US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff met on 2 August in Tel Aviv with the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza amidst demonstrations in Israel calling for a deal to free all of the hostages and end the war on Gaza.
In his meeting, Witkoff stressed that the US Administration is committed to a single hostage deal that he believes will bring the war to an end and “force” Hamas to disarm.
Quoted in Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper, last week, the Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum said Witkoff had talked about the release of the hostages as a “sacred mission” to US President Donald Trump. Witkoff had also assured the hostages’ families that Arab governments are demanding the demilitarisation of Hamas and said that he believed that “we are very, very close to a solution to end this war.”
However, according to a report by the US network CNN, the options the Israeli government is discussing for the future of Gaza include either the encirclement of Gaza City and other population centres or the conquest of the Strip.
An Israeli journalist, Chaim Levinson, wrote in Haaretz that Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir believes that the Israeli military operations in Gaza have been purposeless. His plan at the present moment is to protect “his depleted soldiers” through the building of defensive lines and pursuing intelligence-based strikes and assassinations, Levinson said.
Last week, the United Nations in New York hosted an international conference co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia that supported the two-state solution and called on UN member states to lend their support to a declaration urging collective action to end the war on Gaza and to reach a just, peaceful, and lasting resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Both France and the UK have announced that they will recognise a state of Palestine when the UN General Assembly convenes for its 80th session in September. However, the two countries have attached certain conditions to this recognition — for example, the disarming of Hamas.
Hamas has said that it will lay down its arms once a state of Palestine is established with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The disastrous and unprecedented humanitarian situation in Gaza has played a major role in extending the understanding of the international community of the plight of the Palestinian people and has led to a belated recognition that it has become necessary to push for a serious, credible, and a sustainable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that will guarantee the sovereignty and security of an independent state of Palestine and Israel.
But for the moment the present and future of Gaza remain in limbo. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more interested in his political survival than in negotiating a way out of the war, and for this reason he has kept saying that the war will end once Israel achieves “total victory” without spelling out when that elusive victory will be reached and when there will be the release of the remaining Israeli hostages.
Instead of setting out his ideas on the future governance of Gaza, Netanyahu has let the most extreme-right Ministers in his governing Coalition address this question publicly without his confirming or rejecting their ideas.
On the contrary, there have been reports that the Israeli Government is mulling the full occupation of Gaza. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared on 29 July that Gaza is an “inseparable part of Israel,” for example.
Is this the official position of the government of Israel? The answer is subject to debate and speculation. Personally, I am afraid that this could be the undeclared goal of the Israeli Coalition, but Netanyahu is waiting for the right moment to give a green light to implement it.
The Israeli newspaper the Times of Israel published an opinion piece on 30 July by a well-known Israeli political analyst, in which he argued that the best option for Gaza in the post- war era is what he described as an “international governance mechanism” with American oversight, on the one hand, and participation by “regional players” and “ostensibly legitimate Palestinian governance,” on the other.
In sum, the future of Gaza lies somewhere between this option and the extreme Israeli vision of reoccupying Gaza, if not its outright annexation.
Should we expect the Trump Administration to be a fair and credible arbiter? I am not sure, although I guess there is a plan for the future of Gaza that is part of Israeli next steps in the West Bank, the details of which have been cleared with the White House.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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