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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're talking about the one-year anniversary of the attacks that Hamas perpetrated in Israel. It's a good time to talk about Gaza. Josh Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy. Josh, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Josh Keating: Thanks for having me, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Things are at a much lower boil, but that doesn't mean the war is any closer to a conclusion. Where does this go if not ceasefire? What happens?
--:-- Josh Keating: The question I was trying to answer in this piece I just published was, has Israel effectively reoccupied Gaza? Israel, of course, occupied Gaza up until 2005, the same way it currently does the West Bank. In 2005, it pulled out its troops along with, you know, several Israeli settlements that were there.
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--:-- Josh Keating: And, you know, the answer I came up with was probably not in quite the same way. It's not going to look like it does in the West Bank. There are some voices in Israel in the influential settler movement. That includes the far-right finance minister, Basil El-Smotrich, who actually want to reestablish settlements in Gaza, who want to basically occupy it the way that the West Bank is currently occupied.
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--:-- Josh Keating: Returning to Gaza, they cheer. That is the goal of Zionist settler organization Nahala, one of more than a dozen groups now advocating for the re-establishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza.
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--:-- Josh Keating: There doesn't seem to be much appetite for that, but neither are they going to withdraw entirely either. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made pretty clear that he wants to keep a military presence there, but not sort of fully administer it.
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--:-- Josh Keating: I would define the end of the war in Gaza when Hamas no longer rules Gaza. We throw them out. To do that, you need to have a military victory, and you have to have also a political victory to destroy their governance.
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--:-- Josh Keating: The issue with that is it gets us into this sort of uneasy middle position where, you know, Israel hasn't quite pulled out, but, you know, it also hasn't sort of established the conditions that would allow Gaza to either rebuild or establish some kind of adequate civilian governance.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, it sounds kind of like the United States and Afghanistan or something. Are we talking about a forever war here?
--:-- Josh Keating: There are people like General David Petraeus in the U.S. who've urged Israel to do, you know, what they call like clear, hold and build, which is basically, you know, you come in, you clear out the militants in an area and then you sort of govern it. You set out, you provide basic services.
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--:-- Josh Keating: Just as we did in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in these other cities, as we cleared, held, and then went further. But we were rebuilding immediately as we proceeded so that the civilians could come back into them. We could restore them.
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--:-- Josh Keating: Israel doesn't seem to be, you know, digging wells or building schools in these areas it's left behind. And, you know, clearly Hamas is degraded as a military organization, but it's sort of converted into a kind of insurgency where it's launching sort of hit-and-run attacks.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If the position in Israel is that it's going to keep its troops there as long as Hamas poses any military threat, That seems to be a recipe for permanent occupation without the kind of service provision portion of counterinsurgency.
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--:-- Josh Keating: Okay, so Israel may be on the precipice of some kind of permanent occupation in Gaza if they're not already there. But they're not worried about taking care of the Palestinian people.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does that mean? Who is running Gaza? who is providing services for the people who live there?
--:-- Josh Keating: Well, at the moment, Hamas still is to some extent. I mean, even as the group's leadership has been decimated, most of the government buildings have been destroyed.
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--:-- Josh Keating: From sources I've talked to, Hamas is still the kind of main service provider at least in parts of Gaza. But its capabilities are dwindling. There's still sort of rampant malnutrition.
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--:-- Josh Keating: This is Ahmed Kanan. His aunt, Isra Khalak, says he weighs just over 13 pounds, half of his pre-war body weight.
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--:-- Josh Keating: The health system's been devastated in Gaza. The polio virus spreading fast for the first time in 25 years. And this is its first victim. Baby Abdur Rahman is sleeping through the sound of an Israeli drone overhead
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just want to go back a year to October 7th, 2023, and ask you, Josh, what was Hamas trying to accomplish when they, you know, horrifically attacked Israel?
--:-- Josh Keating: I think there was a sense at the time that the Israeli-Palestinian issue was kind of falling off the global agenda. I mean, you saw Israel sort of making these normalization deals with other Arab governments. The focus was all on Iran.
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--:-- Josh Keating: And, you know, I think this was an effort to both sort of put their struggle back on the agenda. And in the process, I'm sure we're under no illusions that this would prompt the sort of devastating Israeli response that would, you know, deepen Israel's international isolation and cause international criticism.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So did that work? I mean, in some sense, yes. I mean, Israel is more isolated than ever. They've gotten more international criticism. Those normalization deals haven't materialized.
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--:-- Josh Keating: But did this make life better for the Palestinians? Did this accomplish anything for Gaza? I mean, I think you have to say no.
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--:-- Josh Keating: I mean, we're certainly no closer to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Certainly no close to anything that will sort of restore some measure of sovereignty, security and dignity for the people of Gaza.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now, in a weird way, we're back to where we were. You know, Israel's like focusing on Iran again. They're fighting in the north with Hezbollah. They are escalating their conflict with Iran.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And once again, the suffering of Gaza, the conflict between Israel and Hamas and Gaza is falling off the agenda. People are paying less attention to it than they were a few months ago.
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--:-- Josh Keating: So after a whole lot of conflict, a whole lot of bloodshed, a whole lot of people dead, we're almost back to where we were a year ago.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Josh Keating, Vox.com.
