Gaza Between Three Tracks: The Battle of Wills Over "The Day After the War"

This paper examines the struggle over the future of the Gaza Strip in the “day after the war” phase, treating it as a contest over reshaping the Strip’s political, security, and administrative reality, rather than merely a set of post-war arrangements. It reviews three main tracks: the Israeli track, which seeks to impose new security and geographic realities through field control and forced displacement; the American track, based on international and administrative arrangements under the banners of reconstruction and investment, operating under the umbrella of the Board of Peace; and the Palestinian track, which proposes reunifying Palestinian political geography through elections and renewing the legitimacy of national institutions.

The paper argues that, at the current stage, the Israeli track holds a field advantage owing to its instruments of power and its capacity to impose facts on the ground, while the American and Palestinian tracks face challenges related to a lack of vision and the capacity for implementation. Nevertheless, the Palestinian track remains the one most closely tied to preserving the unity of the national project, which requires national consensus and the translation of political legitimacy into effective capacity on the ground, in order to prevent Gaza from being reshaped outside its Palestinian national framework.

Dr. Mansour Abu Kareim