Gaza Disengagement commander admits: Withdrawal paved way for October 7 invasion

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen said the Jewish settlements and concomitant army presence were crucial for Israel’s security.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The military commander who oversaw the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 said Saturday that destroying the settlement enterprise there led directly to the horror of the Hamas invasion in 2023.

Interviewed on Channel 11, Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen said, “Oct. 7 could not have occurred if Gush Katif had remained in place, and I am saying this as a professional.”

“We left the Philadelphi [Corridor on the Egyptian-Gazan border], and this enabled the entry of proper weaponry, long-range rockets, and allowed them to build a real army,” Hacohen said.

The abandonment of this vital area, he added, enabled massive smuggling into the Strip and “turned the issue into … a strategic threat” to Israel. Hamas “became a proper army with companies, battalions, brigades, headquarters,” instead of small “terror squads.”

“We allowed Hamas to become a strategic threat because every time we wanted to enter [terror hotbed] Beit Hanoun for five minutes, there were rockets aiming for Tel Aviv,” the general added.

“A threat to us was created with a de facto army, a de facto state that is located on the border of Nahal Oz, a five-minute drive away.”

Most of the Gush Katif bloc of 16 small, mostly religious Jewish farming communities and one town, Neve Dekalim, lay between Rafah and Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, with one village, Netzarim, strategically located in the center of the coastal enclave.

Three small secular communities were located on the northern edge of the Strip for security reasons.

There had been many terrorist attacks on these villages over the decades of their existence, and a large army presence was necessary to protect them, which stirred much controversy in Israel.

In an operation called the “disengagement,” they were all destroyed in the summer of 2005, and their 9,000 residents were forcibly expelled by Israeli military forces in an undertaking that nearly tore the country apart.

Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised that ousting citizens who had lived there legally and with government support for decades would help bring peace between Palestinians and Israelis, but opponents of the move repeatedly warned that if the settlers and the IDF left, the result would be an exponential rise in terrorism.

They were proven correct, as Hamas took over the Strip in a violent coup against the Palestinian Authority, rockets began steadily raining down on Israel’s border villages and cities, and arson balloons sent from Gaza burned thousands of dunams of cropland and forests.

In addition, unbeknown to the IDF, hundreds of miles of terror tunnels were built in preparation for all-out war with the Jewish state.

Hacohen has expressed this view before.

In an interview with Maariv last August, he said that a senior journalist had told him a few weeks earlier, “It’s very good that you evacuated Gush Katif, because if the evacuation hadn’t happened, another 8,000 Jews would have been slaughtered there on Oct. 7.”

He said he had answered, “Quite the opposite. If there had been Gush Katif, Oct. 7 would not have happened.”

“Preparations for Oct. 7 took years,” he explained then. After the disengagement, “the entire Gush Katif area became a training area,” with models of tanks, a fence, and settlements that they could practice taking over.

“If we had been present in Gush Katif, they would have had nowhere to organize such training,” he said.

Hacohen had been against the disengagement but “acted contrary to my worldview,” he said, in order to “save the settlement enterprise” in Judea and Samaria, which he said had been under threat as well, “and prevent bloodshed.”

2005 disengagementGush KatifOctober 7th massacre