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The Israeli military has presented the UN and aid organisations with a plan for running Gaza that involves Israel having tighter control than it did before the war, according to humanitarian officials, casting doubt on whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has any intention of carrying out a military withdrawal.
At meetings with UN representatives on Wednesday and with officials from other agencies on Thursday, Cogat, the army unit given the task of delivering aid to the occupied territories, outlined a scheme of distributing supplies through tightly managed logistics hubs to vetted Palestinian recipients.
The blueprint appears to be a version of a scheme tried more than a year ago in Gaza, known as “humanitarian bubbles”, involving aid distributions from small, highly controlled areas that would expand over time. But the experiment was abandoned after a few trials in northern Gaza.
It has been revived by Cogat at a time when Israel is negotiating the potential start of a second phase of the January ceasefire agreement, which is supposed to include the full withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from the Gaza Strip. The Cogat plan instead involves a tightening of Israel’s grip on day-to-day life in the Palestinian territory.
According to aid sources briefed on the plan, the “humanitarian hubs” themselves could be secured by private security contractors, but they would be located in areas “under full IDF control”.
The only entrance to Gaza through which aid would be allowed under the plan would be the Kerem Shalom crossing, controlled by Israel. The Rafah crossing, between Egypt and Gaza, would be permanently closed.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) allowed to operate in Gaza would have to be registered in Israel, and all staff working for them or for UN agencies would have to be vetted.
As aid would only be allowed through an Israeli crossing and not through Rafah, it would make operating in Gaza all but impossible for the UN relief agency for Palestinian Refugees (Unrwa) – by far the biggest aid organisation in Gaza – which has been banned by Israel.
Aid officials familiar with the Cogat briefing said the plan was presented as an established fact, with Israeli officials claiming it already had full US support and would therefore be hard for the UN to resist.
The scheme envisages a Gaza in which basic necessities are distributed to approved Palestinians at limited distribution points under tight Israeli control. It makes no mention of Donald Trump’s plan for the US to take ownership of the Gaza Strip and for the territory to be emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.
Cogat did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Its presentation of the scheme comes as Arab governments discuss their own plan for Gaza’s future. A meeting in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, of representatives from Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states on 21 February endorsed an Egyptian-designed $53bn reconstruction plan lasting three to five years, starting with the establishment of safe zones of tents and mobile homes for people to live in during reconstruction.
The proposal is due to be presented to an emergency summit of the Arab League on Tuesday in Cairo.
“The Cogat plan is meant to be a spoiler, an alternative to the Arab plan,” an aid worker in Jerusalem said.
In January 2024, the IDF carried out trials of “humanitarian bubbles” in three areas of northern Gaza. Selected Palestinians such as community elders were to administer the distribution of food and other basic supplies, but the plan never got off the ground. It was hard to find local volunteers prepared to work with the Israelis and Hamas killed some of the local people who were co-opted into the experiment.
“The bubble approach, which was rejected from the beginning of the war, has all kinds of serious implications since the Israelis will control each single supply coming in,” Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, said.
Shawa said it would be an extension of the restrictive aid regime currently overseen by the IDF. Under the ceasefire, the flow of humanitarian assistance entering Gaza has reverted to its prewar level of 400 to 600 trucks a day, but Shawa says Israel has not delivered the number of tents promised, when children have been freezing to death.
Unrwa reported that six infants died from exposure to cold on Monday and Tuesday this week in the Gaza Strip.
Shawa said the IDF was also preventing water tankers from entering, as well as notebooks and crayons intended for the improvised school classes being taught under canvas, on the grounds that such materials were “dual use”.
“They want to control the ABC of the lives of Palestinians,” he said.
