Israeli officials are scrambling to head off mounting frustration in Washington in the run-up a potentially difficult meeting between the top US diplomat and Benjamin Netanyahu by offering a series of policy proposals on Gaza that critics say lack detail or commitment.
The US has offered staunch support to Israel since the outbreak of its war with Hamas three months ago but is anxious to secure some concessions from Netanyahu to lower regional tensions and help avert a wider conflict in the Middle East.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, arrived in Turkey on Friday to begin a week-long Middle East tour. During his upcoming visit to Israel, Blinken is expected to put pressure on Netanyahu to do more to protect civilians in Gaza, allow more aid to reach the territory and rein in outspoken far-right ministers who have called for the mass displacement of Palestinians – rhetoric that the US has condemned as inflammatory and irresponsible.
Netanyahu has also angered Washington by so far refusing to engage in any detailed planning for the governance of Gaza when Israel’s military offensive ends and by rejecting the US’s preferred options.
In recent days, senior Israeli ministers have rushed to offer some postwar proposals and to repeat earlier promises that the Israeli military would transition to tactics less costly to civilians.
On Thursday, the Israeli defence minister suggested that Israel would keep security control of Gaza but with an undefined, Israeli-guided Palestinian body running day-to-day administration and the US, the EU and regional partners taking responsibility for the reconstruction of the territory.
Under Yoav Gallant’s plan, Israel’s offensive in Gaza would continue until hostages taken during the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October were freed and Hamas’s “military and governing capabilities” dismantled.
Then, a new phase would begin during which unspecified Palestinian bodies – apparently local civil servants or communal leaders – would take over the territory’s governance.
Israeli observers, however, have noted that Gallant’s proposals are not official policy, are yet to be submitted to other ministers and are unlikely to work.
“The Israeli military is presenting their plan for the politicians to consider. It’s a recipe for disaster. The idea that you want local Palestinians to do domestic government is the right approach but you have to let them choose,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel and Palestine with the International Crisis Group.
The plan outlined by Gallant differs starkly from US calls for a revitalised Palestinian Authority, which is based in the occupied West Bank, to take control of Gaza too and a start to new negotiations towards creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“We don’t expect every conversation on this trip to be easy … There are obviously tough issues facing the region and difficult choices ahead,” Matthew Miller, the spokesperson for the state department said.
The Biden administration has previously taken credit for coaxing Israel on several aid issues, including allowing limited fuel and commercial trucks to enter the Gaza Strip. This week Israeli officials suggested further entry points from Israel may be opened to allow more aid to reach northern Gaza.
Gallant also indicated a more precise approach to targeting Hamas fighters and their leaders, in what appears to be another response to pressure from Washington.
The US has been pushing Israel to shift to lower-intensity military operations in Gaza that more precisely target Hamas, which took over the territory in 2007. In rare public criticism, Biden warned last month that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing”.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 22,400 people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the territory, with thousands more thought to be buried under rubble and tens of thousands wounded.
The offensive was launched after Hamas sent thousands of militants into southern Israel, they killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted about 240 others.
Gallant’s statement said that in northern Gaza, Israeli forces would shift to a “new combat approach”, which would emphasise raids, destruction of tunnels, “air and ground activities and special operations”.
It was not immediately clear how this might differ from current operations.
Palestinians said there had been no let up in Israeli airstrikes and shelling since the announcement, with planes and tanks intensifying attacks on the densely populated areas of Maghazi, Bureij and Nuseirat in the centre of Gaza.
In southern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have moved on Israeli advice, six Palestinians were killed in a strike on Khan Younis, local health officials said.
Another concern for the Biden administration has been calls by far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet for Palestinians to be encouraged to leave Gaza en masse.
On Sunday Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who has been excluded from the war cabinet and discussions of day-after arrangements in Gaza, called for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave the besieged enclave, making way for Israelis who could “make the desert bloom”.
A day later, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, said the conflict was an opportunity to “encourage the migration of the residents of Gaza,” which he said would be “a correct, just, moral and humane solution”.
Such statements, coming amid unconfirmed reports in Israel of proposals to convince other countries to accept large numbers of Palestinians, have created fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians off land where they want to build a future state, repeating the mass dispossession of Palestinians in the wars surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948.
Rwanda on Friday described reports by an Israeli news outlet of talks between Rwanda and Israel on the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza as “completely false disinformation … [that] should be ignored”.
Smotrich, whose hard-right Religious Zionism party draws support from Israel’s settler community, has made similar comments in the past, angering the US. Biden is believed to have made clear to Netanyahu that he holds him responsible for ministers’ statements.
“We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel,” Miller, of the state department, told reporters.
In a further apparent effort to reassure the US as Blinken’s visit approached, Gallant said that though Israel would reserve its right to operate inside the territory, his plan foresaw “no Israeli civilian presence in the Gaza Strip after the goals of the war have been achieved”.
Some in Gaza are reluctantly considering leaving the territory in the future.
“I know it is what the Israelis want but I think about my children’s future and wonder where we could go. I would never want to leave in ordinary times but there is nothing here now: no schools, no roads, no house,” said one UN administrator who has been living in a crowded shelter near Khan Younis since his home was destroyed a little more than two months ago.
Much of northern Gaza is in ruins. About 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and are being forced to live in ever smaller areas. A quarter of the population is now starving because not enough supplies are entering, according to the UN.
On his trip, Blinken will visit Israel, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and five Arab countries, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the state department said.
