The Re-occupation of Gaza - with Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal

You are listening to an art media podcast.

Here is the dilemma.

The government, the cabinet, Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to conquer the rest of Gaza Strip because the argument is that if you don't do it, because you wait for the hostages, you will get neither the hostages nor defeating Hamas.

Whereas Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, says the hostages are going to get killed in this operation.

So, what we should do is rather than occupying the area, having a siege.

I'm not going to mince words here, Dan.

I have never heard such extreme negative reactions to any plan that I've ever covered, you know, since I've been a journalist, as to the plan to somehow take over the entire Gaza Strip in the near future and have a military military rule of the entire Gaza Strip.

And because of that, there's a mega confrontation between the chiefs of staff and this cabinet.

So, you know, this is a very, it's a very radical moment.

It's a very radical moment.

It is 8.30 a.m.

on Thursday, August 7th here in New York City.

It is 3.30 p.m.

on Thursday, August 7th in Israel, as Israelis are processing news that a, quote, total conquest of Gaza will be brought to Israel's cabinet for a vote and is expected to pass.

One quick housekeeping note.

This is the first members-only Inside Call-Me Back episode.

So if you're listening to this on our regular feed, you'll be getting the conversation with Nadava Namit on the latest news.

But if you're an Inside Call Me Back subscriber, you should listen on the members-only feed because there you will get an extended version of our Thursday episodes, which includes a longer discussion as well as questions from our listeners.

To those of you who have yet to subscribe to Inside Call Me Back, you can follow the link in the show notes.

Now on to the news.

The plan to reoccupy Gaza was accelerated following the July 24th collapse of the ceasefire hostage release talks.

Israel and the U.S., as well as Arab League governments, blame Hamas for the collapse of a possible deal.

As far as we know, the new military plan begins with the evacuation of Gaza City, which is believed to hold about half the Gazan population, and will include the construction of hospitals and camps for evacuees in southern Gaza.

It is also expected to include an announcement by President Trump of considerable funding from the U.S.

and other countries for Gaza.

IDF Chief of Staff Ayel Zamir and other military officials have reportedly warned about their concerns surrounding the risks of the implementation of this plan.

I'm here with Arc Media contributor Amit Segel and Nadav Ayel, also an Arc Media contributor, will join us during the conversation.

Amit, welcome back and welcome to the first episode of the Inside Call Me Back edition.

Excitement in the air.

Thanks, Dan.

I hear

everyone's buzzing about it.

Okay, so Amit, I want to dive into this dramatic development of the last 24 hours.

What can you tell us about the plan to occupy Gaza, which the government will bring to a cabinet vote later today?

So here's the controversy.

Israel has recently completed the occupation of 75%

of the Gaza Strip, but there are still 75% of the population in the other 25% of the territory, which is Gaza City, the Muwasi, the humanitarian area, and the third part is the refugee camps in central Gaza.

Now, here is the dilemma.

The government, the cabinet, Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to conquer the rest of Gaza Strip because the argument is that if you don't do it, because you wait for the hostages, you will get neither the hostages nor defeating Hamas.

Whereas Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, says the hostages are going to get killed in this operation.

So, what we should do is rather than occupying the area, having a siege, we will actually encircle those three areas

without having the day-to-day fights with the Hamas terrorists, no more casualties, and we can attack them from the air or specific invasions when we have something that we want, but we will operate pressure.

Now, rumors had it that Zamir threatened to resign.

I'm not sure this is the case, but I do think that it would lead to something in between.

And I think the solution would be, it's gonna take for me 30 seconds to explain it, occupying Gaza City.

Gaza City is the hub, the symbol,

where the headquarters are.

Every 99% of the pictures from Gaza is Gaza City.

So it's like taking Moscow from Russia.

But let me just stay on that, because you talked about that in your newsletter, on your It's Noon in Israel newsletter this morning.

The symbolism, even in the eyes of Palestinians, is Gaza City being the heart of Gaza.

But hasn't Israel been in and out of Gaza City already?

Only once at the beginning of the war.

And it was just like driving through.

I mean, I visited the Gaza Strip last week.

So you can see that all the area that you see in front of you is reduced to ruins.

Then, when you see the eastern neighborhoods of Gaza City, you see that they are half-standing by the coast.

Gaza City is still standing.

So the 70% of the buildings are still standing.

The idea is to to move the population to central Gaza, from Gaza City to central Gaza, give or take 1 million Palestinians, building the hospitals there, because half of the hospitals in Gaza are in Gaza City, and then invading the city of Gaza.

Simultaneously, the United States of America would actually

organize to actually have 16 food distribution centers rather than four at the rest of Gaza.

So you take from Hamas, Gaza City, and you take from Hamas the entire funding from the humanitarian aid because the entire humanitarian aid would be provided by the American Foundation GHF.

Okay.

And Nadav Ayel, another Arc Media contributor, has joined as well.

He just...

just sort of slid into the conversation.

Nadav, welcome.

I'm going to jump right into a question for you.

There seems to me two main challenges to this plan that we're hearing about.

The burden on the IDF, which by all accounts is exhausted and feeling overstretched, getting closer and closer to

the two-year anniversary of this war, and also the lives of the hostages and what this means, what this operations means for them.

The way Amit just described it is on the path Israel was on, there was no path to get the hostages back because Hamas did not appear to be willing to negotiate, at least not negotiate in good faith.

So there was no getting back the hostages on the path they were on.

That doesn't mean that this is a clear path to getting the hostages back.

So I want to talk about each of these.

So what does this plan mean for the IDF?

And also, I would say the position of the chief of staff of Ayal Zamir.

I'm not going to mince words here, Dan.

I have never heard

such extreme negative reactions to any plan that I've ever covered since I've been a journalist as to the plan to somehow take over the entire Gaza Strip in the near future and have a military military rule of the entire Gaza Strip.

The type of negative responses that I'm getting, and I'm not talking about opposition figures, I'm not calling on Yael Apid to ask what he thinks about this, obviously is against it.

I'm talking within the Israeli defense apparatus.

It's very obvious that the IDF does not want to do this, thinks it's a strategic mistake, thinks it will be tactically extremely challenging.

And on a different level, that isn't a defense apparatus.

I just had a conversation with a senior official very much involved in the negotiations right now as to this decision.

And he talked about how the war is damaging Israel's position internationally, how Israel's friends are telling it that whatever it's going to achieve, it's not worth it in terms of the damages made to Israel's position in the world and with its friends globally.

I'm again not talking about those who criticize Israel anyhow.

So these are two distinct levels.

One of them is an army level, a defense level, and the other one is a more political, international level.

And the people I'm speaking with are insiders.

I've had a series of meetings with these kind of officials.

They're extremely negative.

Now, the IDF, as Amit probably mentioned, is going to present two plans.

One of them is according to the command that it got from the Israeli cabinet to occupy the entire Gaza Strip.

And the other one is another plan to actually lay a sort of a siege to Hamas strongholds in the Gaza Strip without really occupying population centers of Palestinians.

Of course, the IDF is aiming for the second option, Dan,

because they think it would be a gross mistake to go for a full-time occupation.

And they also think that that would probably lead to the deaths hostages.

This is the assessment within the IDF right now.

And because of that, there's a mega confrontation between the chiefs of staff and this cabinet, specifically the chief of staff Ayal Zamir.

You know, we are like dialogues in which the chief of staff tells the prime minister, why is your son attacking me online?

These kind of conversations are being made in the cabinet room.

And the IDF is getting some legal advice, saying what you can and cannot do as an army, just maintaining with Israeli law and the law of conflict, what you can and cannot do.

And I'll give you one example.

Israel can definitely say to a local population, we're going to fight in this, in the street or town, and we want to make sure that you don't get hurt.

So this is a temporary evacuation, and you'll be able to return.

But if the evacuation has a political reasoning behind it, the type that Smortrich and Benveer are pushing for.

If the evacuation is supposed to lead to an immigration, even voluntary, quote unquote, from the Gaza Strip, this would be a war crime.

And the IDF has told the political level in Israel that it's not going to be part of any plan like that.

And the IDF chiefs have ordered the IDF not to support.

and not to be part of any plan like that because it's against the Israeli law and against conventions that Israel is signed on.

So, you know, this is a very, it's a very radical moment for Israel in the type of conversation that we're having.

And I, you know, I'm bearing no good news in that regard.

It's, it's a solemn moment and it's, it's, uh, it's an extremely conflicted moment in which many of the insiders I'm speaking with are extremely hesitant as to what Netanyahu is trying to push the cabinet to decide.

Now, I have to say whether or not it's actually going to happen.

That's a different story.

Well, that was going to be my next question because, as we've talked about on this podcast, and I've heard many experts say, what Hamas cares about most is who is in control of Gaza.

It completely subordinates other issues, like when there are

prisoner exchanges, prisoner releases, negotiations over getting Palestinian prisoners out of Israeli prisons.

That's always something that's done at the end of the negotiations.

It's not the priority.

What Hamas most values and most prioritizes is getting the IDF out of Gaza and not having Israel in control of the land, of Gaza, and of Gaza and Palestinians.

So, could it be that this plan, whether it goes through its full scope as it's been laid out or not, is sending a message to Hamas that unless there's a deal, unless hostages start getting released, the direction of travel is only going in one direction, and that's the direction that you most fear?

So, I must say that at this phase of the war, i'm quite worried of uh trying to convince hamas to do something i think that hamas as i was told by a very senior officer in the army last week in gaza it's not that it it's a a body that looks to do something positive for itself but to only to damage you and it doesn't have and it's it's not an entity so even if you kill each and every commander in hamas which which you give or take did over the last 22 months At the end of the day, there is no one to actually surrender because they don't have this feature in the system.

And that's why, in my opinion, the only way to defeat Hamas is to actually separate Hamas from the population.

Now, there has been various attempts to do it.

Now the effort focuses on relying heavily on American humanitarian aid, $1 billion.

And then the assumption is that

it would actually cut hamas's lifeline which was the unitarian aid and if you take gaza city it might actually break hamas as an entity to be honest i think that when this ends in a few weeks eight weeks ten weeks israel will have uh to go on the uh zamir's solution which is to actually have a siege on the areas left by uh israel to the to the

hamas and the population

i i don't think that you can uh separate the population from Hamas simply because Hamas is so entrenched within the population.

Hamas is a government, as a regime, I mean.

Well, it doesn't really.

It exists as a guerrilla organization.

I can see the logic in what Amit presented.

I think that we are way past that.

And let me explain why.

For instance, in a plan, which is the basis for the thinking in the Prime Minister's office, and I published details of that plan.

I saw the document itself.

The document itself is saying that after Israel takes the Gaza city, it will need to clear the humanitarian city, quote-unquote, humanitarian camp that Israel intends to build of who?

of Hamas.

Because it was obvious to the people who were writing the program to the prime minister's office, the program that the military secretary of the prime minister Roman Goffman is handling, that at a certain point, Hamas will infiltrate also the humanitarian areas because it's everywhere, because it's part of the population, it's supported by the population.

Now, in terms of government, how much of a government does it exist?

I think that we're trying to rationalize here something

that to me is very hard to rationalize.

And let me explain why.

Israel is, and I'm hearing what Amit is saying on TV,

I'm seeing what we're writing.

I think there is a consensus about this.

Israel is in such a difficult condition globally that the very idea that at a certain point it will

start occupying the center of the Gaza Strip and the population centers there.

With a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, you don't want to call it famine, you want to call it hunger, you don't want to call it hunger, you want to call it something else.

There is a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

The thinking that Israel has enough political leverage internationally, has enough

stamina in its defense forces to actually go through this plan right now, there isn't a plan.

As far as I know, right now, there is no plan to take the entire Gaza Strip, to take care of the population.

What the U.S.

administration is speaking about, it will take time until these things will actually happen.

And the GHF isn't such a bright success to begin with.

My guess is that the IDF will say, look, you're ordering us to do something we don't want to do, but you're the government, we're the army.

Okay, now give us some time to plan it.

We need to plan ahead.

And this will buy some time before implementing something that no one that I know thinks is a good idea, to say the least.

And the expressions people are using with me is a catastrophe if Israel goes through this plan.

But they might be wrong, okay i don't know but they're talking about a catastrophe in terms of defense in terms of israel's standing in the world and of course the deaths of hostages which are the reason or at least one reason of two to this war okay uh uh amit i know you've got to go in a moment just real quick before you go What kind of support does this plan have in Israeli society right now?

I know there's not immediate polling on it, but obviously you can get a sense for what's going on.

Well, actually, there is a fresh one, especially for you.

Oh, it it was conducted by the JPPI,

an independent institution, and it says exactly this.

Within the Jewish population,

it is raised democracy with Arab voters as well, but I think when it comes to questions of peace and war, it's mainly about the Jewish population.

It's exactly tied.

46%

are for ending the war with Hamas still in office, and 45%

are for an operation to actually

conquer the rest of Gaza city.

So I would say the right wing is for it and the center left is against it.

This is, in my opinion, the way to depict it.

Now, here is the crucial question.

And I fully agree with Nadav

that Hamas is here to stay.

But what is the conclusion out of it?

One conclusion might be, let's end the war, take the hostages, and then we will defeat Hamas, let's fight another day.

I'm not sure this is the case, and we talked about it various times.

The other other option is to try and weaken Hamas as time passes, taking Gaza, providing humanitarian aid without those infamous UN trucks robbed by Hamas and then sold in a high price for the population, hoping that this process would lead in a few months for

the defeat of Hamas.

Nadav had some internet connection problems, so he had to drop.

But I wanted to ask him the same question that I asked Amid about support for this plan within israeli society so i'll send him this question and he'll send us the answer nadav

so as to the support of the israeli public in such an operation right now the majority of the israeli public and by majority i mean over 70 percent are saying they would rather have an end to the war and getting the hostages back home than continuing the fight against Hamas.

If you even narrow it down and you ask them, you tell them that would would mean that Hamas would control the Gaza Strip, you still get more than 50% of Israelis saying the same.

And this is before the warnings of the Israeli defense apparatus.

And

this is without taking into account the assessment of the IDF that hostages will get hurt and probably some of them or more will die as a result of an IDF operation to occupy the entire Gaza Strip.

But we need to say another something that's important, the way that the cabinet is presenting this, or the prime minister is presenting this, is as though there isn't any other option because Hamas has walked away from a deal.

And the answer that the mediators are giving is that Hamas did drift away from a deal, seeing Israel's weakness in the international stage, trying to use that weakness.

On the other hand, they're saying there is still a deal to be made.

It's just not the deal that Israel is willing to make.

That means that Hamas says it will never disarm.

It said that in a response to Steve Witkoff's statements last week.

I'm not saying this in order to pitch for such a deal specifically, but to present it as though Hamas has decided that there will be no deal to end the war, no ceasefire.

That's not the case.

Hamas still sees this as part of the negotiations, and probably they see Israel's decisions or the cabinet suggestion

as a sort of an attempt by the Israelis to threaten them back to the negotiating table in better terms.

Okay.

Amit, I want to ask you one operational question before you have to drop.

Between 1967 and 2005, when Gaza was a normal functioning territory, Gaza lies today in complete ruins.

As I've said here on the podcast, the place looks like Stalingrad.

What would it mean for Israel to become the governing force under such circumstances?

Like Israel comes in there and it just takes this place that is more or less flattened and does what?

Israel has no intention in the even under the Netanyahu Smotish Bengiver government to actually take over Gaza Strip.

The idea that I hear is to annex the perimeter, the areas that are near the kibbutz and the villages that were attacked on October 7th for security reasons.

And the rest of the areas are going to be handed over to an international sort of government, but you know, like a mandate, a mandate would be a more accurate term by the Americans, the Emirates, Egypt, etc.

This is the main idea.

And then Israel doesn't have the power or the will to actually conquer this area.

One of the interesting ideas that I heard was to lease, to actually lease the strip to the U.S.

So Israel would annex it and immediately would lease it to 99 years, like in Hong Kong.

I'm not sure it's quite feasible.

But the main idea is that Israel is not going to control the lives of 2 million Palestinians.

And this is an idea coming out of Jerusalem or coming out of Washington?

You know that in those two administrations, you never know who invented the idea and who adapted it.

For instance, who made the idea of B2's bombing Iran's nuclear facilities?

What is Ron Dermer or Marco Rubio?

Okay, Amit, we'll let you go.

I know you've got a heart out.

We will see you soon.

Thank you so much.

That's all for our regular Call Me Back feed, but the rest of the episode continues on Inside Call Me Back, where I also answer your questions.

One listener, for example, asked, How alarmed should we be about the rise of right-wing anti-Semitism?

If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit Segel, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically happen after the cameras stop rolling.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aredi.

Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Mariangelez Burgos.

Our director of operations is Maya Rockoff.

Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.