Israeli decision-makers are considering a plan to lay siege to the northern Gaza Strip in an effort to ramp up pressure on Hamas.
The "Generals’ Plan," a three-page document published last week by high-ranking Israel Defense Forces reserve officers, calls for Israel to evacuate civilians from the northern 1/3 of Gaza and then block all supplies to the remaining Hamas terrorists. The goal is to bring Hamas to the brink of defeat and force the Palestinian terror group to return the remaining hostages in Gaza on terms favorable to Israel.
The authors of the plan are engaged in a public advocacy campaign aimed at shoring up public support for it.
"Officials of Hamas will have only two choices: Starve or surrender," Giora Eiland, the face of the plan and a former IDF planning and operations chief who headed Israel’s National Security Council under prime minister Ariel Sharon, told the Washington Free Beacon. "This is something that might create some real pressure, and if we do it in this area, we can later do it in other areas."
Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported on Thursday that top IDF brass are "considering accepting the plan," which would involve relocating up to 400,000 civilians and neutralizing 5,000 terrorists estimated to remain in northern Gaza. The authors told the Free Beacon they have presented the plan to a number of senior government officials, including members of the security cabinet, and will address the Knesset Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday.
"It seems that my plan is being seriously considered by the IDF," Eiland said. "I have gotten indications that my plan is being discussed and revised by, let’s say, official people, and hopefully it will become something real."
A spokesman for the IDF declined to comment.
Eiland developed the Generals’ Plan with a group of hawkish Gaza war veterans known as the Forum of Reservist Commanders and Fighters. He described the plan as a "relatively modest" version of his initial proposal in the days following Hamas' Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel: a total siege of Gaza.
The early impact of the Generals' Plan reflects a growing consensus in Israel that there is little choice but to take control of Gaza, at least temporarily, if the Jewish state hopes to achieve its war aims of toppling Hamas, returning the hostages taken on Oct. 7, and ensuring the territory does not pose a national security threat in the future.
The authors warn in the plan that nearly a year into the Gaza war, Israel's tactical achievements against Hamas are not adding up to victory. They say the IDF must bring economic and political pressure to bear on the group in addition to military force.
"As long as there is an unlimited supply of food, water, and fuel in Gaza, and as long as Hamas is the one who controls this supply to residents, and as long as we do not make an effort to physically separate Hamas from the civilians, it is impossible to create effective pressure for the release of the hostages and the hoped-for victory will not be achieved," they write.
"It is not enough to call for the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to move south. We must make it clear to them that starting from a certain date, aid supplies will be prohibited from entering Gaza City and its neighborhoods. If such pressure is created, what it means for [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is complete loss of the control and the presence [of Hamas] in the north of the Gaza Strip. It will then be possible to make progress in achieving the goals of the war."
Hezi Nehama, a member of the Forum of Reservist Commanders and Fighters and former brigade commander in Gaza, told the Free Beacon that it was frustratingly difficult to fight terrorists who could disappear among civilians, move in and out of combat zones, and constantly replenish their ranks with new recruits. He said a key to Hamas’s survival has been the roughly 200 truckloads of humanitarian aid that Israel allows into Gaza each day on average.
"I can’t explain how strange it is, on one hand, to fight against Hamas, and on the other hand, to supply them with food, water, fuel, etc.," Nehama said. "They get the aid for free and sell it for a lot of money. They use it to pay salaries for terrorists. They use it to recruit new terrorists."
Almog Boker of Israel’s Channel 12 news station reported on air Tuesday that Hamas has reaped a windfall of at least half a billion dollars by stealing and selling humanitarian aid in Gaza during the war—and has added 3,000 terrorists to its payroll in northern Gaza, according to "assessments" by Israel’s security establishment.
"It’s actually become the main oxygen pipeline for the terrorist organization," Boker said of the aid, which has doubled in quantity compared to before the war.
According to Eiland, a core problem with the IDF’s strategy in Gaza is that it relies on a wrongheaded understanding of the enemy.
"Unfortunately, we were persuaded by the American administration that Hamas is like [the Islamic State terrorist group] in Baghdad or in Iraq: They are terrible people, but the rest of the people of Gaza are innocent. So let's try to fight against the bad people, and at the same time please make sure to take care of all the poor people of Gaza," Eiland said.
In reality, Eiland said, Hamas is more like the Nazi Party that came to power in Germany. Over the 17 years since Hamas won election and then violently eliminated political opposition in Gaza, the genocidal anti-Semitic group has turned the territory into a de facto state.
"They melded all the civilian agencies and organizations—including the health ministry, the schools, the religious institutions, and even the international groups that are there—into one strong, robust, and cohesive entity," Eiland said. "So, what really happened on Oct. 7 was the State of Gaza launched a vicious attack against the State of Israel. Now, when your state is attacked by another state, the very first question that you have to ask yourself is, ‘What is our relative advantage over the enemy?’"
Beyond starving the terrorists, Eiland said, the Generals’ Plan would demonstrate to the Palestinian people that Hamas cannot provide for them or even secure their land.
"There is nothing Arab leaders are more sensitive about than land," Eiland said. "They are ready to sacrifice many lives, but they are never ready to lose land. This is an almost holy matter for them."
Eiland recalled that early in the war, Israeli leaders were not ready to hear his aggressive strategy for Gaza. That has changed, he said, as evidence has piled up about Hamas's corruption of UNRWA, the U.N. agency primarily responsible for the aid distribution in Gaza, and a second round of hostage-ceasefire negotiations has stalled. But Israel’s security establishment has remained reluctant to get bogged down in Gaza amid an escalating multifront war with Iran.
Netanyahu told the security cabinet in June that he was considering transferring responsibility for humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza to the IDF, "contrary to the position of the security establishment," Kan reported at the time. In an interview with Kan on Monday, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said the IDF has "insisted for months on not taking responsibility for humanitarian aid" in Gaza and thereby, he alleged, enabled Hamas to hold onto power.
Eiland argued that Israel should avoid holding onto control in Gaza but instead use the pressure that his plan would create on Hamas to reach a deal to "officially end the war and withdraw all our forces" from the strip in exchange for the return of all the hostages.
"We face much greater concerns than Gaza on all our other borders, including of course the direct threat from Iran," Eiland said. "We are in such a real, almost existential crisis today that if we need to give up in Gaza and agree to end the war in order to be able to solve some of our more urgent problems, then we have to do it."
In July, leaders of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, another security reservist organization, presented Netanyahu, defense minister Yoav Gallant, and other lawmakers with a plan for Gaza that recommends "distribution of humanitarian aid directly by the IDF" and "taking over the territory for a while."
"Whoever controls the aid controls the society," Amir Avivi, a reserve brigadier general and the head of IDSF, told the Free Beacon. "If we get Gazans to understand that Hamas cannot exercise power over them anymore, then the chances increase dramatically of the people working with us—handing over our hostages or Sinwar and the other Hamas leaders."
Avivi said his impression from meeting with Netanyahu and Gallant was that the prime minister is "very aligned" with those who want to see the IDF take over civil administration of Gaza, and the defense minister, who has publicly ruled out the idea, is reluctantly realizing that "there is no other choice."
The Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for Gallant told the Free Beacon in a statement: "The minister does not support maintaining a long term presence in Gaza." She did not respond to a follow-up question about his views on the shorter term.