Israel’s reluctance to fill the current leadership vacuum in northern Gaza has been the backdrop to the unrest that led to the deaths Thursday of dozens of Palestinians along the Gaza Strip, analysts and aid workers said.
More than 100 have been killed and 700 injured, Gaza health officials said, after thousands of starving civilians rushed a convoy of aid trucks, leading to a stampede and prompting Israeli soldiers to shoot the crowd.
The immediate causes of the unrest are hunger and desperation: The United Nations has warned of a looming famine in northern Gaza, where the incident took place. Civilian attempts to ambush aid trucks, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of war-torn roads have made it extremely difficult for food to reach the approximately 300,000 stranded civilians still in that region, which led the United States and others to airdrop aid. .
But analysts say this dynamic has been exacerbated by Israel’s failure to implement a plan for how to govern the north.
While southern Gaza is still an active conflict zone, fighting has largely subsided in the enclave’s north. The Israeli military defeated most of Hamas’s resistance forces there in early January, leading Israeli soldiers to withdraw from parts of the north.
Today, those areas lack a centralized body to coordinate the provision of services, enforce law and order, and protect aid trucks. To prevent Hamas from rebuilding itself, Israel prevented police officers from the Hamas-led prewar government from escorting the trucks. But Israel has also delayed the creation of any alternative Palestinian law enforcement.
Aid groups have only a limited presence, with the United Nations still assessing how to increase its operations there. And Israel says it will maintain indefinite military control over the territory, without specifying exactly what that means on a day-to-day basis.
“This tragic event reflects how Israel does not have a long-term, realistic strategy,” said Michael Milstein, an analyst and a former Israeli intelligence official. “You cannot simply occupy Gaza City, leave, and then hope that something positive will grow there. Instead, there is chaos.”
Since Israel invaded Gaza in October, following attacks led by Hamas that devastated southern Israel earlier that month, Israeli politicians have debated and disagreed about how to govern Gaza as soon as the war stops, a time they describe as “the end of the day.”
In northern Gaza, that moment has indeed arrived.
When UN officials toured the area last week to assess the damage there, they did not coordinate their visit with Hamas because it no longer has widespread influence in the north, according to Scott Anderson, the deputy Gaza director for UNRWA, the main aid agency of the UN. in Gaza.
Reports have emerged of some Hamas members trying to reassert order in some neighborhoods. But aside from limited services at some hospitals, Mr. Anderson said he saw no sign of civil servants or municipal officials. Uncollected garbage and sewage lined the streets, he said.
“The leadership in Gaza is underground, literally or figuratively, and there is no structure in place to fill the void,” Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview from Gaza. “That creates an overriding aura of desperation and fear,” making events like Thursday’s disaster more likely, he said, adding, “It’s very frustrating and difficult to coordinate things when there’s nobody to be with.”
Video has emerged of armed groups attacking convoys, and diplomats say criminal gangs are beginning to fill Hamas’ void.
Without any plan, “the vacuum will be filled with chaos and lawless gangs and criminals,” said Ahmed Fouad Khatib, an American commentator on Gaza affairs raised in Gaza, “or by Hamas, which will re-emerge and try to rebuild.”
Power vacuums are inevitable after most wars. But critics of the Israeli government say the vacuum in northern Gaza is worse than it could be because Israeli leaders disagree about what happens next.
The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, released a plan in late February that suggested “the administration of civilian affairs and the enforcement of public order will be based on local stakeholders with experience in governance.” But beyond noting that these administrators cannot be affiliated with “countries or entities that support terrorism,” Mr. Netanyahu.
His plan is so vague that it has been interpreted as an attempt to delay a pending decision about whether to prioritize the goals of his domestic political base or that of Israel’s strongest ally, the United States.
A vocal part of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing base is aggressively pushing for the re-establishment of Jewish communities 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 re-establish Palestinian rule there.
Conversely, the United States and other Western powers and Arab states are pushing Palestinian leaders in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to allow Gaza to be run, as part of a process toward the creation of a Palestinian state spread over both territories.
Between those two conflicting paths, Mr. Netanyahu neither.
“He’s trying all kinds of maneuvers to keep his government calm,” said Mr. Milstein, the former intelligence official. “Because of all the tension and all the problematic arrangements 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, a former strategist for Mr. Netanyahu, dismissed concerns about Mr. Netanyahu’s strategy.
“If someone thinks he doesn’t have a plan in mind, they’re wrong: He does,” 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 as long as possible, Mr. Shtrauchler and other analysts said.
Israeli officials have spoken of empowering clans in various pockets of Gaza to maintain peace in their neighborhoods and protect aid supplies. But the plan has not been proven and implemented – and foreign diplomats are skeptical about its effectiveness.
Some Palestinians and foreign leaders say several thousand former police from the Palestinian Authority, the body that ran Gaza until it was pushed out 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.
Meanwhile, “the Palestinians who stayed north of Gaza are dying of hunger,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor from Gaza City. “And basically, they try to find food in any way possible.”
