What happens to Gaza the day after the war ends? [View all]

When Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East on his most recent visit, one of the US secretary of state’s aims was to lift some of the fog over what happens to Gaza in the war’s aftermath, but he is meeting resistance both from Israel and Arab states.

Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said on Saturday at a press conference alongside Blinken: “What happens next? How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know what kind of Gaza will be left after this war is done? Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we going to be talking about a whole population reduced to refugees? Simply, we do not know – we do not have all the variables to even start thinking about that.”

The tentative US proposal is for a reformed Palestinian Authority, dominated by the secularist Fatah, which administers the West Bank, to come back to Gaza. But this is rejected by Israel’s right.

For instance, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, in a weekend interview on Israel’s Channel 12, rejected US advice to leave Gaza once the war ends. He said: “The day after, the most important thing is that there will be no Hamas in Gaza, and there will be operational control by the Israel Defence Forces for years.” He added: “It’s not like we’re going to destroy Hamas and another body will come along.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/05/what-happens-to-gaza-the-day-after-the-war-ends