Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear: once the fighting with Hamas is over, Israel doesn’t intend to plant its flag in Gaza and stay. Instead, he says, the plan is to hand the reins to Arab nations willing to govern the war-torn enclave — as long as they’re not aligned with Hamas or hostile to Israel.
Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Netanyahu was pressed on whether Israel would assume full control of the Gaza Strip. His response was blunt. “We intend to, in order to ensure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Hamas, and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel,” he said.
While stressing that Israel doesn’t “want to keep it,” Netanyahu said his government envisions a “security perimeter” to protect its borders. “We don’t want to be there as a governing body,” he added. “We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly.”
It’s not the first time Netanyahu’s intentions for Gaza have been in the spotlight. Earlier this month, Israeli media reported that he told ministers he would seek cabinet approval for a plan to fully occupy the territory — despite pushback from the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel ruled Gaza from 1967 until its withdrawal in 2005. But since October 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, the region has been plunged into one of its bloodiest conflicts in decades.
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The war has been relentless. A fragile three-stage ceasefire in January collapsed by March, with each side blaming the other. Negotiations have sputtered ever since. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry claims the Israeli military campaign has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians.
International criticism has been fierce. The UN, humanitarian agencies, and several European governments accuse Israel of indiscriminate strikes on residential neighborhoods and of blocking aid from reaching desperate civilians.
Earlier this year, former US President Donald Trump floated a controversial idea — relocating Gaza’s population to neighboring “wealthy” Arab states. The proposal was swiftly rejected by Arab nations and Russia alike.
For now, Netanyahu’s vision for Gaza’s future depends on whether Arab governments are willing to take the handoff. And with the war still raging, that handoff looks a long way off.
