The trucks carrying us back to October 6, 2023

Here’s an invitation for UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Come stand at the front gate of Kibbutz Zikkim any day this week at 1pm. In response to President Trump’s suggestion that Gazans be relocated so that Gaza can be reconstructed without danger to anyone, Sir Keir declared his support for reconstructing Gaza without relocating anyone.

Standing in front of Kibbutz Zikkim, Sir Keir can better understand what he himself is saying. On any given day at 1pm local time, a convoy of over 100 empty trucks passes the quiet access road to the kibbutz. They are leaving Gaza from a special northern crossing the IDF has opened, having delivered their cargoes to what is obliquely called “the civilian authorities” in Gaza, a polite term for the intricate network of agencies (including UNRWA) who kowtow to Hamas in Gaza. These are not the closed panel vans designed to carry the food aid that we see in many news items, but open trucks, designed to carry hardware and construction equipment, designed for Gaza’s “reconstruction.”

All that’s great, right? Gazans get homes, Israeli hostages go free, Trump shuts up. Umm… no. The problem is with Hamas, not with Trump. The “reconstruction” Hamas plans is precisely that – “reconstructing” Gaza as it was October 6, 2023, with tunnels of reinforced concrete under hundreds of kindergartens, mosques, and clinics, used to hide Hamas fighters, with reinforced bunkers for Hamas’s upper echelons designed to protect them and the Israeli hostages serving as their human shields, with weapons stored in reinforced basements under hospitals.

Allowing Hamas to restore the status quo ante which led to the October 7^th massacre is one of the prices Israel is currently paying for the hostage release and ceasefire. And the price Israel will pay in human lives of hostages and soldiers in further rounds of hostilities which Hamas will launch may dwarf that paid in the last painful 15 months.

By panning Trump’s plan, and piously opining that Gazans be allowed to rebuild without conditions, Sir Keir and millions like him, who supposedly support the civilian population of Gaza, are ignoring the huge elephant in the room: Hamas still controls Gaza’s territory and population. Any rebuilding under Hamas will take us back to a larger version of October 7^th.

Those who support “Gazan rebuilding” without finding a way to displace Hamas’s control are making a clearly immoral choice, preferring to allow Hamas to control Gaza and to reconstruct it as a launching pad for ever more deadly attacks on Israel. This immoral choice allows Hamas to parley the misery of Gaza’s civil population on the one hand, and Israel’s need for its hostages on the other, into a winning formula for maintaining control over Gaza.

It works like this: All aid sent into Gaza ultimately reaches Hamas. Using violence, Hamas ensures that no non-Hamas actors can distribute aid. The profit Hamas realizes by selling aid is funneled into hiring more Hamas fighters. Thus, so long as Gazans remain under Hamas control, Hamas will rebuild both in forces and in physical infrastructure.

Sir Keir speaks glowingly about a two-state solution. But Sir Keir is acutely aware that any attempt to hand Gaza to the Palestinian Authority in the near term will have only two possible outcomes. In the short term, the Palestinian Authority, which has never denounced the October 7^th massacres, will serve as a fig-leaf for Hamas, much as UNRWA does. In the long term, Hamas will come out in the open and throw any Palestinian Authority figures who oppose Hamas off the rooftops, as was done June 11, 2007.

To avoid a return to October 7^th, in which citizens of Israeli towns on the Gaza border are massacred, with the survivors exiled, the umbilical cord binding Gaza’s civilians to Hamas must be broken. The Palestinians of Gaza must be convinced that continued Hamas control leads to loss of dignity and loss of land. Trump’s plan may be the only way to break Hamas’s hold on Gazans’ loyalties. It gives Gazans the option to remain in their current miserable conditions, in tent cities in the Mowasi humanitarian area, and the option to leave Gaza and leave Hamas control. If substantial numbers of Gazans opt to leave, then Hamas will have been dealt a severe setback. Non-Hamas actors can then take control of the physical landscape of Gaza, allowing a reconstruction that doesn’t take us back to October 6^th, 2023. The rebuilding of Gaza can then focus on civilian needs such as housing, clinics (without attack tunnels in their basements), and educational facilities (that don’t teach Jihad).

Anyone who actually cares about Gazan civilians, and really wants a stable peace in the area around Gaza, needs to look carefully at what is happening now, and at what Trump is proposing. The trucks that are bringing construction materials into Gaza are carrying us back to a second and more horrific round of the last 15 months. Trump’s plan offers a way out.