Israel’s military has drawn up plans to reconquer Gaza in a bid to finally defeat Hamas, paving the way for a long-running occupation of the besieged enclave.
The proposal — yet to be approved by Israel’s security cabinet — was formulated by the new Israel Defense Forces chief of staff with the unofficial backing of far-right ministers who have long demanded drastically harsher tactics to fight the militant group, said several people briefed on the plans.
Two officials said the plans were made possible by US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, which freed up Israel from the Biden administration’s insistence that it not reoccupy Gaza or annex territory.
“The prior administration wanted us to end the war. Trump wants us to win the war,” a third Israeli official said. “There is a supreme American interest in defeating Hamas as well.”
According to the plan, the IDF would call up several combat divisions to reinvade and subdue Hamas, take control of wide swaths of the enclave and force the territory’s 2.2mn population into a small, so-called humanitarian zone along the Mediterranean coast.
The Israeli military would then administer Gaza, these officials said, in effect reoccupying the febrile territory 20 years after it pulled out. Israel occupied the enclave for nearly four decades until 2005, after capturing it in the 1967 war.
Such a plan would uproot millions of Palestinian civilians and corral them into an even smaller stretch of barren land, dependent on food aid to survive. It also risks sparking a long insurgency against Israeli troops. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One of the people familiar with the deliberations said Israel could take over the distribution of all humanitarian aid and had recently assessed how many calories each Palestinian would require. Another said the military was considering options including distributing aid directly, or through private contractors, to ensure Hamas could not benefit.
The UN said on Monday that it would withdraw a third of its international staff from Gaza after determining that an Israeli tank had fired a shell into a UN compound last week, killing a European aid worker and injuring five others, according to spokesman Stéphane Dujarric. The IDF has denied attacking the compound.
The plans for a renewed invasion, first reported by Ha’aretz newspaper, would be a change from how Israel prosecuted the war under former security officials, including erstwhile defence minister Yoav Gallant and the recently retired chief of staff Herzi Halevi.
Until now, Israel’s approach has centred on bouts of high-intensity combat, after which its forces would repeatedly raid different areas of the strip to root out Hamas remnants, and then leave.
“It’s a completely different kind of fighting,” said one senior military reservist, who has now been told to prepare for several months of combat operations involving “combat, victory and administration”, he said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to destroy Hamas after the militant group’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, in which local officials say 1,200 people were killed and some 250 people taken hostage.
The Israeli military went on to lay waste to much of the enclave, sparking a humanitarian crisis and killing over 50,000 Palestinians, according to local officials.
During that time, the IDF said it had dismantled most of Hamas’s military structure, destroyed large portions of an underground tunnel network and killed much of its leadership, including Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, who plotted the October 7 attack.
But in late January, after Israel had to agree to a fragile ceasefire to secure the release of hostages in exchange for a halt to the fighting, Hamas once again began to reassert control in the strip.
Though polling shows a majority of Israelis favour a deal to end the war and release the remaining 59 hostages in Gaza — fewer than half of whom are believed to still be alive — Israeli’s inability to remove Hamas outright galvanised criticism of the former security chiefs by Netanyahu’s allies.
Now, Israeli political and military officials have made clear that the goal is to hold territory and destroy Hamas as both a military and governing force in the strip once and for all.
Earlier this month Bezalel Smotrich, the influential far-right finance minister, said Israeli soldiers should prepare for a long battle to “finish the job”. “Gaza won’t be the same Gaza that we came to know in the past few decades,” he told Israeli public radio.
But defence analysts say it is unclear if the IDF can achieve those goals in the space of a few months given attrition among its existing forces and the need to deploy what they say would be at least four divisions of combat soldiers.
Israel made its first move last week, breaking the ceasefire with a devastating campaign of air strikes across Gaza and restarting ground operations.
Last Tuesday alone the air strikes killed 400 people, the majority women and children, according to preliminary figures from Palestinian health officials.
The IDF said it was targeting Hamas political and military figures including Ismail Barhoum, a senior leader in the group’s political office, in an air strike at the Nasser Medical Complex on Sunday.
“The bombing destroyed all of the beds and the whole area of the male surgical ward,” said Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma surgeon volunteering at Nasser, who added he narrowly escaped death because he was called to the intensive care unit.
Nasser had been dealing with an influx of wounded patients, many of them children, added Sidhwa.
Additional reporting by Heba Saleh in Cairo; cartography by Steven Bernard and data visualisation by Aditi Bhandari
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