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Cut Gaza in half, Naftali Bennett says, and go for slow victory

The former prime minister envisions Israel controlling an empty north and all Gazan civilians in the south until Hamas surrenders and releases all hostages.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett outlined a plan to defeat Hamas to The New York Times Friday that envisions cutting the Gaza Strip in half until the terror organization surrenders and releases all its hostages.

Working carefully, Israel should first set up a “security strip” two kilometers wide along Gaza’s entire border that would permanently be a no-go zone for Palestinians, he said. The northern half of the coastal enclave would then be occupied and fully controlled by the IDF.

While some 800,000 Arab civilians have heeded Israel’s warning over two weeks ago to leave the area, about 200,000 are still left, many prevented from fleeing by Hamas forces unwilling to let go of their protection as human shields. Israel would set up two humanitarian corridors for the rest of the civilians to go south, Bennett explained, and allow food, water and medicine to reach this section of the Strip, which borders Egypt.

Emptying the area of civilians will save their lives and isolate the battlefield, which would be concentrated in Gaza City, with its extensive network of terror tunnels hiding terrorists and armaments. The IDF could then conduct an “ongoing and persistent series of targeted ground raids” he noted, mainly with elite troops and combat engineers, instead of invading the city en masse and risking thousands of casualties in booby-trapped passageways.

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“I don’t want to get into a Viet Cong-type war of tunnels,” Bennett explained. “I want to surprise them by letting them dry out in the tunnels. Imagine a Hamas terrorist waiting in one of those tunnels with his weapons. The one thing he doesn’t expect is to be stuck there for nine months with no logistics backing, running out of food, cold, wet and miserable.”

What he dubbed the “Gaza Siege Plan” would release the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of reservists now massed at the border to go back to work and revive Israel’s economy, he said. But it would be slow work, the former commando acknowledged, with the process of getting Hamas to admit defeat taking months, if not years, comparable to the Western campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

As an incentive to end the war more quickly, Bennett would be willing to give any terrorists who surrender a guarantee of safe passage to a third country, suggesting Algeria or Qatar as a possibility. Qatar has supported Hamas with public statements, refuge, and billions of dollars in aid over the years.

It is what Israel did in 1982, he pointed out, when the IDF launched the First Lebanon War to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which used Lebanon’s south as a launching pad for Katyusha rockets that rained down on Israel’s northern residents for years. Sitting on the outskirts of Beirut, Jerusalem agreed to allow the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, and hundreds of his terrorists, to leave by boat for Tunisia, instead of invading the Lebanese capital and engaging in street-by-street fighting that would have skyrocketed the casualty count.

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Once Hamas is completely defeated, the northern residents of Gaza could return to their homes, Bennett said. The only part Israel would hold would be the security strip, for years if need be.

His plan did not go as far outlining who could be successfully placed in control of the coastal enclave.

It is unknown if Bennett’s vision of a slow victory is being considered by the IDF.

On Sunday, chief IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that increasing numbers of IDF troops were gradually joining the ground incursion that began Friday night, “progressing along phases, according to plan.”