Another Gaza Border Perimeter

The previous one didn’t work. Why will this one?

Mar 18, 2024

Israel is making a buffer zone inside the outer edge of the Gaza Strip.

In January, an Israeli soldier whose unit had been using bulldozers and heavy equipment to make the zone, described the half-mile-wide area thusly: “Everything has been flattened. It was mostly agriculture. Now it’s a military zone, a complete no man’s land.”

Israeli officials say the buffer zone is critical to demilitarizing Gaza. It should prevent future attacks like the one on October 7 — when Gazan terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages — and enable Israelis to return safely to their towns near the border. Israeli troops will use the zone to spot and stop anyone approaching the border.

The width of the buffer zone will reduce the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip’s territory by 16%. So far, Israel has destroyed more than 40% of the estimated 2,800 buildings in the planned zone.

Prior to the October 7 attack, Israel enforced a 330-yard security zone inside Gaza to prevent people from approaching the border. It is now expanding that zone, hoping the thicker perimeter works better than the previous one.

Israel plans to invade the city of Rafah, located on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, to which many Gazans fled from the north as the war raged over the past five months. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that taking the city is essential to destroying the Hamas terrorist group, which orchestrated the October 7 attack. Israel says Hamas has four battalions in Rafah.

The Wall Street Journal reports that an operation in Rafah “is fraught with risk and could further damage Israel’s already strained relations with the US unless civilians are protected — a step Netanyahu has said he would take. Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari has said that Israel would evacuate people in Rafah to ‘humanitarian enclaves’ that he said would be built in the center of Gaza.”

A series of negotiations has led to Hamas releasing many Israeli hostages, but 130 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of some that Israel says are no longer alive. As many as 50 could be dead.

As the United Nations warns that a quarter of Gaza’s 2.4 million people face famine, humanitarian aid is now flowing into the territory.

An aid ship from the nonprofit World Central Kitchen completed the first delivery by sea on Saturday. The organization said in a statement: “All cargo was offloaded and is being readied for distribution in Gaza.” A second aid ship due to depart Cyprus contains “pallets of canned goods and bulk product — including beans, carrots, canned tuna, chickpeas, canned corn, parboiled rice, flour, oil and salt.” Saturday’s aid was offloaded via a jetty the organization built on the coast of Gaza. The second ship could carry two forklifts and a crane to assist with future maritime deliveries.

Al Jazeera cameras captured a convoy of 19 aid trucks entering the Jabalia refugee camp as humanitarian convoys reach northern Gaza without incident for the first time in four months.

Gaza has no deepwater port, so the US military is building a temporary port to increase the aid volume by hundreds of truckloads per day. The temporary port will feature a temporary pier able to receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.

President Joe Biden said: “A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.”

As a result of the war, America’s military footprint expanded in the Middle East.

In addition to the military-assisted humanitarian effort around Gaza, fighter jets roar from the flight deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, stationed more than a thousand miles south near Yemen, to combat Houthi fighters attacking ships in and around the Red Sea.

The White House insists that the US military’s work around the edges of the Gaza war will not turn into a combat role, but there’s no escaping the danger of operating in a region as volatile as the Middle East.

Last Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) gave a floor speech criticizing Israel for an inadequate response to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, and calling for a new election in Israel. This was notable because Schumer is a typically pro-Israel voice and the highest-ranking Jewish official in American government. From his speech:

Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel. … We should not be forced into a position of unequivocally supporting the actions of an Israeli government that includes bigots who reject the idea of a Palestinian state. … Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution.

Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Herzog denounced Schumer’s speech in a post on X, from which:

“It is unhelpful, all the more so as Israel is at war against the genocidal terror organization Hamas, to comment on the domestic political scene of a democratic ally. It is counterproductive to our common goals.”

Yesterday, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Netanyahu lambasted Schumer’s speech:

I think what he said is totally inappropriate. It’s inappropriate to go to a sister democracy and try to replace the elected leadership there. That’s something the Israeli public does on its own. We are not a banana republic.
The only government we should be working on to bring down now is the terrorist tyranny in Gaza, the Hamas tyranny … [We must continue on our path of] going to Rafah, destroying the remaining Hamas terrorist battalions, making sure that we don’t put into Gaza, instead of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority that educates their children towards terrorism and the annihilation of Israel.

When pressed to comment on whether he would commit to new elections when the war winds down, Netanyahu said, “That’s something for the Israeli public to decide” and added that it was “ridiculous” to talk about it while the war is ongoing.

Israel’s next election is scheduled in October 2026.

Most discouraging in this sequence of events is that, still, nobody discusses a solution more enduring than another attempt to contain an Arab terrorist encampment within the borders of Israel. Hamas or something like it will reemerge in the new Gaza.

A Gaza border perimeter existed before the October 7 attack. Now there will be a thicker one — which terrorists will eventually breach. No hearts and minds will change, ever. It’s high time to acknowledge this reality and adopt a bolder two-state solution, one that relocates Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula, as proposed here at Signalizer in November:

A Bolder Two-State Solution

Jason Kelly

November 30, 2023

Somebody needs to go, and it should be the side that has failed most miserably in the shared-territory experiment. That side is the Arabs. My proposal is that Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip be relocated to their own, new country in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula.

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