What Comes After Hamas?

Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip is ramping up. After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas spilled out of Gaza to stage a brutal attack on Israel on October 7, the enclave is now under siege. Israel has cut off the delivery of electricity, water, fuel, and food. Israeli warnings have led hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza to flee their homes, and Israeli bombs have killed thousands already. And all this ahead of a much-anticipated ground invasion that will likely lead to significant casualties on both sides. Some analysts, such as Marc Lynch in Foreign Affairs and Hussein Ibish in The New York Times, have argued that “invading Gaza will be a disaster” and that Israel “will be walking into a trap.” They could well be right. Military operations in urban terrain are notoriously difficult and deadly. And Hamas, as a social movement and not just a militant outfit, will be impossible to fully uproot.

But Israel may yet achieve its maximalist war aim of destroying Hamas’s leadership and military capacity. The Israel Defense Forces has now deployed 350,000 reservists and 170,000 active-duty personnel. Although the bulk of these forces will be allocated to the northern front facing Lebanon and the militant group Hezbollah, there will be plenty of soldiers left for operations in Gaza. Meanwhile, Hamas can deploy at best 15,000 fighters. The IDF has complete control over Gaza’s airspace, coastline, and land border. In order to smash Hamas, the Israeli public is prepared to tolerate high casualties in addition to the significant losses it has already incurred. And Israel has the support of essential outside players, not least the United States. It is hard to envisage more favorable conditions for the difficult campaign Israel is contemplating.

This raises a major question: What happens if Israel does manage to defeat Hamas? Although the Biden administration views a ground offensive and the blockade of Gaza as a risk to regional stability—and worries about an unfolding humanitarian disaster—the United States’ ability to alter Israel’s course at this point is limited. Israel might have narrowed its own options if it is shown to be responsible for the October 17 bombing of al Ahli Arab hospital in northern Gaza that killed hundreds. But if the planned Israeli assault is a fait accompli, the United States and its partners must start to think carefully about a range of scenarios, including a Gaza without Hamas.

The incapacitation of the militant group will be bloody, but Hamas’s removal could provide a fleeting opportunity to bring about a new dispensation in Gaza that is better than what came before it. Whether it will have been worth the human suffering will be debated after the war. But if Israel defeats Hamas, the United States should work with regional and international powers to find a way to transfer Israeli control of Gaza to the temporary stewardship of the United Nations, backed by the strong mandate of a UN Security Council resolution. This UN mission would then help return Gaza to Palestinian control. Unless the ultimate objective is revival of the Palestinian Authority and its control of Gaza, Arab countries will be reluctant to participate in such a day-after plan. It will still be a hard sell in Israel, where distrust of the UN runs deep. But such a process would not just spare Palestinians in Gaza the prospect of an indefinite Israeli occupation and repeated rounds of destructive skirmishes—or even wars—with Israel, it would also, by restoring Palestinian Authority administration in Gaza, preserve the possibility of a two-state solution that now appears so unattainable.

REGIME LIQUIDATION

The opportunity to establish a better arrangement in Gaza would in large part be a function of the defeat of Hamas. But other developments may make such an outcome more likely. Israel is now ruled by a new emergency coalition government that includes centrists, who in the past have endorsed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and feature two former IDF chiefs of staff, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. The Israeli war cabinet reflects a diversity of views that can help serve as a counterweight to the extreme right, which moved to the foreground of Israeli politics after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a new government late last year.  

The Biden administration’s new eagerness to reassert a U.S. role in the Middle East—beyond its fitful attempts to constrain Iran’s nuclear program—will also help. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in particular, wants to demonstrate the utility of diplomacy as an instrument of policy and the current crisis is tailor-made for this goal. He is currently shuttling among regional capitals. Although the war in Gaza has scotched the mooted normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia as facilitated by the United States, the negotiating process has opened lines of communication that make the coordination of policies among the three countries regarding the future of Gaza a real possibility.

Israeli forces now face a potentially long and grinding campaign in the territory. The outcome of this campaign remains uncertain. Hamas fighters know this dense urban landscape, riddled with tunnels and potential booby traps, better than their IDF opponents. External forces, including Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, may launch attacks on Israel in the hope of complicating any Israeli advance in Gaza. But the preponderance of strength remains with Israel. Buoyed by the support of its superpower backer, the United States, Israel may well succeed in its goal of flushing out Hamas’s leadership and destroying the group’s ability to rule Gaza. Much will then depend on who controls the ground after Israel withdraws.

AFTER HAMAS

Israel’s answer to this question is not clear. Its postwar plan seems to involve a tight blockade of Gaza that sharply restricts imports, rigid controls on the movement of people across the boundary between Israel and Gaza, and a system of opportunistic raids and airstrikes launched from Israel on targets within Gaza when deemed necessary by emerging intelligence information. Control of Gaza would presumably devolve to warlords or a Hamas successor organization that can rule over the rubble but be unable to kill Israelis. Such an arrangement may not prove especially durable. After all, Hamas acquired an arsenal and constructed a sprawling network of tunnels despite stringent Israeli controls and the close surveillance of Gaza. It is hard—perhaps impossible—to seal off Gaza in a long-term, impermeable way. Israel would make itself a jail warden, presiding indefinitely over an immense prison camp (to which Gaza has long been compared). For Israel, and for the Palestinians in Gaza, handing off control to a third party would be the better course of action. Otherwise, the situation will eventually revert to a grimmer version of the status quo ante, only with many more people dead on both sides and Gaza’s vital infrastructure pulverized.

There is at least one alternative to this bleak forecast. The United States could lead a contact group, a clutch of neighboring states and selected outside powers, namely Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the EU, the UN, and the Palestinian Authority. The group would develop a plan to transfer control of Gaza from Israel to the UN once combat operations have ceased. This would be an enormous undertaking for the UN, whose institutional capacity is already strained, encumbered by a rigid and complicated bureaucracy. Setting these defects aside, the key step at this stage would be the securing of a UN mandate in the form of a Security Council resolution authorizing member states to organize a transitional administration for Gaza, maintain civil order and public services in coordination with Israel, and develop a plan for elections in the West Bank and Gaza. China and Russia, veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, may stymie such a resolution. But ensuring that the request for a mission came from, say, Egypt and was endorsed by the Palestinian Authority (an observer state at the UN) might make it easier for China and Russia to abstain in a Security Council vote or even to support the endeavor.

What happens if Israel does manage to defeat Hamas?

There are precedents: a 1999 Security Council resolution placed Kosovo under temporary UN administration, mandating two entities—the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, which served as a transitional administration, and the Kosovo Force, which was a NATO force carrying out the instructions of the Security Council. Moreover, a UN mandate does not dictate the requirement for a UN mission. Here, the precedent of a 2023 Security Council resolution authorizing a Kenyan peacekeeping force in Haiti permits a non-UN mission to draw, on a reimbursable basis, from UN supply stocks. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe had such an authority for its monitoring mission in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022 and the African Union for its forces in Somalia from 2007 to 2022. This procedure gives the organizers of the mission, such as the contact group, free rein to build the best team possible. And because the mission may not be a UN one, skeptical Israelis may be reassured of its utility. 

If the Security Council were to approve a resolution that mandates a transitional arrangement in Gaza, the subsequent mission would have to be appropriately sized, structured, and defined. Since time would be of the essence, the contact group, in coordination with UN agencies, would have to identify and recruit donor states and equip and deploy the peacekeeping and “protection of civilians” units. Essential equipment, such as vehicles and computers, would be drawn from UN stocks. The mission’s rules of engagement would have to permit firing in self-defense, and the peacekeepers’ primary function would be policing. The force itself would have to comprise troops from Arab states, in part to minimize language barriers but also to reinforce the notion that the mission is led by Arabs. Applying the rule of thumb of five peacekeepers per 1,000 civilians, the force would have to be sizable—10,000 troops or more. The UN mission headquarters would liaise with Israeli authorities, UN headquarters, and the contact group. 

The interim UN-backed administration would bear some resemblance to the UN governance mission in Kosovo, where the UN has managed relative success in a fragile environment, and to the UN mission in Libya, where it backs one of two rival governments. There is no shortage of UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations capable of organizing elections. With the election of a new president and a new Palestinian legislative body, the UN mission would shift from its Kosovo-like role to one more like the UN mission in Libya, where the international organization supports an elected government. The UN mission would require a powerful head, someone capable of standing up to both Israelis and Palestinians who could deal with senior officials from outside powers—somebody like Sigrid Kaag, the deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who previously served as a high-ranking UN official and envoy in Syria and Lebanon.

THE RESTORATION

The political aim here would be to revive a moribund Palestinian Authority that lost its control over Gaza in 2006, the last time elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were held. The current president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected in 2005. Despite the suspicion and doubt with which many Palestinians regard Abbas and the PA, Arab states will not cooperate with any attempt to reset the administration of Gaza without a role for the body. Nor will the major powers of the global South—with the possible exception of India, which has grown closer to Israel in recent years—approve of such a plan if control of the territory did not return in some form to Palestinians. Indeed, many Arab states as well as those in the global South might demand more than elections and the reassertion of PA control over the territory; they might demand that Israel make territorial concessions and halt settlement construction in the West Bank. Without securing gains on the ground, a restored PA in Gaza will lack credibility and appear like a mere puppet regime. Israel may balk at the prospect of making such concessions, but the centrist members of the unity government might help tip the balance.

None of these measures will matter without swift action to rebuild a devastated Gaza. This is where Saudi Arabia becomes critical to the success of the transfer of Gaza from Israeli control to the UN and the subsequent consolidation of the Palestinian Authority’s hold over both the West Bank and Gaza. The cost of reconstruction will be substantial. Public infrastructure—including hospitals, schools, roads, electrical substations, water pipes, sanitation systems, and government offices—will probably be in ruins. To clear the rubble alone will take time and money. The United States will certainly try to be a generous contributor and, with Israeli cooperation and a functioning House of Representatives, Congress will appropriate the necessary funds. Saudi Arabia, however, not only has the funds to make a difference, but its participation will also lend the enterprise the kind of regional legitimacy that will strengthen the Palestinian Authority.

Many hurdles stand in the way of such an arrangement coming to pass. China and Russia may choose to obstruct the passing of the necessary resolution at the Security Council. Arab states may be unwilling to join what many of their citizens see as an occupying force in the strip. And Israel may refuse to make concessions to the Palestinians in the wake of Hamas’s attacks and an Israeli military victory. But one purpose of diplomacy is to probe intentions and spur the consideration of a wider range of options in a contingency. This is what the moment requires. The alternative is Gaza as an eternal dystopia, with violence metastasizing around the broader region, and states less able to deal with all manner of social and environmental disarray—in other words, a Middle East transformed, but not quite as Washington envisaged it.