Israel’s reluctance to fill the current leadership vacuum in northern Gaza was the backdrop to the chaos that left dozens of Palestinians dead on Thursday in the Gaza Strip, analysts and aid workers said.
More than 100 were killed and 700 wounded, health officials in Gaza said, after thousands of hungry civilians rushed a convoy of aid trucks, leading to a riot and prompting Israeli soldiers to fire into the crowd.
The immediate causes of the chaos were extreme hunger and desperation: The United Nations has warned of impending famine in northern Gaza, where the incident occurred. Attempts by civilians to ambush aid trucks, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of war-damaged roads have made it extremely difficult for food to reach the roughly 300,000 civilians still trapped in the area, leading the U.S. and others to drop help from the air. .
But analysts say that dynamic has been exacerbated by Israel’s failure to set in motion a plan for how to govern the north.
While southern Gaza remains an active conflict zone, fighting has largely subsided in the northern part of the enclave. The Israeli army defeated the bulk of Hamas fighting forces there in early January, prompting Israeli troops to withdraw from parts of the north.
Now, these areas lack a central body to coordinate service delivery, enforce law and order and protect aid trucks. To prevent Hamas from rebuilding, Israel prevented police from the pre-war Hamas government from escorting the trucks. But Israel has also delayed the creation of any alternative Palestinian law enforcement.
Aid groups have a limited presence, with the United Nations still evaluating how to increase its activities there. And Israel has said it will maintain military control of the territory indefinitely, without specifying exactly what that will mean on a day-to-day basis.
“This tragic event reflects Israel’s lack of a long-term, realistic strategy,” said Michael Milstein, an analyst and former Israeli intelligence official. “You can’t just take over Gaza City, leave, and then hope that something positive will develop there. Instead, chaos prevails.”
Since Israel invaded Gaza in October, following Hamas-led attacks that devastated southern Israel earlier that month, Israeli politicians have debated and argued over how Gaza should be governed once the war ends, a period they describe as “the next day. “
In northern Gaza, that moment has essentially already arrived.
When U.N. officials toured the area last week to assess the damage there, they did not coordinate their visit with Hamas because it no longer exerts widespread influence in the north, according to Scott Anderson, deputy Gaza director for UNRWA. the UN’s main aid agency. in Gaza.
Reports have emerged of some Hamas members trying to restore order in some neighborhoods. But apart from limited services at several hospitals, Mr Anderson said he saw no sign of civil servants or council workers. Unimaginable garbage and sewage littered the streets, he said.
“The leadership in Gaza is underground, literally or figuratively, and there is no structure to fill that void,” Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview from Gaza. “This creates a prevailing aura of despair and fear,” which makes events like Thursday’s disaster more likely, he said, adding, “It’s very frustrating and difficult to coordinate things when there’s no one to coordinate with.”
Videos have emerged of armed groups attacking convoys, and diplomats say criminal gangs are beginning to fill the void left by Hamas’ absence.
Without any plan, “the vacuum will be filled by chaos and illegal gangs and criminals,” said Ahmed Fouad Khatib, a Gaza-raised American commentator on Gaza affairs, “or by Hamas, which will manage to re-emerge . and try to reconstruct.”
Power gaps are inevitable after most wars. But critics of the Israeli government say the impasse in northern Gaza is worse than it could be because Israeli leaders don’t agree on what happens next.
The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, released a plan in late February that suggested “the management of political affairs and the enforcement of public order will rely on local stakeholders with managerial experience.” But beyond saying these administrators could not be linked to “countries or entities that support terrorism”, Mr Netanyahu did not elaborate.
His plan was so vague that it was interpreted as an attempt to postpone an impending decision on whether to prioritize the goals of his domestic political base or those of Israel’s strongest foreign ally, the United States.
Vocal parts of Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing base are aggressively pushing for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza, nearly two decades after Israel removed them. Such a plan would require long-term Israeli control of the territory, making it impossible to restore Palestinian rule there.
Instead, the United States and other Western powers and Arab states are pushing to allow Palestinian leaders in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to govern Gaza, as part of a process to create a Palestinian state spread across both territories.
Pulled between these two contradictory paths, Mr. Netanyahu chose neither.
“He’s trying all kinds of maneuvers to keep his administration calm,” said Mr. Milstein, the former intelligence official. “Because of all the tensions and all the problematic configurations in his government, he can’t make any real dramatic decisions,” Mr Milstein added.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment for this article.
Nadav Shtrauchler, Mr Netanyahu’s former general, dismissed concerns about Mr Netanyahu’s strategy.
“If anyone thinks they don’t have a plan in their head, they’re wrong: they do,” Mr. Shtrauchler said. “I think he has two plans. But I’m not sure which one he’ll choose in the end and I’m not sure he knows.”
For now, Mr. Netanyahu is using the ambiguity to postpone inevitable confrontations with both his right-wing coalition allies and the United States for as long as possible, Mr. Shtrauchler and other analysts said.
Israeli officials have spoken of empowering tribes in different enclaves of Gaza to keep the peace in their immediate neighborhoods and protect aid supplies. But the plan is unproven and enforced — and foreign diplomats are skeptical about its effectiveness.
Some Palestinian and foreign leaders say many thousands of former police officers from the Palestinian Authority, the body that ran Gaza until it was ousted by Hamas in 2007, could be retrained to fill the void. Others suggest that Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan could send a peacekeeping force to support the authority’s police officers.
Meanwhile, “Palestinians who stayed in northern Gaza are starving,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor from Gaza City. “And basically, they’re trying to find food in any way possible.”
