John Haltiwanger
Foreign Policy / February 6, 2025
[via email]Negotiations for the second phase of the fragile Gaza cease-fire began this week. There are myriad obstacles to the six-week truce moving forward to the next stage and widespread uncertainty about who will govern postwar Gaza. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has made a bold, controversial proposal for the United States to take control of the coastal territory.
To get a clearer picture on where things stand, SitRep sat down with Sharren Haskel, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, at the Israeli Consulate in New York City on Tuesday.
What Israel wants
Since the cease-fire began on Jan. 19, there have been exchanges of hostages and Palestinian prisoners. But 79 hostages remain in Gaza, many of whom are believed to be dead. Bringing those hostages home remains “our greatest mission,” Haskel said. “We want all of them to come back. We want all the families to be reunited.”
When asked about the hurdles to moving the tenuous truce forward, Haskel said Israel doesn’t want a cease-fire but a “long-term solution where we can live side by side with our neighbours.” This will require dismantling Hamas’s military power and ensuring that the militant group doesn’t “hold any civilian power so that it cannot control and indoctrinate an entire population,” to deny the militant group the ability to recruit, she said.
Haskel conceded that Hamas’s military capabilities can’t be completely destroyed, but she said Israel has been able “to turn it from a full operational army of terror with a lot of equipment capability” to a type of guerrilla terrorist organization and that that change “makes a difference.”
How Israel sees UNRWA
The Israeli diplomat said Israel’s “fight against UNRWA is part of the fight on the civilian power held by Hamas,” referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the main U.N. aid agency for Palestinians. An Israeli ban on the agency went into effect last week, despite opposition from much of the international community, including top U.S. allies.
Israel has alleged that UNRWA has been “infiltrated by Hamas,” a charge that the agency vehemently rejects. A U.N. investigation last year found that nine UNRWA staffers, out of the more than 30,000 the agency employs, “may have” had links to Hamas. Those staffers were fired.
Critics of the ban, which bars UNRWA from operating on Israeli soil and prohibits Israeli authorities from interacting with the agency, warn that it’s coming into effect at a precarious moment and risks undermining the cease-fire by contributing to instability in Gaza.
“They don’t understand the situation in-depth,” Haskel said of those critics, while dismissing U.N. investigations into the agency’s alleged Hamas ties as a “joke.”
Haskel reiterated Israel’s allegations of deep ties between UNRWA and Hamas, insisting that the U.N. agency is “part of the problem” and ineffective at distributing humanitarian assistance. But experts on international aid say no other agency or organization has the same capacity as UNRWA to assist Palestinians.
About Trump’s Gaza idea …
Amid open questions about the sustainability of the Gaza cease-fire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington this week and met with Trump at the White House.
At a joint press conference with the Israeli leader on Tuesday, Trump sent shockwaves across the globe when he said the United States should take over Gaza, relocate its entire population of 2.1 million Palestinians to other countries, and rebuild the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The president initially suggested that Palestinians in Gaza should be permanently displaced. The administration subsequently backtracked on this, stating that the displacement would be temporary while emphasizing that the president had not committed to involving U.S. troops (after he didn’t rule it out at first).
Trump’s proposal was swiftly rejected by Palestinian leaders and U.S. allies worldwide, including Egypt and Jordan. Saudi Arabia also unequivocally rejected the plan and signalled that it threatened the Trump administration’s goal of seeing the country normalize ties with Israel. U.N. chief António Guterres responded to Trump’s idea with a warning against “ethnic cleansing.”
But Haskel welcomed the proposal.
“Trump’s idea for finding the Palestinian people, temporary refuge while the US rebuild[s] Gaza, is an outside of the box solution that we should seriously look into. More of the same won’t work,” Haskel told SitRep via WhatsApp on Wednesday.
“We have been looking at different solutions for the day after the war with Hamas. We have been trying for more than 75 years to solve this dispute and every solution has failed,” Haskel continued. “We have to start again in Gaza and that’s essentially what the [U.S.] President is suggesting and this won’t happen without American leadership and regional cooperation. All that the usual suspects are suggesting regarding the future of Gaza is rewarding Hamas’s terrorism of October 7 with Palestinian statehood.”
Haskel’s comments echoed remarks from Netanyahu, who told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump’s proposal was a “remarkable idea” that “should be really pursued, examined, pursued, and done because I think it will create a different future for everyone.”
Trump on Thursday doubled down on the plan despite international condemnation. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Gaza would be “turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” adding that Palestinians would be “resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.”
On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that he had ordered the country’s military to make a plan for the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians from Gaza.
John Haltiwanger is a reporter at Foreign Policy covering U.S. national security, the Middle East, and more
