Muhammad Shehada
+972 Magazine / January 29, 2026
By undermining a new Palestinian technocratic body, Israel is trying to make Gaza appear ungovernable — and prove the need for its sustained military rule.
When U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff announced the start of phase two of President Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan in mid-January, it marked the inauguration of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) — a 15-member Palestinian technocratic body tasked with providing services and managing reconstruction in the ravaged enclave, supervised by Trump’s Board of Peace and Gaza Executive Board.
Within hours of the announcement, all major Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, had welcomed the formation of the NCAG. Many of the committee’s members are well-known and respected figures who quickly garnered popular support. Chairman Ali Shaath himself lost his father during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and demands Israel be “held accountable,” while having been openly critical of Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” plan. The committee’s health commissioner, Dr. Aed Yaghi, is a longtime civil society activist who headed the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Gaza. Ayed Abu Ramadan, the trade and industry commissioner, was chair of Gaza’s Chamber of Commerce and has been a vehement opponent of Israel’s policy of backing criminal gangs in the Strip.
The public in Gaza also breathed a sigh of relief when the committee’s first decision was to waive all taxes or fees on individuals and businesses imposed by Hamas’ government (both before October 7 and since the ceasefire), and when Shaath promised the reopening of the Rafah Crossing in his first televised appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
But since its formation two weeks ago, Israel has yet to allow the NCAG to even enter Gaza, let alone rebuild it.
Even though Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to join the Board of Peace at Trump’s invitation, the Israeli prime minister publicly rebuked the president and criticized the Gaza Executive Board as running “contrary to Israeli policy.” Shortly after, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared “Gaza is ours” and called the Trump plan “bad for Israel.” Smotrich demanded that the plan be shelved in place of resuming “a full-force assault on Gaza” and rebuilding “permanent Israeli settlements” in the enclave.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv even reported that Israel is currently “preparing for the collapse of the Trump plan” and has already made preparations for resuming its assault on Gaza “without restrictions,” seeking this time to directly occupy the entire Strip. Israel’s Channel 14 further highlighted that the army’s chief of staff has approved plans for a large-scale attack on the enclave, including the invasion of areas that Israeli forces didn’t enter during two years of fighting.
In other words, Israel has made no secret of its intention to keep Gaza deadlocked indefinitely. The Israeli government is proactively taking steps to ensure that phase two of Trump’s plan will not proceed as planned — and at most, as Netanyahu remarked dismissively, remain a “symbolic” spectacle — in order to convince the Americans that Gaza is ungovernable, and thus prove the need for sustained Israeli military rule.
Handpicked technocracy
The formation of the NCAG is long overdue. It could have been appointed to replace the Hamas government in Gaza over two years ago: In December 2023, Hamas’ leadership unanimously agreed to hand over governing duties to an interim technocratic administrative body, according to several of the group’s leaders.
Multiple Palestinian leaders have told me that the names of potential committee members have been on Netanyahu’s desk since at least August 2024. Egypt facilitated talks between Hamas, Fatah, and the other Palestinian factions to reach agreement on the makeup of the committee, developing a list of 41 names that was later narrowed down to 15. According to the Palestinian leaders, Netanyahu didn’t give an answer until two weeks ago.
Even after Trump incorporated the administrative committee into his 20-point plan, Israel kept procrastinating for over 100 days until Witkoff pressed Netanyahu to make a decision, hoping the NCAG’s creation would create “momentum” after Israel had brought the ceasefire to the brink of collapse through repeated violations of the first phase and by stalling the arrival of the second.
Israel’s Shin Bet security agency repeatedly vetoed most of the names proposed for the committee — including human rights lawyer Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network in Gaza, who was supposed to chair the committee, or Maged Abu Ramadan, the former mayor of Gaza City and current Palestinian Authority health minister. Israel sought to further manipulate the list of names to put the committee on a collision course with Hamas and other factions in Gaza.
According to a knowledgeable Palestinian source and a senior British official, half of the technocratic committee’s members were handpicked by the UAE and belong to the faction around Mohammed Dahlan — once a top Fatah leader in Gaza opposed to PA President Mahmoud Abbas before he was exiled to the UAE in 2011, where he is close to President Mohamed bin Zayed.
Israel knows Hamas is suspicious of the UAE’s role and believes that it seeks the group’s demise, especially given its alleged support for the Israeli-backed Abu Shabab criminal gang and its investment in the dystopian “New Rafah” concentration camp. Yet Hamas has assented to many of those names, as it doesn’t want to be seen as an obstacle to progress. However, the role that most concerns Hamas is the NCAG’s security commissioner, who would take charge of the police and other security agencies and oversee an expected Northern Ireland-style decommissioning of Hamas’ offensive weapons.
This portfolio was supposed to be given to retired PA general Mohammed Tawfiq Heles. However, his name was swapped out at the last minute for retired PA intelligence officer Sami Nasman, despite Israel pledging to veto any PA affiliates in the committee. (Shaath was almost blocked for this reason, but Israel deemed him close enough to Dahlan to counterbalance his affiliation with the PA.)
Hamas and other factions in Gaza view Nasman as a “compromised” figure and accuse him of “collaborating with Israel,” according to two sources close to the group. In 2016, a Gaza court sentenced Nasman to 15 years in prison in absentia for alleged espionage and for recruiting cells tasked with burning vehicles and attacking public infrastructure to create unrest and destabilize Hamas’ government. A knowledgeable source told me that after Nasman’s retirement, he too drew close to Dahlan’s circle, and that the UAE pushed for his appointment to the NCAG.
Nasman’s inclusion in the committee has caused significant frustration among the leadership and members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas may try to prevent him from entering Gaza. This is precisely Israel’s aim: to ensure Hamas militants will have no trust in the NCAG and refuse to cooperate in a decommissioning process led by their archnemesis, which Israel would then use as a pretext for resuming its assault.
Delay, attack, obstruct
Netanyahu has plenty more tricks up his sleeve to prevent the NCAG from being able to do its job. While crossing from Ramallah to Jordan to fly to Egypt for the committee’s first meeting on Jan. 15, Shaath was held by Israel for six hours at the Allenby Crossing. Similarly, Israel blocked Husni Al-Mughni, the NCAG’s commissioner for tribal affairs (who is also from Dahlan’s orbit), from crossing from Gaza into Egypt, likely because he had endorsed Hamas’ crackdown on Israel’s collaborators in the Strip.
This was merely a prelude to further Israeli restrictions on the NCAG in an effort to obstruct it from carrying out its mandate and ultimately lead to its collapse. Israel is currently blocking the NCAG from employing any civil servants from either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, which means the committee’s 15 members would be on their own without any staff on the ground to run the enclave. Even if Israel backs down from this, it will insist on vetting every single civil servant employed by the NCAG, giving Netanyahu more power to limit its work.
As soon as the committee was announced, Israel also unleashed its criminal proxy gangs in Gaza to attack it publicly and vow to boycott and undermine it. Israel has recently used these gangs to carry out assassinations and sabotage operations in the parts of Gaza under Hamas’ control while maintaining plausible deniability, which bodes ill for the safety of the NCAG’s members.
Indeed, committee members who cross into Gaza would first be forced to go through the area occupied by the Abu Shabab militia, right next to the Rafah border crossing. The gang has installed multiple checkpoints in this area, routinely stopping international delegations and aid convoys. And although the Trump deal stipulated explicitly that Israel would reopen the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt to allow for the movement of people in and out of the enclave, Israel kept the crossing closed for over 100 days after its announcement — and has continued to do so for two weeks since the formation of the NCAG.
Israel’s pretext was that Hamas had not returned the body of Ran Gvili, the final Israeli captive still in Gaza. However, the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom revealed on Monday that the army had known the approximate location of Gvili’s body for over a month, yet Netanyahu refused to authorize a mission to retrieve his remains until the last minute when Trump pushed for the opening of the crossing.
Despite this pressure, Israel has imposed numerous restrictions meant to render the opening of Rafah a purely symbolic gesture. For example, the government is planning to permit only 50 Palestinians to enter Gaza from Egypt each day; given that there are around 150,000 Gazans in Egypt alone, this would mean it would take almost a decade for all of them to return home.
Israel also insists that three times as many people will be allowed to leave Gaza each day as those returning, while also seeking to bar any Gazan born outside the Strip in the last two years from entering — as well as those born abroad who were not in Gaza when the war began — even if they have a Palestinian ID, meaning most families with young children would be de facto banned from their homeland.
The Israeli government will also retain full control over who is allowed to enter or leave Gaza, as all names would be sent to the Shin Bet and COGAT, the army’s civilian coordination unit, to approve in advance. Passports would also be scanned and sent to the Israeli authorities before they get stamped by the local personnel at the crossing.
Anyone entering Gaza would also have to go through an Israeli checkpoint for manual inspection by soldiers — a step meant to deter people from returning, since Israel has shown its willingness to kidnap and imprison Palestinians without due process or legal counsel. Taken together, these policies suggest that Israel’s longstanding ambition to cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants has not subsided.
Deliberately unworkable proposals
According to a senior Arab official and two European diplomats, the Israelis have an approach of circumventing any demands for progress in Gaza by playing what they describe as a game of “whack-a-mole,” or adopting a stance of “Excellent, but…”
The first refers to Israel’s strategy of dragging out discussions with mediators or at Trump’s Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Israel with empty talking points and propaganda to justify continued restrictions. It then takes members of the CMCC — the body tasked with implementing the Trump plan — days to articulate a response that debunks or provides a technical solution to Israeli objections, by which time the Israelis would throw new ones at them.
For instance, Israel is currently restricting the entry of temporary prefabricated homes into Gaza and even limiting the entry of tents under the pretext that Hamas can extract the tiny amount of aluminium or steel used to erect them and recycle it into weapons and missiles. The absurdity of this claim is immediately made clear by the fact that Israel has been allowing large quantities of canned food into Gaza — as well as by Israel’s own intelligence, which indicates that Hamas is not rearming and does not even “have the ability to produce rockets and RPGs.”
The second Israeli strategy of “Excellent, but…” refers to Israel’s approach of circumventing any demands for progress with deliberately unworkable ideas. For instance, when European diplomats brought up the need to revive Gaza’s banking sector in Gaza, the Israelis responded: “Excellent, but we will create a new bank in Gaza with a crypto digital wallet system” — a proposal undermined by the lack of stable internet and electricity in the Strip, not to mention other vulnerabilities of cryptocurrency.
Similarly, a senior Arab diplomat told me that when she insisted upon the long-term unification of the West Bank and Gaza under one government, the response was, “Excellent, but under the technocratic administrative committee,” a body whose only real authority is to provide humanitarian services. The Israelis and Americans explained to her that Gaza could act as a pilot: If the committee is successful there, it could potentially replace the PA in the West Bank.
The diplomat added that when she raised the need for Israel to release billions of shekels of withheld PA tax revenues, the answer was: “Excellent, but we will release it to the Board of Peace and the NCAG since Gaza is also part of the Palestinian territory.”
Aiding this Israeli approach is Aryeh Lightstone, the American businessman and right-wing rabbi who serves as a link between the CMCC, Jared Kushner, and Witkoff. Lightstone, who was a senior advisor to the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is so close to Netanyahu that the latter asked him to run his 2022 election campaign. He was reportedly involved in the establishment of the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, responsible for the massacre of hundreds of starving Gazans at aid distribution sites.
Two Israeli experts who met Lightstone described him as “more ideological and more right-wing than Netanyahu,” explaining that he kills any complaints raised by the CMCC to Washington. Lightstone was recently appointed as a special advisor to Trump’s Board of Peace, giving him even more power over Gaza and allowing Israel even greater leeway.
Cementing perpetual occupation
Perhaps the greatest obstacle the NCAG faces is the fact that the Israeli army still occupies roughly 60 percent of Gaza, and is not planning to withdraw anytime soon. In the meantime, it is entrenching its presence with multiple outposts in the area, while cultivating more collaborators and gangs to do its bidding on the other side of the so-called “Yellow Line.”
Israel has conditioned any withdrawal on the creation and deployment of the International Stabilization Force (ISF), but Netanyahu has sought to prevent this by all means. This includes vetoing the participation of Turkey and Qatar in the ISF and insisting that the force acts as a subcontractor of Israel’s army and occupation — policing Palestinians, confiscating weapons from Hamas, and destroying tunnels. Israel even pushed Azerbaijan to withdraw from the ISF to ensure that it remains dead on arrival, according to a senior Arab official.
Without an Israeli pullback, the NCAG would either be barred from accessing over 60 percent of Gaza, or be forced to operate in that area under Israeli control, thus leading its members to be viewed by the public as collaborators.
Israel is also pushing for the establishment of a concentration camp in Rafah, which only individuals screened by Israeli security agencies would be allowed to move into. If the NCAG were to operate there, this would also substantially erode its legitimacy, along with its inability to provide adequate shelter and services elsewhere.
Israel further insists that no reconstruction be allowed in Gaza until the full disarmament of Hamas is completed, a sensitive process that is likely to take years. And instead of an initial focus on Hamas’ offensive weapons (such as rockets), Netanyahu is insisting on collecting 60,000 rifles, some of which are in the hands of powerful families, clans, or private individuals.
Through deliberate sabotage, the unleashing of criminal proxies, and a web of impossible conditions, Netanyahu is ensuring the Trump plan is stillborn, manufacturing the very chaos he claims necessitates indefinite Israeli military control. This is not merely policy disagreement; it is a deliberate strategy to cement perpetual occupation.
Muhammad Shehada is a Gazan writer and political analyst, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations
