Permanent stalemate in Gaza suits Netanyahu

After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of news, 2 a.m. last Friday, to leak his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza.

There was no speech. No briefings. Just a page and a bit, double-spaced, presented to his cabinet for discussion.

But the plan is not a plan. What is being presented as Netanyahu’s – or even Israel’s – idea for the future of Gaza is simply a list of 12 ‘principles’, divided into ‘immediate time-range’, ‘the mid-term’ and ‘long-range’. These headings give the impression of thought-through stages but on inspection, they’re absurdly vague, even contradictory.