Israel wants 'effective control' of Gaza without ensuring stable govt, institutions & infrastructure
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00:00 Well, amid this growing expectation that a possible deal is imminent on the return of
00:06 at least some of those hostages who have been held since October the 7th in Gaza, there's
00:12 speculation of course about what has changed to enable any such deal and what any such
00:18 deal might entail, as we heard there.
00:21 And to try to answer some of these questions, I'm joined on the line now from London by
00:26 Dr. H.A. Helya, who is a Senior Associate Fellow in International Security Studies at
00:34 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and also the Royal United Services Institute.
00:40 First of all, Dr. Helya, thank you so much for joining us.
00:45 If I might ask you to begin with, if as we are being led to believe then that this deal
00:50 is imminent, what do you think has changed?
00:53 What might have made it possible?
00:55 I suspect, and I'm saying here purely on the basis of speculation, in this regard there
01:03 isn't terribly much more than what your own reporters note in the public domain, but I
01:08 suspect that additional pressure was brought to bear by DC, continued contact with the
01:16 Qataris and keeping in mind that the hostages that are being released are supposed to be
01:22 women and children.
01:24 I don't think that that was something that was terribly difficult to swing in terms of
01:30 Hamas and those holding the hostages.
01:34 I suspect it gets more difficult here on in when they start talking about male soldiers.
01:42 Women and children, I think, is going to be much easier.
01:46 Now, you've said in the past that you don't actually think Hamas intended to take so many
01:53 hostages.
01:55 Why do you think that?
01:56 And if you're right, how do you think they are handling what happened, this large number
02:02 of hostages?
02:05 So everything that we've seen, especially in the past sort of two or three weeks, people
02:12 have dug up as much as they could about the actual day itself of October 7th, but everything
02:19 we've seen indicates that Hamas planned for a particular type of operation where, yes,
02:26 it would come into Israel, of course, where it would target various targets and then would
02:33 return back to Gaza with a limited number of hostages, limited in comparison to what
02:38 finally happened in the end.
02:40 And I think that what you've seen over the course of the last couple of weeks is that
02:45 they went in, the result from the Gaza IDF battalion was actually far less than what
02:52 they thought they were going to have to encounter in terms of resistance, and they just kept
02:59 on going.
03:00 I don't think, by the way, this absolves them of any responsibility whatsoever.
03:05 My point is that I don't think that they were prepared for the repercussions of what was
03:10 going to happen next, because I don't think they prepared to go in that deep and to take
03:15 that many hostages in the first place, but they did.
03:20 And so, you know, speculation in this deal is that there might be a five day ceasefire.
03:27 Israel's stated objectives were to get all of the hostages back and to destroy Hamas.
03:32 So what will happen after this truce?
03:36 Will it be the same?
03:38 And what will the truce itself look like?
03:41 So I think that this is the the unwritten or unspoken truth that people don't really
03:46 want to talk about.
03:47 So we've been we've been speaking a lot over the past month, a month or so now.
03:53 It's been six weeks since October 7th.
03:56 And we've been talking a great deal about how there's a division within Israeli society
04:03 on what to prioritize, the ceasefire and getting the hostages or the bombardment.
04:10 And we we we cover this or we discuss this against the backdrop of overwhelming international
04:16 support for a ceasefire while on the one hand and then on the other, the United States and
04:23 a few European countries being opposed to one.
04:28 It's not the same debate.
04:30 OK, in the international community, it's a debate between continued bombing and ceasefire.
04:37 In Israeli society, the debate is very different.
04:41 It's about delaying bombing or continuing the bombing.
04:45 OK, so this division that you see unfolding right now, you know, between the families
04:51 of the hostages and so on, all of that disappears once the hostages are gone.
04:56 I don't think that there's appetite within Israeli society to go into a ceasefire ceasefire.
05:03 I think it's purely about we want the hostages back.
05:06 And then once the hostages are back, then, you know, the gloves can come off.
05:10 While we have you with us, there is so much speculation about what Gaza might look like
05:16 when this war is over.
05:18 What are your thoughts?
05:19 What do you think might be the fate of Gaza after this?
05:24 I think it's a terrible situation.
05:26 I think what you have in Gaza are 1.7 out of 2.2 million people who have been displaced
05:32 yet again because many of them are refugees in the first place.
05:35 I think 70 percent of people who live in Gaza are originally refugees anyway, and now they've
05:39 been forcibly displaced from their homes.
05:43 Infrastructure is in a shambles.
05:45 Health infrastructure, educational infrastructure.
05:48 You have huge portions of particularly the north that are completely, you know, they're
05:54 unlivable.
05:55 I think you have the spread of disease, which has been warned about by the United Nations,
06:01 which is why we're seeing so many calls for medical aid to get through.
06:07 You don't have a solution in terms of governance that everybody seems to agree upon.
06:14 You know, the United States is calling for some sort of Arab force and the Palestinian
06:19 Authority to be returned.
06:21 The Israelis are saying there's not going to be any Palestinian Authority that returns,
06:24 that they will maintain a quote unquote overall security control over the the strip.
06:32 And you also have Arab states saying we're not interested in coming in to clean up Israel's
06:37 mess.
06:38 So what you have, unfortunately, is this bizarre situation where the Israelis are going to
06:44 continue being in occupation of the Gaza Strip, an occupation, I have to say, has not that
06:50 has never ended.
06:51 You know, from 1967, Israel is the occupying power, a power in this in the Gaza Strip.
06:58 This did not end in 2005 with the withdrawal of settlements or military troops on the ground
07:04 because they continue to maintain and they definitely still can maintain effective control
07:09 over the strip.
07:10 So they want to have, quote unquote, their cake and eat it, too.
07:13 They want to have effective control over the strip, but without taking responsibility for
07:17 what happens inside of it.
07:19 And that makes for a very deleterious situation.
07:22 It means that governance in Gaza, as it stands right now, will be completely impossible.
07:28 And I'm not sure how people are going to get around that.
07:30 You need to have stable institutions inside the strip.
07:34 You need to have medical infrastructure.
07:35 You need to have educational infrastructure.
07:38 You need to be an anybody that comes in as part of any multinational international peacekeeping
07:43 force of any kind whatsoever.
07:45 It's not going to do that if they know that the Israelis are going to be in effective
07:49 control over the strip and not give that up.
07:53 You know, it's either you're in or you're out.
07:55 And right now, I just don't see any way around that unless the goalposts are shifted quite
07:59 tremendously and the United States is not moving in that direction at all.
08:03 It talks a great deal about, you know, the need for a two state solution, but it hasn't
08:07 talked about the need to remove the settlements from the West Bank, for example.
08:12 And this makes it very difficult to move forward.
08:14 Okay, well, thank you so much for your thoughts on that.
08:17 I should point out, of course, that the Israeli settlers did move out in 2005.
08:24 Many people will remember pictures of them hauled out by soldiers after the Israeli government
08:29 made that decision.
08:30 Absolutely, of course, I realize you did point that out.
08:34 And that Israel, I should point out, says that they do not intend to reoccupy as such
08:41 Gaza.
08:42 We will be following, of course, events on any hostage deal throughout the day.