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Three years after October 7, Israel has killed Hamas’s top leaders and gutted its military wing in a war meant to ensure the group never governs Gaza again. Yet as Israelis prepare to vote Tuesday in their first national election since the massacre, the campaign has largely avoided the most consequential question about Gaza’s future: Will Israel allow Palestinians to govern the territory themselves, or reoccupy it?
The Trump administration’s Board of Peace has a plan to replace Hamas with a Palestinian government backed by international security arrangements. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected its phased roadmap in August, insisting Hamas must disarm before Israeli forces withdraw.
The impasse reflects an old dilemma. Israel insists it cannot relinquish control until Palestinians can guarantee its security. Palestinians argue they cannot govern meaningfully while Israel retains that control.
The Board proposes breaking the deadlock by making Palestinian governance and Israeli security part of the same transaction. It is a long shot. It is also the only plan on the table that offers Israel a way out of Gaza without reoccupying it, which makes it worth a serious try.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board’s high representative for Gaza, described the approach to me as “zero trust,” a choreography for two sides that expect the other to cheat. Sector by sector, Hamas would surrender its weapons as international forces help vetted Palestinian police and administrators take control, while Israeli troops withdraw as each step is verified. Palestinian self-government would become a way to achieve Israeli security instead of waiting for it.
Palestinian institution-building is hardly new. George W. Bush made reform a condition of statehood, and Salam Fayyad, as prime minister, tried to build institutions that would earn it. Palestinians were asked to perform first, with Israeli withdrawal a distant reward. It stayed distant. The Board’s version asks Israel to move too, and neither side has to take the other’s promises on faith.
Hamas has accepted the framework in principle, but Israel says the group is already rearming, and even the Board expects it to test the limits. Friday’s Hamas-claimed attack near Hebron, which killed two Israeli soldiers, has only reinforced Israeli fears that Hamas is regrouping, not standing down.
A year after the ceasefire, none of the Board’s central steps has begun. Hamas still runs the parts of Gaza Israel does not hold. The Palestinian administration meant to replace it remains in Cairo, international troops have not deployed and reconstruction has stalled, while Israeli strikes continue almost daily.
The chicken-and-egg problem the plan was designed to solve is keeping it from starting. Israel rightly wants proof that Palestinians can govern Gaza securely before handing over control. Palestinians cannot provide that proof without the authority to try. A government sent in without trained police, resources or Israeli security commitments, Mladenov told me, would see its credibility “eaten up very quickly.”
Israel has even resisted letting Palestinian police recruits leave for training in Egypt. So Palestinians are expected to prove they can keep Gaza secure, while the people who would do the securing can’t get to class.
October 7 made the distinction between Hamas governing Gaza and Palestinians governing it far harder for Israelis to accept. Many of those who would staff a new government work for international agencies, including the U.N. relief agency for Palestinians, which Israel accuses Hamas of infiltrating; the agency disputes the charge. Whatever the merits, Israel regards those institutions with profound suspicion. Vetting can screen individuals, but it cannot guarantee what happens once they have power.
Nor can technocrats substitute indefinitely for political authority. An interim government needs real power and a credible path to elections, not another arrangement in which Palestinians are governed by people acceptable to everyone except the Palestinians themselves.
Mahmoud Abbas, now 90, is 21 years into a four-year term, and this month he postponed elections yet again, to September 2027. Critics say the delay protects the old guard, and few expect the date to hold. Whether Abbas will run is unclear, and Palestinians have every right to re-elect him if he does. But giving another term to the man who presided over two decades of political drift would be an odd way to ask fro change and demand leaders capable of delivering a state
Israel, for its part, has backed anti-Hamas clans, including the Popular Forces militia founded by the late Yasser Abu Shabab, a Rafah clan leader with a criminal past. That illustrates the danger of mistaking an enemy of Hamas for a credible alternative. Israel cannot demand legitimate Palestinian leadership while cultivating rival armed groups. After three years trying to dismantle Hamas, auditioning candidates for an Israel-friendly version of it would be a peculiar definition of victory.
It would be easy to blame Netanyahu and his election calculations for the foot-dragging. But Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist serving as Netanyahu’s envoy to the Board, suggests the election is delaying a decision Israeli society itself has not made.
“When you say politics, it’s not the politicians; it’s actually the body politic,” he told me. Israelis, he said, have not settled on an acceptable outcome in Gaza. Still, Eisenberg supports the Board, calling its work “critical” and “the best option for Gaza.”
The campaign bears this out. Netanyahu’s main challengers, Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett, also insist Hamas must disarm before Israeli forces withdraw. On Gaza, at least, the opposition is running on the incumbent’s platform. A recent Pew survey found that just 17 percent of Israelis believe peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state is possible.
It is not hard to see why. Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, only for Hamas to seize control two years later. For many Israelis, the lesson was simple: Whatever vacuum Israel leaves, Hamas fills. October 7 seared it in.
But Netanyahu’s demand for complete disarmament before withdrawal threatens to restore the familiar arrangement: Palestinians deliver first, Israel decides later, if ever. The Board cannot guarantee a Palestinian government will succeed. But without real authority, its premise cannot even be tested.
The Board has problems of its own. Hamas may resist disarmament, foreign troops may balk at confronting it and Israel may stall. Reciprocal commitments need enforceable benchmarks, not another collection of promises with flexible expiration dates.
Meanwhile, Israel is drifting toward occupation without the paperwork: Israeli military control over much of Gaza, Hamas influence in the rest and no Palestinian government capable of replacing either. Israel does not want to govern Gaza, but it is not prepared to let Palestinians govern it. The arrangement everyone says cannot continue is becoming the arrangement everyone is allowing to continue.
The next Israeli government will inherit that choice. It should start small: a monitored transfer of authority in one area, backed by trained Palestinian police and international forces, with Israeli withdrawal following verified progress. That would test the Board’s central proposition without betting everything on it.
Mladenov is blunt about what happens otherwise. Israelis, he told me, “need to let the Palestinians govern themselves,” because the other option is “full reoccupation.” That would mean governing more than two million people in a devastated territory, with a likely insurgency and no clear exit.
“You will end up with what you had before,” Mladenov warned. “It’s not going to be called Hamas. It’s going to be called something else.”
Skepticism about the Board’s plan is expected and, frankly, reasonable. But the alternatives on offer are reoccupation or more waiting, and neither is a plan.
Israel went to war to ensure Hamas could never govern Gaza again. Three years later, it still has no answer to who should govern instead. By refusing to let a Palestinian alternative take hold, or to invest in the Palestinians who could lead one toward elections, Israel is already making the very choice it says it doesn’t want to make.
Elise, I like your writing even if I disagree with you at times. Here, I don't. It is not because you are ill-informed or lacking command of most of the facts, but the reality is that, whether I agree with it or not, there is a consensus in Israel to the tune of 78%: Hamas must be eliminated as a military force for good before anything else can be discussed. As a matter of fact, the Israeli opposition currently leading in the polls is adamant that Gaza remains a problem because Netanyahu failed to finish the job. Eisenkot, his rival, has stated numerous times that within 18 months he will pulp Hamas as a military power.
With Israel insisting on disarmament of Hamas? Hamas signed an agreement where they accepted disarmament. It is Israel insisting that Nazi Hamas do what they signed, do what they AGREED to do.