Israel-Hamas War: Splits Over ‘Day After’ War Divide Netanyahu’s Government

The Biden administration wants Israel to plan for “the day after,” meaning how Gaza will be governed when fighting ends, though analysts say that to keep his far-right allies from leaving his governing coalition, Mr. Netanyahu has delayed any serious domestic discussion or diplomatic effort around such a plan.

Mr. Gallant’s proposal shared on Thursday at a meeting of the Israeli security cabinet is predicated on the military defeat of Hamas. It calls for maintaining Israel’s military control of Gaza’s borders, while a “multinational task force” oversees reconstruction and economic development in the territory.

Under his plan, Gazan Palestinians who do not have ties to Hamas, which the United States and European countries have designated as a terror organization, would administer civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip, according to details of the cabinet meeting leaked to Israeli media. But there would be no role for the Palestinian Authority that runs the occupied West Bank, and there would be no resettlement of Israelis in Gaza.

Mr. Gallant’s proposal appeared to be an effort to stake out middle ground. It rules out involvement of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises authority in parts of the West Bank, in administering Gaza after the war. The Biden administration has called for the authority to play a postwar role in the territory, viewing it as a path toward a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state consisting of both Gaza and the West Bank, which many politicians on the Israeli right oppose.

But the Gallant plan also rules out resettling Gaza with Israelis, an idea that far-right Israelis espouse.

In recent days, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, have advanced the idea of encouraging Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to countries willing to grant them entry. The State Department sharply rebuked the comments, issuing a statement that criticized both by name and called their comments “inflammatory and irresponsible.”

In a Facebook post, Mr. Smotrich criticized the plan floated by Mr. Gallant, suggesting that it risked a repeat of the Hamas attacks, and reiterating his call for “voluntary emigration” of Gazans.

The Israeli news media described the meeting of the Israeli security cabinet on Thursday as stormy and said it had ended in a blowup after several ministers assailed the military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, for forming a committee of inquiry to investigate the failures that led to the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7.

General Halevi said a limited investigation would yield lessons that would be helpful in the current conflict.

On Friday, Benny Gantz, a centrist who crossed party lines to join Mr. Netanyahu’s war cabinet after Oct. 7, sharply criticized the ministers who attacked General Halevi, calling their attacks politically motivated.

“We are in the most difficult war of our history, on several fronts, and we need to form a single united fist against them,” he said. But he went on to blame Mr. Netanyahu for avoiding a serious discussion about the war’s strategy and aftermath, saying: “He has the responsibility to fix this, and to make a choice — between national unity and security, and politics.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition holds only a fragile majority, with 64 seats in the 120-seat Parliament. Mr. Gantz and other centrist rivals who joined him to form the broader emergency government have not signed onto any coalition agreements, and have indicated they would leave the government when they see fit.

With his popularity at a new low, in large part because of the security failures of Oct. 7, Mr. Netanyahu is loath to face elections anytime soon and must keep his governing coalition together in order to stay in office.

As almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been driven from their homes by Israel’s nearly three months of airstrikes and evacuation orders, Rafah, once a city of 300,000 people, has become the main refuge for those displaced. More than 1 million people are squeezed into the city, in a tiny corner of the enclave on the Egyptian border, the United Nations said this week.

People are struggling to find the materials to make even the most makeshift tents, which spread in rows across sandy ground. The misery is compounded by the spread of disease and an already overwhelmed health system, according to the United Nations. The city is not safe either: Airstrikes are pummeling all of Gaza, including areas that the Israel military has called on Gazans to flee to.

Israel launched the war after Hamas, the political and armed group that controls the territory, carried out an attack on Oct. 7 in southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.

With Rafah’s increasingly dense population, the potential death toll of a single strike is high, noted the Al Mezan Center, a Gaza-based human rights organization, on social media.

More than 160 people were killed by airstrikes across Gaza in the previous 24 hours, the Gazan Health Ministry said Friday. The death toll over three months has surpassed 20,000 people killed, many of them women and children, according to the ministry.

On Thursday, the Gazan government media office said that Israeli strikes in six locations in Rafah had killed dozens over the previous three days.

“Rafah is not safe at all; on the road I pass through every day, three rockets hit yesterday, killing 10 people,” said Ms. Abu Samra, who added that her family had been displaced seven times since the war began. “In any moment I can be killed. You don’t know whose turn is next.”

“The places that the Israelis say ‘this area is safe, go there,’ nowhere is safe,” she said.

But still more are expected to flee to Rafah. On Wednesday, the Israeli military dropped leaflets on residents of two blocks in the city of Deir el-Balah, an area that is home to 4,700 people in central Gaza, ordering them to leave for shelters, according to the United Nations. But many people have chosen to head straight to Rafah, worried that they will just have to flee again.

“The situation in Rafah is a total misery,” said Mohammed Shaath, 68, a retired engineer from the southern city of Khan Younis who has been helping a group with aid distribution in Rafah, including helping to cook hot meals.

“There is no single empty inch in Rafah,” he said. “Tents everywhere. And by tents, I don’t mean the proper tents people are familiar with. It is simply anything that covers one’s head.”

People sign up to receive a tent from the United Nations or Palestine Red Crescent, he said, but receiving one can take a long time and people can’t wait, especially in miserable winter conditions. Consequently, many use old wooden beams, plastic and nylon from greenhouses nearby to build any sort of shelter, he said.

Finding the materials to make even the most ramshackle of shelters has become a daily routine for many in Rafah, he said.

Despite the conditions, Mr. Shaath said he is preparing to move with his family there even though he doesn’t know where they will live. He said the Israeli military recently warned residents of a city block near his home in Khan Younis and those sheltering there to flee.

He fears their block will be next.

“I have no other option for myself and my family,” he said. “They will bomb us here in Khan Younis.”

“I am not worried about myself,” he added. “I am 68 already. I am worried about the children. They are the future.”

Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the powerful armed group Hezbollah, pledged on Friday that it would not negotiate peace with Israel until the war in Gaza ends — a statement that came as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken began a diplomatic tour around the Middle East to defuse regional tensions amid deepening fears of a wider conflict.

Israel’s top officials have repeatedly threatened that if U.S.-led efforts to secure a diplomatic settlement fall through, they will have little choice but to increase military action against Hezbollah inside Lebanon. U.S. officials have expressed concern that, should the fighting expand on more fronts, it could potentially drag the United States into a regional war.

“You will be the first to pay the price,” he warned.

Mr. Nasrallah reiterated a message from his speech Wednesday, when he vowed that Hezbollah would avenge the killing of a Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri — a man he described as a “dear friend” — in a suburb of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Mr. al-Arouri was the most senior Hamas figure to have been killed since Israel vowed to destroy the organization and eliminate its leadership after sweeping Hamas-led raids into Israel on Oct. 7.

“This won’t go unpunished,” Mr. Nasrallah said Friday. “We cannot stay silent. ”

As he did on Wednesday, Mr. Nasrallah did not say exactly how, or when, his group would respond to the assassination. And although clashes have been intensifying along the Israel-Lebanon border, none so far have signaled a marked escalation.

Israel has not publicly accepted or denied responsibility for the killing, but two senior Lebanese security officials, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss an active investigation, said that Israel had carried out the attack using six missiles, two of which did not explode.

Lebanon’s caretaker government has submitted a complaint to the U.N. Security Council over the killing of Mr. al-Arouri, calling it the “most dangerous phase” yet amid the escalating conflict, according to a statement.

As he closed his remarks, Mr. Nasrallah appeared to acknowledge this new chapter.

“The war today is not only for the sake of Palestine, it is also for Lebanon,” he said.

The statement did not specify how it knew Mr. Adar had been killed during the attack. Nir Oz was one of the Israeli villages hit hardest by the Oct. 7 assault, with roughly 100 residents killed or abducted — one quarter of its prewar population.

Mr. Adar’s grandmother, Yaffa Adar, 85, had been held captive in Gaza but was released in late November as part of a temporary cease-fire deal in which Hamas let go 105 hostages and Israel freed 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Ms. Adar’s son, Moshe Adar, described her captivity in an interview with The New York Times, saying that there was little food or medicine and “she didn’t sleep for a month.”

According to Israeli officials, 129 of the approximately 240 hostages taken during Hamas’s attack remain in captivity. That number includes the bodies of several people who were initially thought to have been taken hostage but who were actually killed during the attack.

“Sons, brothers, fathers, Americans. Brutalized, murdered. Act now or more will die,” a narrator says. “Every second counts. Do everything. Bring them home now.”

More than 1,200 people were killed in the Oct. 7 attacks, and about 240 people were abducted to Gaza, according to Israeli officials. A weeklong pause in the fighting in late November led to the release of 105 people, mostly women and children. Officials say about 130 people, including eight Americans, are still hostages.

Orna Neutra, whose son, Omer, 22, grew up on Long Island in New York before moving to Israel to serve in the military, said she hoped the ad would help remind other Americans of the suffering eight of their fellow citizens continued to endure.

“I’m not sure how many people realize that there are American hostages that are being held in Gaza,” she said in an interview.

“With all the noise on social media — who’s right and who’s wrong and where the justice is — I think we’re losing sight of where this all started and the fact that there are still almost 140 hostages being held there against their will, with no sign of life, with no medical attention, in complete darkness,” she added.

The ad was produced and paid for by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group set up in Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks.

Edan Alexander, from New Jersey, recently spent his 20th birthday in captivity. He, like Omer Neutra, was serving in the Israeli military on the border with Gaza when the attacks took place. His mother, Yael Alexander, said she and the families of other hostages believed the television ad could help keep pressure on the governments in the United States and Israel to secure the captives’ freedom.

“It’s just to make clear that the time is running out,” she said. “We need to bring all the hostages home now. We need Edan back to us, like to the family. We are broken now, and we want to feel whole again.”

In addition, the report found, settlers have been fencing off open areas in the part of the West Bank that is under complete Israeli control in order to block access to Palestinian herders. Several of the outposts and roads are on privately owned Palestinian land, the report said, in violation of Israeli law.

The activities add fuel to what are already unusually high tensions in the West Bank, where violence and Israeli military raids have spiraled over the past year. Palestinian militias have carried out shooting attacks against Israelis; frequent raids by the Israeli military have produced thousands of arrests and have often turned deadly; and extremist Jewish settlers have rampaged through Palestinian villages, setting fire to property.

While the settler actions documented by Peace Now are not approved by Israel, the far-right coalition that took power in December 2022 supports settlement expansion, and includes extremist settlers who want to annex some or all of the West Bank. Israel has in the past retroactively authorized settlements it had previously seen as illegal.

Most countries view all settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be a violation of international law. Israel captured those areas from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians see that land as part of a future independent state, made steadily less viable by settler expansion.

“The three months of war in Gaza are being exploited by settlers to establish facts on the ground,” Peace Now said in a statement, citing what it described as a “permissive military and political environment” that allowed land seizure to go “almost unchecked, with minimal adherence to the law.”

The Palestinian Prisoners Club, a nongovernmental rights group, said in a statement that Israeli forces made the arrests in Nur Shams, a neighborhood near the city of Tulkarem. It said that Israeli forces had transferred more than 100 Palestinians to another area, and interrogated an estimated 500 people, including women and children.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the operation in Nur Shams lasted more than 40 hours and “destroyed many explosives and detained dozens of terror suspects.”

Wafa Awwad, a journalist for the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, was among those arrested, his outlet and The Palestinian Prisoners Club said. Palestinian news media reported raids in Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus and Jenin, among other locations in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health reported that Asid Jawad Bani Odeh, 29, was shot in the chest and killed during a raid by Israeli forces in Tamun, a village in the northern West Bank.

Photos from Nur Shams and Sir, a village near Jenin, showed residents in both sites assessing the damage from clashes on Thursday. They inspected scorched and crumbling buildings, and windows and walls punctuated by bullets.

Though the war between Israel and Hamas has been concentrated in the Gaza Strip since it began almost three months ago, violence has also surged in the West Bank. The Israeli military has carried out frequent raids across the West Bank, some of them deadly, and has made thousands of arrests. Violence between Palestinians and Israeli civilians in the area has escalated.

During a visit to the West Bank on Thursday, Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, said that the Israeli military would fight against terrorism wherever it encounters it.

“We are keeping our focus on removing the threat posed by Hamas, but we’re not forgetting that our goal is to remove terror threats from all of our borders,” he said, according to Israel’s N12 news channel.

He added that protecting Israeli settlements was a “central issue,” and that Israeli military forces have expanded their presence in the area.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, are considered illegal by the United States and many other countries around the world. The United Nations and many Palestinians view the territory as part of a future Palestinian state, which the settlements have made steadily less tenable.

After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government came into power a year ago, it approved permits for 13,000 new housing units and has pushed to expand settlements in the West Bank.

Settler violence against Palestinians was on the rise before the war and has escalated sharply since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched its attack on Israel. The Palestinian Health Ministry has said that 313 Palestinians have been killed across the West Bank since Oct. 7 in clashes with Israeli troops and armed extremist settlers.

On Wednesday, Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, condemned attacks on the West Bank on social media and warned that “everyone will pay the price” for failing to curb extremism.

“Igniting the West Bank and Lebanon is the goal of the extremist agenda in the Israeli government, which continues to destroy Gaza to prolong its political leadership and drag the West into a regional war,” he said.

The Palestinian Prisoners Club has said that arrests made in the West Bank have driven the number of Palestinians in Israel jails to a 14-year high. Many of those detained are being held without a charge or trial.

Talya Minsberg and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed translation.