Who will govern Gaza after the war?

Israel will maintain "overall security responsibility" in Gaza "for an indefinite period" after the war, Benjamin Netanyahu has said.

As Israeli forces prepare to move into the Hamas stronghold of Gaza City, having already split the territory in two, the Israeli prime minister told ABC News that troops are likely to remain there beyond the course of the current conflict "because we've seen what happens when we don't have… that security responsibility".

The focus may be on the war and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but Netanyahu's comments offered the "clearest indication yet" that Israel plans to maintain control over the territory that is home to 2.3 million Palestinians, The Guardian reported.

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What did the papers say?

The problem for Israel, said NPR, is that "right now, no one else wants to rule the Gaza Strip".

Israel withdrew all its troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 after nearly four decades – while maintaining a land, sea and air blockade of the territory. And there is no desire for another extended stay, said Yaakov Amidror, a former general and national security adviser, expressing a widely held sentiment among Israeli officials and the general public.

Put bluntly, "taking full control of the territory may be the easy part", said the US public broadcaster. "The more daunting challenge could be finding a replacement who's willing and able to run Gaza."

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that, while the US and other countries were looking at "a variety of possible permutations", an "effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority" (PA) should ultimately govern Gaza.

This solution might look logical on paper but it presents huge problems politically. First, Israel's long-standing policy to "disconnect Gaza from the West Bank and to treat Gaza as a nonentity in political and governing terms would have to be completely reversed, and that seems unlikely", said Nathan Brown, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank. 

Second, such a scenario fails to take into account the "historically weak state of the PA" in Gaza, said The Times of Israel. The West Bank-based PA has been "plagued by corruption" and is "unpopular among Palestinians for cooperating with Israel", the paper added, making its takeover of the territory a non-starter for many Gazans.

"It is unlikely, even if it so desired, that the PA has the capacity to govern Gaza," added Peter Beaumont in The Guardian. Multiple failed attempts to broker a meaningful rapprochement between Hamas and the PA over the years reflect, he said, "wider splits and tensions in Palestinian society that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate, not least if the PA were to be seen returning to power in Gaza riding on an Israeli tank".

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, has repeatedly warned against such a scenario, and on Sunday appeared to link any Gaza takeover with the wider Palestinian question, saying: "We will fully assume our responsibilities within the framework of a comprehensive political solution that includes all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip".

What next?

To help prepare the ground for a possible PA takeover from Hamas, former Israeli PM and chief of the defence staff Ehud Barak suggested a multinational Arab force could take control of Gaza after the military campaign ends.

"It is far from being inconceivable that, backed by the Arab League and United Nations Security Council, a multinational Arab force could be mustered, with some symbolic units from non-Arab countries included," he told Politico. "They could stay there for three to six months to help the Palestinian Authority to take over properly."

The EU, meanwhile, has suggested Gaza could become an international protectorate after the war. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, told a yearly meeting of the EU's overseas ambassadors in Brussels that "different ideas are being discussed" on how to ensure Hamas cannot rebuild after the conflict ends, "including an international peace force under UN mandate". But she reiterated the solution cannot be a "long-term Israeli security presence".

The question of how Gaza should be governed when the war is over "will likely reveal itself to have no good answers and not even to be the right starting point", said Brown at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Instead, he argued, we should be asking what it means to oust a party like Hamas from governance when it dominates all levels of Gaza's government and how we define the end of the war.

"These better questions show why it is a mistake for scenarios to assume a 'day after' as if this were a conventional war that will clearly and cleanly give way to agreed or imposed postwar arrangements," he concluded.