defining them as such allowed Israel to kill thousands of them, under the label of "terrorists." Traffic cops, accountants and teachers aren't terrorists and cannot be marked for death. Their killing was, and is, a war crime. So, too, journalists carrying Hamas-issued press cards are not terrorists. They might be propagandists, as are many Israeli journalists, but they are not terrorists.
Israel killed two birds with one stone: legitimacy, albeit false, for indiscriminate killing, alongside an additional stage in the realization of its grand plan. No society can function without teachers, doctors, social workers, engineers and clerks, and without a functioning society, it's easy to expel Gaza's residents to the four corners of the earth.
On Thursday the latest episode of "The Tucker Carlson Show" aired, featuring a two-hour interview with Dr. Nick Maynard, an Oxford-educated British surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza for around 17 years, on and off. The atrocities that he described having witnessed were jaw-dropping: corpses in handcuffs, teenage boys who were brought in for surgery after having been shot in the testicles, babies who died of starvation and preemies left in incubators, on IDF orders, when a hospital was evacuated, and found dead a few weeks later.
Every Israeli, every human being in the world must see or hear this interview. There was one goal to all these atrocities: Israel's "solution" to the problem called Gaza.
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