Within a year of the 2014 Gaza War, the conditions that precipitated it had grown considerably worse. The Palestinian government of national consensus, formed in June 2014, never exercised authority in Gaza. Just over a year later, that government was reshuffled without Hamas’s inclusion or input, dropping all pretense of consensus. Nominally, the consensus government persisted, because Hamas still saw it as offering the best chance of disowning responsibility for Gaza’s miserable conditions. But it had not taken over managing the territory—not the payment of employees who administered Gaza; not the functions or operating costs of major ministries; and not the control of the border crossings that remained closed or highly restricted. The result for Gaza’s population was unprecedented misery, a sense of abandonment by Palestinian leaders, and economic regression, with per capita income far lower than it had been over two decades earlier.1
Many diplomats who had hoped to resolve Gaza’s problems by restoring PA control had lost faith that such a transfer of power was in the offing or would even substantially change conditions. Instead, lip service was paid to the ideal of Palestinian unity, which in reality Israel, the United States, and Europe opposed in any serious incarnation, and which they deemed unlikely to come about.
And why should it have? Via Israel, which collects taxes on the PA’s behalf for a 3 percent fee, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah received revenues from levies on all goods entering Gaza but did not have to spend them on the majority of its residents. Instead it paid tens of thousands of Gaza-based, Fatah-affiliated former PA workers, most of whom had been ordered to boycott the Hamas government on pain of losing their salaries. Egypt’s closure of the network of Gaza–Sinai tunnels in 2013 meant that Hamas lost most of its tax income, while PA revenues greatly increased: goods that had previously come from Egypt and were levied by Hamas now entered through Israel, which collected the taxes on the PA’s behalf.2
More important, leaders in Ramallah viewed governing Gaza as a trap: they would be given responsibility for the territory’s enormous problems but no real authority to solve them. Were they to oversee Gaza’s crossings, they argued, Hamas checkpoints would exist a few dozen yards behind them; true control, including over war and peace, would have remained beyond their grasp. PA leaders would be blamed for future violence without having the tools to prevent it. Nor were solutions on offer to fix the poverty, poor services, donor neglect, and energy and water crises for which the government would be held to account.
Egypt, which had ousted the Morsi government only a year before the war broke out, viewed Hamas as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore a threat to its national security. More than at any time since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Egypt had succeeded in offloading responsibility for the territory onto Israel. It understood, too, that the Palestinian Authority was not being given sufficient incentive to take over. In Egypt’s view, a superficial PA presence at the crossings would not weaken Hamas or substantially reduce the flow of militants and weapons between Gaza and Sinai. To put real pressure on the PA to return to Gaza, Egypt wanted something Israel was reluctant to provide: substantive links between Gaza and the West Bank. Such links would reduce Cairo’s concerns that the two territories would remain separate indefinitely, leaving Gaza’s growing population with no place to move but Egypt.
For Israel, a reversal of its policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank was viewed as a serious security threat; the separation was thought to prevent Hamas from transferring knowledge, weapons, funding, and, perhaps most dangerously, ideological and political influence to the West Bank. Keeping the rapidly growing Gaza population out of the West Bank also served a demographic interest for Israel, helping it boost the percentage of Jewish residents in what it refers to as Judea and Samaria.3 For Israelis who opposed a two-state solution, the separation provided the added benefits of making a peace agreement more remote and calling into question Abbas’s ability to speak on behalf of all Palestinians or claim a monopoly on the use of force, without which he could not credibly offer an end to the conflict.
Though Israel had arrived at a greater appreciation of the need to strengthen Gaza’s economy to lessen the likelihood of renewed fighting, its preference was to do so by means other than connecting Gaza to the West Bank. It desired greater PA influence in Gaza, and PA control over Gaza’s crossings, but only insofar as these elements of Palestinian unity were not accompanied by reciprocal steps in the West Bank that would have empowered Hamas.
What could be done to improve conditions in Gaza, therefore, was constrained by what Israel and the Palestinian Authority would allow in the West Bank. But because the West Bank was a greater priority than Gaza for both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and because they remained committed to preventing Hamas from sharing power there, the most that Gazans could hope for were small economic improvements and relaxations of the closure regime. For Gazans, these were welcome, necessary steps that seemed likely to forestall a future war, but they were almost certainly not sufficient to prevent one.
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As a result of the enormous shortfall in funding from donors who were reluctant to pay for projects that would likely be ruined in renewed fighting, Gazans saw little relief after the war. One year after the cease-fire, 17,863 families—100,000 people—who had lost dwellings during the conflict were still homeless and living with relatives or in temporary accommodations or in tents on the remains of their homes. For the first ten months after the war, no totally destroyed homes were allowed to be rebuilt, as the Palestinian Authority and Israel argued over how much construction material was needed for each square meter.4
Until mid-June 2015, 5,600 people lived in temporary shelters in United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools. Because such small amounts of construction supplies entered Gaza after the war, poor families with partially destroyed homes resold materials on the black market for two or three times their cost to put food on the table or pay rent. An estimated 23 million tons of construction materials were needed to repair Gaza and to complete infrastructure and other projects begun before the war. Less than 6 percent of this amount arrived in the year following the fighting.5
In 2015, Gaza had the highest unemployment of any economy in the world; 80 percent of the population relied on donor aid, and 39 percent lived below the poverty line. Even before the war, more than half the population was “food insecure.” The once-important manufacturing sector had shrunk by 60 percent. The war destroyed a third of Gaza’s agricultural land and 40 percent of its livestock.6
A functioning economy requires exports, which had become virtually nonexistent. In 2005, the year of Israel’s withdrawal, 9,319 truckloads of goods left Gaza, going mostly to Israel and the West Bank. By 2014, these figures had shrunk by more than 4,000 percent: 136 truckloads went abroad and 92 to the West Bank.7
Unions were on strike, the health sector was collapsing, and it was estimated that the barely commenced reconstruction of damage from the last several rounds of conflict would take decades to complete. Electricity shortages, already chronic before the war, worsened considerably, with frequent blackouts of sixteen hours per day in 2016. Widespread use of generators, far more expensive than power-company electricity, resulted in many burns and electrical shocks.8
Electricity shortages affected water supply, wastewater treatment, agriculture, and health services. Two of every five homes were not connected to sewerage; the vast majority of waste was untreated, with 100 million liters dumped in the sea daily; over 90 percent of the water from Gaza’s aquifer continued to be unfit for humans; and one-third of residents had access to water for only six to eight hours every four days. Water-related diseases accounted for over one-fourth of illnesses and were the primary cause of child morbidity. For the first time in five decades, the infant mortality rate started to rise.9
Lawlessness and criminality began to spread. Bombs were placed at the homes and offices of Fatah leaders. Fights within Fatah—many between supporters of Abbas and those of the former Gaza Preventive Security chief Muhammad Dahlan—occurred in the universities and streets.10 Ministers and other PA officials received death threats.
Boys and young men eagerly joined Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, one of Gaza’s few growth sectors. Desperate families knowingly risked their lives to escape with the help of shady maritime smugglers in Egypt, at whose hands hundreds of Palestinians died in the year after the war. Others risked death by crossing the heavily fortified border into Israel, in the hope of finding work or sometimes a jail cell with regular meals and a bed.11
Salafi-jihadi groups grew in boldness and strength. They did not threaten Hamas rule but challenged the movement politically and ideologically, while tearing at Gaza’s social fabric and undermining the internal security that was among Hamas’s core achievements. They attacked hair salons and symbols of Western influence, such as the French Cultural Center, as well as Hamas government facilities and military personnel. In response, Hamas conducted a large arrest campaign and put up dozens of temporary checkpoints throughout Gaza; in some parts of Gaza City, residents passed through four of them in an area encompassing no more than several blocks. The militants did not back down. In July 2015, unknown assailants detonated bombs targeting five cars belonging to members of the armed wings of Islamic Jihad and Hamas.12
These tensions threatened to further erode the cease-fire with Israel through the old pattern of non-Hamas militants firing a trickle of rockets, prompting Israeli strikes against Hamas. In June 2015, Hamas killed a Salafi-jihadi leader suspected of involvement in a spate of Gaza bombings; in retaliation, a Salafi-jihadi group claiming affiliation to the Islamic State launched four rockets toward Israel, two of which fell within Gaza, and unidentified assailants set off an IED near the Gaza City pier. It was the second set of rockets shot toward Israel in little over a week. In both cases Hamas arrested the perpetrators and disavowed responsibility, while Israel responded with several strikes, including at Hamas sites.13
Gazans asked themselves not whether a new war would erupt but when. A Hamas leader with close ties to the military wing said, “Anyone who has a problem with his faction can fire a rocket at Israel in order to express his resentment. We’re trying to do what we can to stop it, but the militants keep asking us why they should hold their fire when the blockade is still in place.”14
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For many years, Egypt had been the main portal for Gazans to reach the outside world (far fewer, mostly merchants and medical patients, left via Israel, and all of them were subject to Shin Bet vetting and, in many cases, interrogations). In 2012, 420,000 people transited through the Rafah terminal, the sole border crossing between Egypt and Gaza. In 2015, less than one-fourteenth as many—29,000 people—did so. For fully one-third of the year, none at all crossed; the pattern worsened in 2016, when not a single person passed during three of the first four months of the year. An Egyptian official said that, despite Saudi requests to ease pressures on Gaza, the terminal would remain mostly closed for the foreseeable future.15
Egypt also demolished, plugged, or flooded nearly all Gaza–Sinai tunnels. In an effort to prevent the construction of new ones, the Egyptian army razed the Sinai part of Rafah, replacing it with a buffer zone and relocating its inhabitants, many of whom have relatives in Gaza. Following the closure, Hamas and the Gaza government have been strangled. Struggling to find the money to keep the government running, Hamas imposed new taxes and fees that were met with widespread complaints, sometimes resulting in retraction, as with those temporarily imposed on new cars in 2012, or non-implementation, as with an April 2015 draft law for a “solidarity tax” on high-earning businesses. Employees hired by the Hamas government received sporadic, partial payments ranging from one-third to one-half their salaries. Even members of Hamas’s military wing were affected.16
As Israel began to recognize its increased responsibility for Gaza’s residents, the need to prevent or delay another war, and the unlikelihood of Egypt or the Palestinian Authority improving Gaza’s conditions, it started to relax aspects of the closure regime. This reflected an understanding, particularly on the part of the Defense Ministry, that economic conditions had to be improved in order to forestall a new conflagration. Israel cooperated directly with Qatar to facilitate its reconstruction projects in Gaza and permitted it to make a one-time payment, in October 2014, to a portion of the employees of the Hamas government—a move that Israel had refused prior to the war.17 But these steps did not address the fundamental problem of providing a stable source of revenue to the acting government in Gaza. They were insufficient to restore the economy, and they left the vast majority of Gazans trapped, without access to the outside world. Israel had learned some lessons from the war, but hadn’t learned them well enough. Leaving these issues unresolved was a recipe for renewed conflict.
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Since the Palestinian Authority lost control of Gaza in June 2007, Israel and Hamas have engaged in numerous short escalations and three major confrontations, in the last of which, the longest and bloodiest, over 2,250 Palestinians died (1,462 of whom, the UN found, were civilians), as did 71 Israelis (66 of them soldiers).18
During those eight years, Israel and Hamas have pursued irreconcilable goals. Israel sought to deter Hamas from attacking it or letting others do so, and to prevent the organization from increasing its materiel, the primary declared goal of the blockade. Hamas aimed to maintain its grip on power, strengthen its military might, and inflict higher costs on Israel in each successive battle. In the years leading up to the 2014 war, Hamas, far from being deterred or contained, prepared for and fought larger and larger conflicts, while its capabilities and its threat to Israeli life and property steadily increased. Those capabilities were weakened during the 2014 war, but only temporarily. Less than a year after the cease-fire, the head of the Shin Bet stated that Hamas had already rebuilt many tunnels leading into Israel and could wage a significant new war. As after past battles, Hamas didn’t wait to begin rebuilding its stockpile, including by manufacturing, in Gaza, longer-range, more accurate rockets, which it started test-firing into the sea within weeks of the cease-fire.19
Israel may one day decide on an all-out invasion of Gaza, but its security establishment has indicated it very much prefers to avoid this. Its goal is to deter, not topple Hamas, because it fears Hamas’s absence more. Most officials state that in the next round of conflict, unless an attack causes major civilian casualties, Israel is unlikely to reoccupy Gaza—for the same reason the army argued against doing so in 2014: the lack of any viable exit strategy other than returning the territory to Hamas. The IDF believes the PA and Fatah are too weak to wrest control from Hamas and stay in power, and that international forces would likely do no better. In the words of the then head of the IDF Southern Command, responsible for Gaza, “There is no substitute for Hamas as sovereign in the Strip. The substitute is the IDF and chaotic rule … and then the security situation would be much more problematic.”20
Though the army’s professional recommendation is unlikely to change, a minority opinion in the government does not rule out reoccupation. An Israeli official noted that at several points during the 2014 war, Benjamin Netanyahu did not believe he had majority support for his plans in the security cabinet—several members sought stronger action against Hamas—so did not convene it, including when Israel approved the final cease-fire.21
In a future war, particularly one in which residents of border communities are evacuated, as is now planned for towns within roughly four miles of Gaza, politicians may be particularly sensitive to the argument that Operation Protective Edge failed to meet Israel’s objectives. There could be a slippery slope toward reoccupation, with an initial phase of partial seizure of strategic points, or a full ground invasion aimed at eradicating all Hamas’s tunnels and most of its rockets and rocket-production facilities. The Israeli public—85 percent of which supported continued ground operations, according to a poll conducted three weeks into the war—does not want to undergo cycles of sustained rocket fire every few years, and may be persuaded by politicians that eradicating Hamas is the only solution.22 On the other hand, Israelis have not held their politicians to account for failing to live up to previous pledges to destroy Hamas, and very few wish to see their troops once again policing Gaza’s streets.
In Gaza, too, there was considerable war-weariness. Many residents professed readiness for a new conflict but in the same breath asked, with evident concern, whether one was coming. That the population wished to avoid war was not lost on the territory’s rulers, who faced high dissatisfaction as taxes soared and reconstruction stalled. Several Hamas officials proposed a potentially renewable cease-fire of several years, during which economic life would be normalized and dependency on Israel reduced by establishing a floating pier off the coast of Gaza, from which ships could transit to a port in Cyprus. In the meantime, as the head of Israeli military intelligence reported to the Knesset in February 2016, Hamas was “restraining” other armed groups in Gaza, “making an effort to prevent rocket fire,” and “doing everything it [could] to stop an escalation.”23
During the period after the war, neither side was interested in a new confrontation. Hamas needed time to rebuild and improve its capabilities. It awaited a change in regional circumstances that could allow a new conflict to deliver achievements that the last one did not. Israel was not sufficiently threatened by Hamas to launch a preventive attack, and the difficulties Hamas faced in smuggling in weapons gave Israel a sense of reduced pressure in comparison with earlier periods of virtually unrestricted arms trafficking.24
As important, neither side had reason to believe a new war would have a different outcome. Two years later, conditions in the region had not changed substantially. Egypt was only more hostile toward Hamas and would not impede an Israeli operation against it, even one aimed at toppling the movement and reoccupying Gaza. The Palestinian Authority had no more intention of taking over Gaza than it did in 2014. It continued to abhor concessions by Israel that it feared would prolong Hamas rule. Qatar and Turkey were capable of offering Hamas diplomatic support but were still unable to bypass Egyptian mediation in order to help Hamas obtain concessions from Israel. Israel and the international community maintained their opposition to direct relations with Hamas, to an end to the blockade not premised on Hamas’s disarmament, and to any steps that would significantly stabilize its power.25
But though Israel and Hamas did not seek a new war, resumed fighting was a constant risk. Events in Jerusalem and the West Bank threatened to trigger attacks from Gaza, as before the 2014 war. There remained the possibility of error. Hamas’s control over other armed groups in Gaza was not total. Islamic Jihad threatened to break the cease-fire if a Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike died in custody. Israeli incursions into Gaza and destruction of tunnels caused a short flare-up in 2016; improvements in Israel’s ability to locate tunnels posed the risk of larger escalations. Months after the 2014 cease-fire, a non-Hamas militant shot in the direction of IDF soldiers near Israel’s side of the border fence, injuring one, and the army retaliated by killing a nearby Hamas commander responsible for monitoring and maintaining the cease-fire. “All it would have taken,” a Hamas political committee member in Gaza said, “was for someone next to the Qassam commander to have fired a rocket in the heat of the moment, and we could have found ourselves in a new war.”26
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Of the four central stakeholders in Gaza—Egypt, Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority—Hamas and Israel were the most intent on avoiding war. Both recognized this. But both also believed that they were far more likely to continue periodic escalation and war than to find an arrangement that could substantially forestall the next confrontation.
Israel was as determined to maintain the closure that would lead to a new eruption as Hamas was resolved to build up its capabilities, without which Israel would have eliminated it long ago. In the words of former Mossad head Efraim Halevy, “Imagine that Hamas does disperse its military units and they lay down their arms. What will Israel do if it doesn’t kill them? What incentive will we have to negotiate with them if they are no longer a threat to us?”27
In May 2016, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz obtained a leaked copy of a state comptroller’s report on the 2014 war. According to Haaretz’s summary, the audit stated “that the Israeli leadership didn’t seriously consider easing the economic restrictions on Gaza, which might have delayed the eruption of the 50-day war in the summer of 2014.” Yet well before the appearance of the leaked draft, the government appeared to have understood some of its past mistakes: it reversed its refusal to recognize the Palestinian consensus government; retracted its veto over the payment of salaries to Gaza government employees hired by Hamas; permitted limited exports to the West Bank; expanded the quantity and variety of imports to Gaza; and increased the number of Gaza patients and traders allowed to exit the territory.28
For Gazans, who lived under worse conditions in 2016 than they had at any time since Israel’s occupation began in 1967, the lesson of the 2014 conflict was rather different: although a devastating war had brought only limited and meager relaxations of the closure, the benefits of cooperating—indeed, of continuing to provide Israel with the sort of security that its top generals openly praised—were more meager still.
—August 2015