Israel’s current push to occupy the Gaza Strip in full follows a long history of previous attempts involving military occupation, encouraging Palestinians to migrate, direct forced displacement, and efforts to coordinate with or pressure other countries into receiving Palestinians from Gaza.
Throughout the genocidal war, which has continued for more than 22 months, Israeli and American plans for occupying and depopulating Gaza have repeatedly resurfaced under different names. These measures have included the creation of a new position resembling that of the head of the Israeli occupation’s Civil Administration in the West Bank.
Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan presented by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to occupy the Gaza Strip, under which the Israeli army would begin advancing into areas it had not previously entered, intending to take control of locations in central Gaza and Gaza City.
Under Netanyahu’s proposal, the plan would begin by displacing Palestinians from Gaza City towards the south, followed by encircling the city and conducting further incursions into major population centres, paving the way for a broader plan to expel Palestinians outside the Strip.
Operation Horev
Although the Gaza Strip was occupied during the Tripartite Aggression of 1956 and again following the 1967 war, before Israel later withdrew from it on more than one occasion, Israel’s failure to occupy Gaza in 1948 has been described within Israel as a major strategic mistake.
That earlier Israeli attempt came during what Israel calls Operation Horev, also rendered as Operation Horeb, a large-scale offensive against the Egyptian army in the western Negev towards the end of the 1948 war. Its objective was to encircle Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip.
The operation began on 22 December 1948 and ended on 7 January 1949 after Britain threatened to intervene amid pressure from the United Nations.
A previous Maariv report examining the history of the operation said that around three months earlier, on 26 September 1948, then prime minister and defence minister David Ben-Gurion had presented the government with a plan to occupy the area between Ramallah and Hebron in response to Jordan’s violation of the ceasefire in the Latrun area.
The proposal was rejected by seven votes to six, a decision Ben-Gurion later described as “a cry for generations”, although that characterisation appears exaggerated given Israel’s later occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war.
According to the newspaper, had Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in December 1948, and its residents fled or been expelled, as occurred in territories occupied in 1948, it “would have completely changed Israel’s security situation over the years, and the Gaza Strip should have been treated as Jaffa and Haifa were treated”.
A week before the operation began, Ben-Gurion told the government: “Within a few days, we will be able to end our struggle with Egypt by expelling it from the Negev.”
Yigael Yadin, then head of the Operations Directorate and acting chief of staff, defined the objective of the operation, which had initially been scheduled for 20 December but was delayed for two days because of rain, as “eliminating and destroying the invading Egyptian enemy force, and securing the southern and central parts of the country”.
The report said the Egyptian force that the Israeli army had been ordered to destroy consisted of a reinforced division containing four infantry brigades, armoured brigades, several smaller independent units, as well as engineering, artillery and air forces.
Two infantry brigades and an armoured brigade were well positioned for defence in the Gaza Strip.
Another infantry brigade was deployed at forward positions between Auja al-Hafir, also known as al-Auja, a village in the Beersheba district around three kilometres from the Egyptian border, and Bir Asluj, where the Revivim settlement is now located.
A fourth brigade was positioned in the Faluja Pocket, where the settlement of Kiryat Gat stands today.
The bulk of the Egyptian force was therefore stationed in the Gaza Strip, and under Operation Horev it was supposed to be destroyed by the Israeli army.
The operation’s commander, Yigal Allon, who later became prime minister, and chief of staff Yadin feared that a direct attack on the Gaza Strip would cause heavy Israeli losses.
They therefore allocated three of the five divisions participating in the operation, the 8th Division, the Negev Brigade and the Harel Brigade, to destroy the Egyptian division deployed between al-Auja and Asluj.
The aim was to prevent possible Egyptian reinforcements arriving from Rafah in Gaza and from Abu Ageila in Sinai.
The Golani Brigade was sent to conduct a diversionary manoeuvre in front of the Gaza Strip, while the Alexandroni Brigade was tasked with tightening the siege around the Faluja area.
The air force, navy and artillery were ordered to bombard and strike Egyptian positions continuously in the hope that they would collapse, allowing territory to be captured with minimal resistance.
In the second phase, Israeli forces were supposed to advance from al-Auja into Sinai, occupy the Umm Katef area and the village of Abu Ageila, and advance towards al-Arish in order to cut the Gaza Strip off from its vital supply route to Egypt.
The report said that “despite Yadin and Allon’s pride in their plan until their deaths, a rational analysis shows that there was no chance of implementing it, which is indeed what happened”.
It noted that even a single Egyptian brigade surrounded by the Israeli army in the Faluja Pocket held out for two months despite scarce supplies and repelled unsuccessful Israeli attacks that left many soldiers dead.
The report added that Israeli air and artillery power at the time had only a limited impact on the battlefield.
It also argued that there was no possibility that the United Nations, Britain and the United States would have allowed Israel to maintain a prolonged siege on Gaza until it surrendered.
According to the report, Israel failed to draw lessons from the Faluja Pocket or from the failed siege strategy in Operation Horev. It said this failure was later reflected in what it described as the futile siege of Egypt’s Third Army during the October 1973 war and the continuing siege of Gaza since Hamas took control of the Strip in 2007.
Ben-Gurion’s memoirs later addressed questions about why plans with little prospect of success were pursued and why he himself approved them.
At the beginning of the operation, he wrote: “Yigal Allon has the impression that the Egyptians want to leave the country. I do not know, but it is clear that they want to get rid of this miserable adventure and do not know how.”
The report said that both men “failed to understand the importance of the factor of honour in Egyptian and Palestinian culture, just as Golda Meir failed to understand it before the October 1973 war”.
On 22 December 1948, a storm struck, and heavy rain fell across the south, causing floods that blocked roads.
Despite this, Ben-Gurion and Yadin decided to launch the operation, which had previously been postponed because of the same weather conditions.
The Israeli army began implementing its diversionary plan.
Aircraft bombed Gaza from the air while ships shelled it from the sea, hitting many civilians.
The report said the Egyptians “took the bait” and rushed reinforcements from the al-Auja area towards the Strip.
That night, around 120 soldiers from Golani’s 13th Battalion, led by deputy commander Emmanuel Bershi, attacked Position 86.
The position was adjacent to the main north-south road through Gaza, north of Khan Younis and south of Deir al-Balah.
The Egyptian soldiers at the position were taken by surprise and fled.
To maintain the deception, Allon ordered the force not to abandon the position for at least 24 hours, until attacks began against positions between Asluj and al-Auja.
However, Bershi’s troops did not have enough ammunition or supplies, while floods prevented the convoy meant to resupply them from arriving.
The following day, a large Egyptian force equipped with tanks and launchers, led by deputy commander Mohammed Naguib, who later became Egypt’s first president, attacked and struck the Golani forces heavily.
Sixteen Golani soldiers were killed, 17 were wounded, and two were captured.
Bershi and a small number of his men survived and withdrew on foot.
Two days later, on 27 December, the Israeli army succeeded in capturing al-Auja.
Yigal Allon then decided to violate the orders of Ben-Gurion and Yadin and advance into Sinai in what later became known in Israel as the “First Sinai Incursion”.
Allon’s forces reached Umm Katef and Abu Ageila.
Fearing intervention by the United Nations, he ordered the area evacuated even before the UN, Britain and the United States issued a demand for Israeli forces to withdraw from Sinai.
The report said that, tactically, the Israeli army achieved favourable results during Operation Horev.
Egyptian forces were “expelled from al-Auja and the remaining Egyptian force was surrounded in the Faluja Pocket”.
Strategically, however, the operation failed to achieve its objectives. Egyptian forces were neither expelled from the Gaza Strip nor destroyed.
The report said the failure to occupy Gaza in December 1948 became one of the most costly failures in Israel’s military and political history because the Strip later became “a refuge for Palestinian refugees, a continuing source of unrest and attacks against Israel, and played a central role in several subsequent wars”.
It concluded that “the lesson not learned from Operation Horev, and from everything that followed it, is that failing to decisively settle battles when the opportunity exists, whether for tactical or political reasons or because of miscalculation, carries heavy costs for decades to come”.
The Resettlement Project
In December/January 2025, US President Donald Trump revived proposals to displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip by suggesting their transfer to neighbouring countries such as Egypt and Jordan as part of what he described as the “reconstruction of Gaza”.
Observers viewed the proposal as an extension of the “Deal of the Century” plans and efforts to liquidate the Palestinian cause.
The roots of the resettlement project stretch back to the 1950s, when the United States, in cooperation with the Egyptian government and UNRWA, promoted a plan to resettle Gaza’s Palestinian refugees in the Sinai Desert.
In 1953, the Egyptian government agreed to implement the project after negotiations with the agency.
The plan aimed to resettle around 12,000 Palestinian families on land in northwestern Sinai irrigated with Nile water.
A total of $30 million was allocated to support the project, and an agreement was reached to prepare 50,000 feddans out of 250,000 provided by the Egyptian government to accommodate the refugees.
Despite claims that the project was intended to reduce population density, Palestinians rejected it as an attempt to eliminate the right of return.
The project coincided with Israeli attacks on Gaza, most notably the Bureij refugee camp massacre in August 1953, in which 26 Palestinians were killed, in an effort to pressure refugees into accepting resettlement.
Popular Palestinian opposition culminated in a wave of major protests beginning in May 1953 and reaching their peak in March 1955.
Large demonstrations spread from Gaza to Rafah rejecting the Sinai project.
Political forces including communists, the Muslim Brotherhood and independents united in the “Higher National Committee” to organise the movement.
Egyptian authorities responded with repression, and Husni Bilal was killed by Egyptian police gunfire.
The protests expanded and included violence targeting UNRWA and Egyptian government officials, prompting Egyptian authorities to negotiate with movement leaders.
A meeting was held between the director of Egyptian investigations and committee representatives, who demanded cancellation of the project, the arming of Palestinians so they could defend themselves, and guarantees of public freedoms.
Some of these demands were accepted, resulting in the formal termination of the project and acknowledgement by the United Nations that the resettlement plan had failed.
Despite the de-escalation, Egyptian authorities launched raids and arrests against movement leaders only days after agreeing to the demands, as part of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s wider policy of suppressing opposition, particularly communists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nevertheless, popular and political pressure forced the government to formally withdraw the Sinai project.
According to UN documents cited in a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, Nasser later acknowledged that the refugees had become a force that could not be ignored in any future settlement.
Elements of the project resurfaced during Trump’s first term through the “Deal of the Century”, which included resettlement proposals for Palestinians in Gaza, while granting “Israel” full sovereignty over Jerusalem and settlements and preventing refugees from returning.
Earlier media reports, including from Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, had discussed Sinai as a geographical alternative for a Palestinian state within the plan, amid Egyptian neglect of development in northern Sinai, which increased under the rule of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Although former Trump envoy Jason Greenblatt denied that the plan contained any official provision granting Palestinians territory in Sinai, other reports, including from NBC, discussed proposals to temporarily transfer Gaza residents to countries such as Indonesia as part of reconstruction plans.
The ‘New Transfer’
The idea of displacing Palestinians did not begin with the genocidal war against Gaza or with Trump’s current plan.
It existed even before the establishment of “Israel” and before it obtained international recognition and support.
The term “transfer” refers to moving a population from its original place of residence to another area to create a territory with demographic homogeneity based on a single people or ethnicity.
In the Palestinian context, it refers to plans to remove Palestinians through a series of measures pursued by Zionist armed groups and later by successive Israeli governments.
The objective was to remove as many non-Jewish residents as possible from territories incorporated into “Israel” or targeted for annexation to preserve the “Jewish character of the Israeli state”.
From the earliest days of Zionist settlement in Palestine, Zionist leaders wrestled with what they called the “Arab question”: the problem of creating a settler state with a Jewish majority in Palestine, where Palestinian Arabs formed the overwhelming majority of the population and owned most of the land.
The preferred solution among most Zionist leaders became what was known as “transfer”.
The Institute for Palestine Studies describes the term as “a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and the organised expulsion of Palestine’s population into neighbouring Arab countries”.
From the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, to the founding father and first prime minister of “Israel”, David Ben-Gurion, Zionist leaders embraced the doctrine of “transfer” in one form or another.
According to a research paper by the Institute for Palestine Studies, their differences centred primarily on the methods to be used to achieve it.
Strong resistance by Palestine’s indigenous population to Zionism and to projects aimed at uprooting Palestinians through land purchases during the Mandate period affected British Mandate policy and was also reflected in Zionist thinking.
For Ben-Gurion, “transfer”, which he referred to in Hebrew in his personal diary as “gerush”, meaning expulsion, became both an obsession and a proposed solution in the period between the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936 and 1939 and 1948.
During this period, Ben-Gurion addressed a meeting of the Jewish Agency, saying: “I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”
He also wrote in his diary in 1937 that Zionism could eventually take control of all Mandatory Palestine between the river and the sea, in stages.
The Palestinian revolt intensified in the spring of 1938.
The uprising had begun against the British administration with demands for independence.
Against this backdrop, a partition commission headed by John Woodhead was established to “assist the British government in implementing the partition plan proposed by the government commission headed by Lord Robert Peel in the summer of 1937”.
The Peel Commission had been established to investigate the causes of the Great Palestinian Revolt that began in 1936 and sought acceptance from both Arabs and Jews for their proposed shares under a partition arrangement.
Palestinians renewed and intensified their revolt, while Jewish colonies in Palestine received protection.
The Peel Commission proposed dividing “Western Eretz Israel” into three units: a Jewish state covering one-fifth of the territory, an Arab area comprising three-quarters of the land that would be attached to the Emirate of Transjordan, and a British-controlled colonial area extending as a corridor through Jerusalem and Jaffa.
The partition scheme would have involved transferring Arab residents, voluntarily or forcibly, from areas allocated to the “Jewish state” into the Arab territory attached to Jordan and to neighbouring Arab countries.
Further Attempts at Displacement
In 1965, then Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol proposed directing part of the substantial resources allocated to the region towards resettling Palestinian refugees and integrating them into Arab countries.
“Israel” also expressed willingness to contribute financially to the resettlement process alongside major powers.
Eshkol’s proposal also failed, partly because surrounding Arab states rejected it and partly because Palestinians had begun creating political organisations expressing their aspirations to establish a homeland on their historical territory, most notably through the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In 1970, Ariel Sharon, then commander of the Israeli army’s Southern Command and later a prominent prime minister, adopted a plan to empty the Gaza Strip of its residents and relocate them to Sinai and the city of al-Arish, both of which were under Israeli occupation at the time.
The plan was never implemented, particularly after the October 1973 war.
Following the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and “Israel”, media reports emerged in 1995 about a document known as the “Abu Mazen-Beilin” agreement.
It reportedly contained the outcome of discussions between Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli justice minister Yossi Beilin.
Under the proposal, “Israel” would recognise Palestinian return as a “principled right”, provided that the Palestinian side acknowledged that implementing the right of return as stipulated in UN Resolution 194 had “become impractical”.
Yitzhak Rabin was reportedly expected to reveal the understandings as part of the Labour Party’s electoral platform ahead of the 1996 Knesset elections.
His assassination in 1995 contributed to keeping the agreement secret.
Israeli attempts to find ways of removing Palestinian refugees, as well as Palestinians living in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, continued.
By 2000, Israeli general Giora Eiland proposed a plan under which Cairo would cede territory in Sinai to a proposed Palestinian state in exchange for benefits granted to Egypt.
The proposal did not succeed.
Eiland later became the architect of the “Generals’ Plan” during the genocidal war against Gaza that began in 2023.
That proposal aimed to seize control of northern Gaza by displacing its residents southwards before imposing a complete siege on the north, including blocking food, water, fuel and other supplies, and using starvation as a means of pressure for displacement.
Eiland’s earlier proposal resurfaced in 2004 through Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, former president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but remained at the level of discussion.
Unlike Eiland’s proposal, Ben-Arieh’s plan envisioned allocating land in Sinai to the proposed Palestinian state, specifically around al-Arish.
It proposed establishing a seaport, an international railway line away from “Israel”, a large city to accommodate residents, extensive infrastructure, an electricity generation plant and a desalination project.
In exchange, Egypt would receive land in the Negev Desert in southern “Israel” equivalent in area to what it would provide Palestinians in Sinai, amounting to around 700 square kilometres.
The arrangement would also include security and political guarantees for Israel that settlements would not be built along the Egyptian border, while Egypt would be allowed to construct highways, railways and pipelines for transporting oil and natural gas.
In 2018, media discussion began around the US administration’s plan under Trump’s first term, which became known as the “Deal of the Century”.
The proposal was widely rejected by Palestinians and Arab states because it included displacement plans.
Explicit Calls for Transfer
Following the 1967 war, Israeli politics saw a clearer shift towards openly advocating transfer policies.
Political parties and movements emerged calling explicitly for the removal of Palestinians, including the Moledet party founded in the 1980s by Rehavam Ze’evi, the tourism minister assassinated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 2001.
Ze’evi called for Arabs to be expelled from the “Land of Israel” if they refused to fulfil all the “duties imposed on citizens of the State of Israel”.
According to Ze’evi, those duties included service in the Israeli occupation army.
Reflecting his commitment to the policy, he adopted the Hebrew letter “Tet” as his party’s symbol, the first letter of the Hebrew word for transfer.
During the genocidal war against Gaza, Israeli intelligence minister Gila Gamliel called in a secret internal document for a plan to displace Gaza’s population to Sinai after the end of the war.
The Intelligence Ministry was abolished in March 2024 and its powers were transferred to the Prime Minister’s Office.
The document proposed establishing a fortified area that would prevent evacuated residents from returning to the Strip and called for cooperation with as many countries as possible so they could receive displaced Palestinians from Gaza.
The document bore the logo of the Intelligence Ministry and was intended for internal discussions between government ministries rather than public release.
However, it reached a group establishing a movement called the “Settlement Headquarters, Gaza Strip”, which seeks to restore Israeli settlements in Gaza.
According to the Israeli newspaper Calcalist, the analysis contained in the document was based on assumptions that had led “Israel” from the outset to accept a model in which Palestinian leadership was divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, while continuing policies that delegitimised the Palestinian Authority as a legitimate partner.
On 17 October 2023, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy published a position paper calling for the “final resettlement of the entire Gaza population”.
In an unprecedented proposal, it suggested relocating them to Egypt’s cities of 6th of October and 10th of Ramadan, rather than limiting the proposal to the Sinai border region.
The paper called for exploiting the current moment to achieve “a longstanding Zionist objective of removing Palestinians from the land of historic Palestine”.
It argued that there was a “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip in coordination with the Egyptian government in exchange for support for the Egyptian economy”.
On 14 November of the same year, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for encouraging the “voluntary migration and absorption of Gaza Arabs in countries around the world”.
The same position was repeatedly expressed by former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
A Civil Administration for Gaza
In a move indicating longer-term intentions to entrench Israeli control over the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army announced in August 2024 the creation of a new position titled “Head of the Humanitarian-Civil Effort in the Gaza Strip”.
Brigadier General Elad Goren was appointed to the role and tasked with overseeing humanitarian administration and coordinating civilian affairs in Gaza.
According to Yedioth Ahronoth, the position resembles the role and powers of the head of Israel’s “Civil Administration” in the occupied West Bank.
Goren’s responsibilities would include monitoring the return of around one million displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza, organising reconstruction projects, coordinating with humanitarian organisations, distributing aid and preparing for winter.
According to the Israeli source, “Israel” seeks through this move to manage “civilian strategic tracks” over the long term in a way that provides it with “international legitimacy to continue the war on Gaza” while avoiding famine or a major humanitarian crisis.
Yedioth Ahronoth quoted a senior Israeli security official as saying: “This is not a temporary project. This position will remain with us for years to come.”
The official indicated that Israeli intervention in Gaza would not end soon, regardless of the course of military operations or any potential prisoner exchange agreements.
Goren’s appointment coincided with approval by the Israeli cabinet of a new map outlining the continued presence of the occupation army along the Philadelphi Corridor under any potential prisoner exchange deal with Palestinian resistance factions.
The roots of Israel’s “Civil Administration” date back to 1981, when then defence minister Ariel Sharon established separate administrative bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip under the pretext of managing the daily affairs of Palestinians living under occupation.
According to the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies, Mada al-Carmel, the real purpose was to improve the occupation’s image before the international community and give a false political character to the reality of military occupation.
Although most Civil Administration powers were transferred to the Palestinian Authority after its establishment, “Israel” retained certain “sovereign” authorities, including the issuing of identity cards and driving licences, civil registration, and direct control over security coordination.
Over time, “Israel” reactivated and expanded the Civil Administration’s role under a vision aligned with the policies of the far-right governing coalition, particularly National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Smotrich had pledged to his voters that he would dismantle the Civil Administration, while the security establishment and parties including Likud opposed such a step for security and administrative reasons.
Today, the Civil Administration’s role extends beyond security coordination to daily control over the lives of Palestinians in areas classified as Area C, where Israel retains final authority over administrative and legal affairs while the Palestinian Authority provides some services.
According to the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, the security establishment opposes imposing direct military administration over Gaza because of the enormous estimated cost of 20 billion shekels annually, around $5.5 billion.
This would include administering the lives of 2.3 million Palestinians and permanently deploying five military divisions.
In this context, Netanyahu has repeatedly said that post-war Gaza should be run through “a civil administration acceptable to Israel and with Arab support, supervising the fight against extremism beginning with schools and mosques”, while the international community would oversee reconstruction.
Regarding the latest plan to occupy Gaza, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the national security adviser opposed Netanyahu’s plan to seize control of the Strip, while the head of Mossad expressed reservations.
The channel added that implementing the plan would require the mobilisation of 250,000 reserve soldiers.
