Through 16 months of war, Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to say what he envisions for the future of Gaza. Yet the day of reckoning for both the long-serving Israeli leader and the shattered Palestinian enclave may be near.
Netanyahu is set to meet US President Donald Trump next week at the White House, with the discussion expected to centre on whether the temporary truce agreed last month — and set to run for another four weeks — will become a permanent ceasefire.
Outwardly, Netanyahu is committed to both goals he set at the start of the war: destroying Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and returning all the hostages seized during the militant group’s October 7 2023 attack that Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people and triggered the conflict.
But it is clearer than ever that those aims are almost certainly incompatible. No sooner had the fighting ended, kick-starting the process that will eventually return 33 hostages, than Hamas gunmen emerged to reassert control over the coastal territory, parading their weapons and organising mass rallies.
It was a shocking reminder to the Israeli public that Netanyahu’s often-promised “total victory” — despite a ferocious offensive that local officials say killed 47,000 Palestinians — was a chimera.
The war “didn’t force Hamas’s collapse or the hostages’ release”, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer. There were “tactical achievements, but no strategic direction. Hamas is still ruling, and still the dominant actor in Gaza. Period.”
International mediators, led by the US, will next week begin talks over the details of a second stage of the ceasefire deal, in what are expected to be torturous negotiations to secure the freedom of dozens of additional hostages and get the warring parties to agree to a full halt.
Netanyahu will soon need to decide whether he is willing to see the deal through to completion.
On the one hand he must reckon with the mercurial Trump, his most important international patron, who strong-armed the Israeli leader into accepting the initial 42-day truce and has made the return of all the hostages his primary goal.
On the other, Netanyahu must keep onside far-right members of his cabinet such as Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister. Smotrich, who opposed the ceasefire, has vowed to leave and “dismantle” Netanyahu’s governing coalition if Israel does not resume the war and reoccupy Gaza once the first stage of the deal ends in late February.
It is this apparent dilemma that Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist who has worked with Netanyahu in the past, described as “a Bibi sandwich”, referring to the veteran leader by his nickname.
In stark contrast to Smotrich, “Trump wants to continue with the deal . . . The goal is to end the Gaza [war],” he argued.
And yet, in a Trumpian twist, Smotrich and other ultranationalist leaders have seized on the US leader’s repeated recent calls to “clean out” Gaza and move the majority of the population to Egypt, Jordan, and other Muslim states.
“I am working with the prime minister and the cabinet to prepare an operational plan and ensure that this vision of President Trump is realised,” Smotrich said last week.
While Netanyahu has not weighed in on the option — widely condemned as a form of ethnic cleansing that could severely destabilise the region — a person familiar with the Israeli government’s thinking claimed Trump’s comments “did not come as a surprise”.
“This isn’t an idea that just came to Trump,” the person said. “Israel was aware he was going to say it. They [the US and Israel] are aligned and co-ordinated.”
Many, however, have interpreted Trump’s inflammatory comments as the opening gambit in a larger negotiation, and not just over the future of the Palestinian territory.
Like former US president Joe Biden before him, Trump has made no secret of his wish to tie the end of the Gaza conflict to a wider normalisation agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which insists on the creation of an “irreversible” path to a Palestinian state. Normalisation with the kingdom would be both an incentive for Netanyahu to end the war — Riyadh is unwilling to agree while the conflict rages — and secure his legacy.
As Adam Boehler, Trump’s envoy on hostage affairs, told Israel’s Channel 12 on Wednesday, Arab states “should present an alternative option” if they oppose the US president’s plan. Trump “is always open to different options”, he said.
The preferred choice for Israel and its American allies, however unlikely, is the possibility that Hamas, as part of the negotiations for the second phase, willingly agrees to lay down its arms and head into exile.
Netanyahu, said the person familiar with Israeli government thinking, “wants no more Hamas [in Gaza], and he has backing for that”.
More plausible, however, are various schemes floated by the US’s Arab allies such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to create an internationally-backed transitional body backed by the Palestinian Authority to reassert civilian control over the enclave.
Yet the Netanyahu government has for the duration of the war rejected allowing the PA, which exerts limited autonomy in the occupied West Bank and was violently evicted from Gaza by Hamas in 2007, to return to the strip.
Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli analyst and co-creator of the Fauda television series, said involving the PA is the only realistic option for an “alternative regime” in Gaza.
“Trump should now condition the second stage on the entry of the PA into Gaza and Hamas concessions,” he said. “They need to make Hamas understand that they can’t stay in power.”
Other analysts argue the sheer price of reconstructing Gaza — estimated at tens of billions of dollars — will limit Hamas’s bargaining power.
But Milshtein, the former Israeli intelligence analyst, argued any such plan is “naive” and bound to fail. He said an enfeebled PA — led by octogenarian president Mahmoud Abbas — would serve as a mere fig leaf allowing Hamas to remain the de facto military power on the ground.
Milshtein argued instead for a third path: To fulfil the entire Gaza ceasefire-for-hostage agreement, bring back all the Israelis from captivity and concede that Hamas will remain in power for the foreseeable future — until the next war.
“We can’t live with Hamas in Gaza, but it will require a big campaign where we will need to take over Gaza, stay there for a long time, and dismantle Hamas rule,” Milshtein said. “This needs serious planning, as well as domestic and international support. It will take years.”
Ultimately, Netanyahu has not ruled out the possibility of going back to war either — “in new ways and with great force”, as he said last month — if negotiations with Hamas fall apart.
Two people familiar with the matter said Trump and Biden provided Israel with written guarantees that they would back a return to fighting if Hamas violates the terms of the ceasefire deal.
Crucially, it remains unclear whether this would include a breakdown in negotiations over the second phase of the deal.
But for now, Netanyahu has several weeks to make a decision. This “is a long time in this war”, said Shtrauchler, the political strategist. “Bibi is not a gambler — he will take what he thinks are [contrasting] options up to the last minute, and even beyond, and then choose.”
Cartography by Aditi Bhandari
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