Starve or Surrender: Is Israeli siege of north Gaza a winning strategy to end war or wilful blunder?

After more than a year of fighting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an idea to end the war in the Gaza Strip.

The idea is to ramp up pressure so much that Hamas returns to the negotiating table and Israel joins talks from a position of strength.

The strategy to implement the idea rests on the back of recent battlefield successes in Gaza and Lebanon and appears to draw upon a plan floated by a group of retired Israeli military officers led by Major General (Retired) Giora Eiland.

While the underlying idea brings hope for the conflict’s end, whether the ‘Generals’ Plan’ —as the Eiland-led group’s plan is being called— helps realise that remains questionable.

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Even if Israel succeeds in battering Hamas to the extent that it returns to the negotiating table, Israel would have to engage with Hamas politically as military actions are only a medium to arrive at a political solution — not the solution in itself. So far, Netanyahu has refused to come up with any day-after plan for Gaza , except for vague statements like Hamas would not be allowed to continue running Gaza.

What’s Generals’ Plan for Gaza?

The core idea of the Generals’ Plan says that the targeted area, which can be a city or multiple cities in Gaza, would be evacuated of civilians and then all food and water supplies would be cut off.

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Once the civilians have been evacuated, everyone remaining there would be considered a combatant and would be a legitimate target, according to the plan.

The plan rests on the approach of ‘surrender or starve’ where besieged Hamas personnel would either starve or come out to surrender or make the final stand.

While Eiland has said that this is the only way to break Hamas, and reports have said that it is being implemented at least in part in Gaza, there is near-unanimity among observers that the plan is disastrous.

The Associated Press has reported that few civilians have left the places where the plan is supposed to be implemented.

Eiland, however, has been unapologetic. He has maintained that all civilians will be evacuated and if they don’t leave, they will face the consequences.

Eiland told AP, “They will either have to surrender or to starve. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to kill every person. It will not be necessary. People will not be able to live there [the North Gaza]. The water will dry up.”

Eiland told the BBC that once the supplies have been cut, those remaining, including civilians, will have two choices: surrender or starve.

“Since we already encircled the northern part of Gaza in the past nine or 10 months, what we should do is the following thing to tell all the 300,000 residents who still live in the northern part of Gaza that they have to leave this area and they should be given 10 days to leave through safe corridors that Israel will provide. And after that time, all this area will become to be a military zone. And all the Hamas people will still, though, whether some of them are fighters, some of them are civilians… will have two choices either to surrender or to starve (sic)," said Eiland.

Palestinians in Gaza have nowhere to go

The biggest flaw in the Generals’ Plan is the fundamental assumption that all civilians would leave or want to leave or be allowed to leave even if they would want to leave.

The Gazans simply have nowhere left to go as virtually every town has been attacked in the yearlong war and even so-called safe zones have been bombed and there is no sense of security. They also fear that if they leave, they would never be able to return — just like during the Israel-Arab War of 1948, which the Arabs remember as the ‘Naqba’.

Such fears have merit.

The Generals’ Plan does not envision the return of evacuated Gazans to their homes in northern Gaza, said Maj. Gen. (Retd.) Gershon Hacohen, who was involved in drafting the plan, to CNN.

Even if the Generals’ Plan is modified to allow Gazans to return to their homes in future, the plan is still not workable as there is nowhere for them to go even in the interim.

“Even if you want to flush Hamas out by starving the terrorists or bombing them after letting civilians leave, there is nowhere left for them to go within Gaza. Externally, Egypt will not take them and there is no point of Israel taking them. So, geographically, there is nowhere for Palestinian civilians to go,” says Md. Muddassir Quamar, a scholar of Israeli and West Asian affairs at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) School of International Studies (SIS).

Even if such evacuations are successful and buffer zones are indeed created and there is no formal barrier on returning, in all likelihood, the targeted cities would remain uninhabited for a long time, such as in Syria, suggests Kabir Taneja, the Deputy Director at the Strategic Studies Programme at Observer Research Foundation.

War-ravaged towns in Syria are barely populated even now, showing that the creation of such buffer zones may very well displace the population permanently or at least for a long time, says Taneja.

“The strategy being employed right now includes sort of creating these buffer zones where there is no population. You either order them to leave or you bomb the place so hard that the population is forced to leave. We have seen this in Syria before where people were not left with much to return to once the conflict was over. Towns like Aleppo are still decimated and there are barely any populations there,” says Taneja.

Compared to Syrians, the Palestinians facing siege are in worse shape, says Taneja.

“The displacement that took place in Syria was intense, but of course Syrians had geographical depth where people could flee to. The Palestinians don’t have anywhere to go in Gaza or even in the neighbourhood. The Egyptians are not taking any of them in. They are surrounded by other places where they can’t go. So, for them, it’s almost sort of like being destined to death. I am not particularly sure what Israel’s long-term strategy is anymore,” says Taneja.

A real strategy or recipe for isolation & stage for war crimes?

By all reports, Israel appears to be already implementing the Generals’ Plan partially.

However, even as fresh evacuation has been ordered, there is little confirmation that the most contentious parts of the plan are being implemented, such as the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza or a complete siege and treatment of all those remaining as combatants.

In the absence of such measures, there is still hope that if —and it is a big if— the approach is carried out sensibly and matched with right political moves, then it might actually be a pathway towards the end of the war.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a US-based analyst of Israeli and Middle Eastern affairs, tells Firstpost that a condensed version of the Eiland Plan can indeed be a workable strategy — if matched with correct political moves.

“For the first time, Netanyahu appears to have some kind of a strategy to end the war. Once the civilians leave, the military would lay siege to major cities in Gaza where Hamas has rebuilt itself. The siege would be coordinated with the push against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The siege would be expected to last three weeks. The idea is to bring Hamas to the negotiating table for a hostage deal with some leverage for Israel. Any military success in the siege will have to be matched by appropriate political moves to get any real benefit,” says Ben-Ephraim.

However, Netanyahu has so far relied mostly on brute force in the conflict and has barely given talks a chance. Even before the now-dead Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar turned against the peace deal, it was Netanyahu’s own demands that had stalled the peace talks .

With such a track record in the ongoing war, and considering the influence of extremist ministers on Netanyahu who advocate displacing Palestinians in Gaza in favour of Jewish settlements, it appears that Israel is in the process of sanitising northern Gaza to make way for absolute control in that part of the enclave, says Alvite Ningthoujam, a scholar of Israel and West Asia at the Symbiosis School of International Studies (SIS), Symbiosis International University, Pune.

Ningthoujam tells Firstpost, “The northern Gaza has been a nightmare for Israel from security’s point-of-view for a while now, so Netanyahu may use that as a pretext to establish absolute control in that part of Gaza and revert it to the pre-2005 status where Israel controlled Gaza and had settlements there. We may also be staring at a West Bank-like future of northern Gaza.”

If Netanyahu ends up occupying Gaza, then he would cross major red lines set by the United States and the international community. From the onset, even as the Joe Biden administration has supported the war on Hamas, it has stated clearly said the Israeli occupation of Gaza is unacceptable.

Moreover, if Netanyahu does end up expelling Gazans from the north to settle Jewish settlers there, then that would amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Israel, which already stands more isolated than ever diplomatically, may lose whatever support it has in the name of war against terrorism and containing Iran.

Even if Netanyahu does not go for occupation and limits the Generals’ Plan’s implementation to just the siege, he would still end up providing fodder to the war crimes case against him. He and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are being prosecuted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and are charged with using starvation as an instrument of war and exterminating a population.

There are, however, signs that the eventual strategy may be much more moderate than the plan that Eiland floated. The entry of aid in northern Gaza has surged in recent days after US pressure and four sources told CNN that the Israeli Cabinet has not adopted the Generals’ Plan.

Separately, a former military official, who was aware of the Israeli government’s decision-making, told CNN that the plan that has been adopted is a modified version of the Generals’ Plan. The official said that the plan “was adopted without any way that may be conceived a violation of international law”.

Whether this is indeed the case or a precursor of another Netanyahu about-turn is yet to be seen.

On the back of recent military successes, Netanyahu is emboldened to the extent that he sees himself as the undisputed leader of Israel, says Quamar, the scholar of Israel and West Asia at JNU’s Centre for West Asian Studies.

“Netanyahu has been leading the most far-right government in Israel. He and his ministers have become more emboldened lately. They are moving towards the view that the Palestinian state is no longer needed. Such a thinking was once fringe but has gained momentum lately,” says Quamar.

While a revised version of Generals’ Plan, accompanied by right political manoeuvring, may indeed be the strategy for the end of the war, as Ben-Ephraim says, the implementation of the plan in an extreme form may also set the stage for an occupation of Gaza and war crimes. The direction that Netanyahu would choose remains to be seen.