Document on Transformation and Rehabilitation of Gaza after Hamas.. Dismantling the Structure and Social Networks is an Israeli Goal for the Day After the War in Gaza

Since declaring war on Gaza, its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has set two main goals: the need to eliminate Hamas and the release of Israeli captives. In line with this, some other goals have been announced, such as removing Hamas from power, ensuring that armed groups in Gaza cannot threaten Israel again, and destroying the infrastructure and civilian life of the Palestinian resistance. However, as the war continues, other goals are revealed, which Israel is working to impose on the ground, by focusing its large-scale military operations against civilian targets through the systematic and complete destruction of many Palestinian neighborhoods and camps in the Gaza Strip.

The occupation forces destroyed more than 70% of the residential buildings in the area, including entire neighborhoods in Khan Yunis, Sheikh Radwan, Shuja'iyya, Jabalia camp, Jabalia al-Balad, Beit Hanoun, al-Maghraqa, and northern al-Nuseirat, according to numerous statistics from various sources.

The systematic and complete destruction process falls within Israel’s vision of the day after in Gaza, which was written about by a group of researchers from Israeli research centers and universities (the Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, and the Begin-Sadat Center, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in a document that began research in early February 2024 and was published last month (July) under the title “The Transformation and Rehabilitation of Gaza after Hamas.” The systematic destruction set the goal of dismantling the social networks and disrupting the social fabric on which the Palestinian resistance relies for its infrastructure, and then building alternative organized residential neighborhoods that do not constitute a social and family nucleus, as is the current reality in the Gaza Strip. In addition, another goal of destroying the camps includes pushing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which provides educational and health services in these camps and outside them, back within the declared and ongoing war against this international organization to eliminate it.

Israel sees the refugee camps as the social, organizational, political, and even ideological base of Hamas. According to the Israeli mentality, the camps are a difficult environment for imposing ideological or social transformations. In addition, the dense and diverse nature of the camps makes it difficult to carry out preventive operations against “terrorism and extremism.” The best evidence of this is the recommendation in the aforementioned document to destroy the structure of the camps from the ground up and build organized neighborhoods in their place that guarantee decent living conditions, to which the Gazan families will return. This applies especially to the central camp area, but also to the refugee camps in the rest of the Strip.

The occupation is working to destroy and dismantle the structure of the Palestinian family, through killing or displacement.

When talking about social networks in Gaza, we mean family and clan ties, the residential neighborhood, the mosque, and youth movements. The importance of these networks is that they constitute an informal social and political structure that creates trust and loyalty among its members and directly serves the Palestinian resistance factions. Through these networks, the resistance factions may recruit workers and manage their civil and military affairs on an ongoing basis. On this basis, Israel is working to dismantle and disrupt the social structure and networks during the war, according to the document, through five main methods:

First: Repeated evacuation and forced displacement orders of residents to temporary shelter areas designated by the Israeli military, which breaks the neighborhood relations on which the networks and traditional geographical division of the Gaza Strip depend. The United Nations Human Rights Office considered the evacuation orders “horrific,” as they were issued against civilians “many of whom were forcibly displaced multiple times, and displaced to areas witnessing Israeli military operations and where cases of civilian deaths and injuries were recorded.”

Israel is trying to incite the residents of the Strip against Hamas and create internal strife among families.

Second: The destruction of homes, public buildings and infrastructure, which makes it difficult for residents to rebuild social networks after the battles, as many neighborhoods or parts of them have been rendered uninhabitable.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, stated that since late October 2023, there has been widespread destruction and demolition by the Israeli military of civilian and other infrastructure, including residential buildings, schools and universities in areas where there is no fighting or where fighting is no longer taking place. These demolitions have also occurred in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, Shuja’iyya in Gaza City, and Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

Demolitions were reported in other areas as well, with reports of the destruction of several buildings and residential blocks in Khan Younis. Israel has not provided convincing reasons for this widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure.

This destruction of homes and other essential civilian infrastructure exacerbates the displacement of communities that were living in these areas prior to the escalation of hostilities, and appears to be intended or intended to make the return of civilians to these areas impossible.

Third: The killing of tens of thousands of residents of the Strip, most of them civilians, which leads to new dynamics at all levels: family, clan, and between organizations. Psychological and social specialists have confirmed the danger of the Israeli war on the social fabric and family disintegration, pointing out that the occupation is working to destroy the structure of the Palestinian family and dismantle it, through killing or displacement.

The Israeli vision claims that one of the most important solutions for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip is to dismantle the local and service networks controlled by Hamas.

Health and psychological problems resulting from the pressures that families in Gaza are exposed to as a result of this war have actually begun to grow. Hundreds of thousands of families have been torn apart and have collapsed, according to what a psychological and social specialist from Gaza pointed out.

Thousands also do not know anything about their sons, sisters or relatives. The brutal war that Israel is waging against the people of Gaza has caused families to be unable to communicate with each other, stressing that the state of displacement will have a negative psychological impact in the long and medium term. There are families who cannot communicate with each other for long periods, and there are those who have not known anything about their relatives or family since the beginning of the war, noting that “the war will produce thousands of missing persons,” which is what Israel is working on as part of its goal of dismantling the networks and social structure of the residents of the Gaza Strip.

Fourth: Weakening Hamas’s ability to maintain central security and local civil control, and dispersing its structures in the field and dispersing them into different regions. One example is what Israel did and is doing during the war by communicating with some clans to cooperate in its pilot projects to find an alternative to Hamas, as part of a carefully studied plan to dismantle Palestinian society.

According to retired Major General Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council and an adviser to the current government, in his regular column in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth on October 29, 2023, Eiland urged Israel to inflict “not just destruction on Gaza City, but a humanitarian catastrophe and total governmental chaos [only this scenario – the complete destruction of all systems in Gaza and desperate suffering], in his view, ‘will bring about victory.’” On November 19 of the same year, he urged the government to continue the blockade of the Gaza Strip, stressing that “severe epidemics in the southern Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce the number of IDF casualties.”

Fifth: Creating a humanitarian crisis and famine that leads to manifestations of chaos, such as the looting of food and humanitarian aid, and violent societal and family conflicts. All of this has led to a deep humanitarian crisis and famine, which has caused the spread of manifestations of chaos within society, such as the looting of food and humanitarian aid, and societal and family conflicts.

“Israel has been denying food and water to civilians for more than two months,” said Omar Shakar, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, “a policy that senior Israeli officials have urged or endorsed and that reflects the intent to starve civilians as a method of war.” Israel has imposed a blockade that it has not eased adequately since then. There are many reasons for this, including an attempt to turn Gazans against Hamas and to create internal strife among families.

If Israel succeeds in achieving social disintegration in Gaza, it may also serve as a model for the West Bank.

We conclude that the Israeli vision claims that one of the most important solutions for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip is to dismantle the local and service networks controlled by Hamas, and to find an alternative that prevents the repetition of the social and political structural presence of Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance factions. And to strive to achieve as large a geographical dispersion as possible for the family structures intertwined in the resettlement process that will take place after the war. This dispersion will make it difficult for the movement to re-establish itself on the traditional networks that it relied on before the war, according to the Israeli document.

The Israeli document also assumes that, in the wake of the fighting, social networks will seek to reorganize in a more dynamic way, and residents will seek to return to their previous environment and rebuild their lives. Hamas is assumed to work to renew its mechanisms and networks. Therefore, disrupting the social system is very important. If the idea of dismantling succeeds, a new social system will be created in Gaza and an infrastructure will be created for the growth of a moderate, non-violent society. If the idea of dismantling fails, Gaza will deteriorate into chaos that will spawn violent forces from within Hamas or other new organizations.

It can also be said that the Israeli government itself has not yet developed or announced a plan for the day after. However, if we want to get a good indication of Israeli thinking, we can look at this document and the reports issued by research centers and previous political and military bodies, and make sure that decision makers are implementing the plan to the letter. Israel assumes the complete defeat of the resistance in Gaza and the submission of the Strip to the rule and control of the occupation, and deals with the scenario of the day after and the plans, goals and means accordingly.

Finally, it should be noted that for the plans you mention to succeed, there would be a need for a long-term direct occupation of the Gaza Strip, and if Israel succeeds in achieving social disintegration in Gaza, it could also serve as a model for the West Bank.

However, the document whose recommendations Israel implements and markets to the world ignores the nature of the Palestinian people and their conservative social and religious structure built on solidarity, mutual support, and embracing orphans, widows, the wounded, and the bereaved, and the community’s steadfastness every time after previous wars on Gaza. Even if that structure is dismantled in specific areas, and neighborhoods and camps are systematically erased and destroyed, new social structures will form, faster than Israel, its planners, and researchers expect, born from the womb of pain, from among the rubble, in search of life and salvation from the occupation that squats on their land. Palestinian history, successive revolutions, and successive uprisings have always been a living example of the culture of rising again and looking forward to freedom and life.