The Calculated Ambiguity
Netanyahu’s Endgame in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Politics of Permanent Interim
Fault Lines | 23 February 2026
On February 15, 2026, Israel’s cabinet approved a series of measures to register vast tracts of the occupied West Bank as “state property”—the most consequential legal action taken toward the territory since the 1967 occupation began. The decision, advanced by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, establishes a mechanism requiring Palestinian landowners to prove ownership through documentation most cannot produce, effectively converting the absence of proof into Israeli sovereign control. Smotrich described the move as a continuation of “the settlement revolution to control all our lands.” The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now called it “a massive land grab” and warned President Trump directly: “Netanyahu is deceiving you. You said you wouldn’t allow annexation, but he’s carrying it out right under your nose.”
The timing was not coincidental. The decision came days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s seventh meeting with Trump in barely a year, and just as the Board of Peace was assembling for its inaugural session in Washington to discuss the implementation of the 20-point Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict. The juxtaposition captures the central paradox of Netanyahu’s strategic posture in early 2026: the appearance of cooperation with an American-led peace architecture overlaying a systematic campaign to foreclose the political outcomes that architecture was designed to produce.
Understanding what Netanyahu is actually pursuing—as distinct from what he says in English at press conferences—requires examining three interrelated dynamics: the deliberate stalling of Gaza’s post-conflict transition to preserve Israeli security control indefinitely; the acceleration of irreversible territorial facts in the West Bank before elections strip his coalition of the power to create them; and the subordination of both policies to the imperatives of political survival in what may be the most consequential Israeli election in a generation. These three threads are not incidental to each other. They constitute a unified strategy whose internal logic becomes legible only when one accepts a premise Netanyahu cannot state publicly: that he intends to prevent the emergence of any coherent Palestinian political authority in either territory, while maintaining just enough ambiguity to avoid a rupture with Washington.
The Gaza Stall
The Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, announced by Trump and Netanyahu on September 29, 2025, and endorsed by the UN Security Council the following November, was designed as a structured sequence. Phase One delivered a ceasefire, a hostage release, partial Israeli withdrawal, and a surge in humanitarian access. Phase Two—announced by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff on January 14, 2026—was to bring the establishment of a transitional Palestinian governing body, the full demilitarization of Hamas, reconstruction, and the deployment of an International Stabilization Force. The plan’s logic was sequential and interdependent: each step was predicated on the completion of the one before it.
Netanyahu has methodically exploited this interdependence to ensure that Phase Two remains permanently nascent. The strategy is not outright rejection—he accepted the plan on the White House lawn, after all—but the cultivation of conditions under which implementation cannot proceed while responsibility for the impasse is distributed among other parties. The Israeli position has hardened around a set of preconditions so maximalist that their simultaneous fulfillment is effectively impossible: the complete disarmament of Hamas, the return of all remaining hostages (the body of the last captive was recovered in late January), the demilitarization of the entire Gaza Strip, permanent Israeli security control, and the establishment of an alternative civilian government that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. The final condition is the most revealing. By rejecting both the armed movement that governed Gaza and the internationally recognized body that administers the West Bank, Netanyahu has defined an acceptable partner out of existence.
The practical consequences are visible on the ground. Israeli forces currently control just over half of the Gaza Strip. The IDF Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, stated in December that Israel would not relinquish its current military positions, including agricultural land and the border crossing with Egypt—what he described as establishing a “new border” with Gaza. The so-called “Yellow Line” demarcating the zone of Israeli military control has been progressively expanded, with 117 UNRWA facilities now located within or behind it. Between eight UNRWA schools in the militarized zone were demolished by Israeli forces between January and February 2026. The humanitarian system continues to function under severe constraints: over 72,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, more than 18,500 patients require medical evacuation, and significant portions of the territory’s infrastructure remain destroyed.
The Board of Peace—Trump’s signature institutional creation for managing Gaza’s transition—has been formally established but operationally stymied. Its executive board includes Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Tony Blair, and Marc Rowan, with Nickolay Mladenov serving as High Representative for Gaza. A National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, led by former Palestinian official Ali Shaath, has been announced but remains based in Egypt and has not entered the territory. The International Stabilization Force has an appointed American commander, Major General Jasper Jeffers, but no confirmed troop contributions from any country. Indonesia has indicated that up to 8,000 personnel could be ready by mid-2026, but commitments remain aspirational. Donors are reluctant to pledge reconstruction funds before Hamas is disarmed—a precondition Israel insists upon but whose fulfillment Israel’s own military posture makes impossible to verify or enforce.
Netanyahu has further complicated the Board of Peace’s viability by objecting to the inclusion of Turkey and Qatar on its Gaza Executive Board—two countries whose diplomatic relationships with Hamas make them essential to any disarmament process. His office stated that the board’s composition “was not coordinated with Israel,” and far-right coalition partner Itamar Ben Gvir called for a return to “full war” rather than ceding any governance role to countries he considers sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. The result is an architecture of peace that exists on paper and in press conferences but cannot function on the ground—precisely, one suspects, as Netanyahu intends.
The West Bank Acceleration
If the strategy in Gaza is delay, the strategy in the West Bank is velocity. Netanyahu’s government has used the global attention consumed by Gaza to advance a systematic campaign of territorial consolidation in the West Bank that Palestinian officials and international legal experts describe as de facto annexation. The pace and scope of these actions in the first months of 2026 represent a qualitative escalation from the incremental settlement expansion that has characterized Israeli policy for decades.
The February 15 land registration decision is the most dramatic illustration but not the only one. In the preceding week, the cabinet ratified a separate series of measures pushed by Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz authorizing Israeli forces to conduct enforcement operations in Areas A and B—zones that under the Oslo Accords are supposed to be under Palestinian civil and security control. The government introduced a new legal mechanism labeled “Protection of Antiquities and Environment” to justify Israeli jurisdiction across all areas of the West Bank, effectively erasing the distinctions between Areas A, B, and C that have structured Israeli-Palestinian administrative relations since 1993. An initial allocation of 244 million shekels—more than $78 million—over five years has been budgeted to establish a “Settlement Administration” within the justice ministry to oversee land registration.
The Yesha Council, the umbrella body for West Bank settlements, celebrated the decisions as the most significant in fifty-eight years, declaring that the Israeli government was stating in practice that “the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people.” This was not hyperbole. The combined effect of the recent measures is to create a bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for permanent Israeli control that does not require formal annexation—which Trump has publicly opposed—but achieves the same practical outcome. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlement construction has accelerated dramatically, illegal outposts have been legalized, and Smotrich has continued channeling funds to the settler movement even as other ministerial budgets have been cut.
The timing of this acceleration reflects a calculated assessment. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners—Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit—have made maximalist territorial demands the price of their participation in government. With elections approaching by October 2026 at the latest, and possibly as early as this summer, these partners are racing to establish what analysts describe as irreversible “facts on the ground” before a potential change in government. Smotrich has been explicit: the goal is to make any future Palestinian state physically impossible. The settlements, the road networks, the administrative structures, the legal frameworks—once constructed, these create realities that no subsequent Israeli government could easily dismantle, even if it wished to.
Netanyahu’s personal role in this process is characteristically ambiguous. He dropped formal annexation from his government’s agenda in September 2025 under American and Emirati pressure, and his Likud party does not have a coherent official stance on the West Bank’s ultimate status. Yet he has enabled Smotrich’s expansive authorities at every turn, granting him control over the Settlements Administration as a condition of coalition formation, transferring additional military powers to Smotrich-headed civilian bodies, and declining to intervene as his finance minister redirected funds to settler infrastructure. When the Knesset passed a resolution supporting annexation in July 2025, Netanyahu dismissed it as a “deliberate political provocation”—but took no action to reverse the underlying policies the resolution endorsed. The pattern is consistent with a career-long approach: Netanyahu outsources the most controversial actions to coalition partners while preserving deniability for himself, particularly in conversations with Washington.
The Domestic Calculus
Every dimension of Netanyahu’s approach to Gaza and the West Bank is refracted through the prism of an approaching election that will determine not merely his political future but, potentially, his personal liberty. His corruption trial, now in its sixth year, continues. Polls consistently show that his coalition would fall short of the sixty-one seats required to form a government. Yet with approximately fifty seats—a plausible outcome—his bloc could prevent any alternative coalition from forming, since Arab parties remain unlikely to join a center-left government. Netanyahu’s strategic objective is therefore not necessarily to win outright but to avoid losing decisively enough to be replaced.
The 2026 budget passed its first reading on January 28 by a margin of 62 to 55, but only after excruciating negotiations with ultra-Orthodox coalition partners Shas and United Torah Judaism over the Haredi draft exemption bill. The budget must clear its second and third readings by March 31 or the Knesset dissolves automatically—triggering elections months earlier than the scheduled October date. The ultra-Orthodox parties have tied their budget support to passage of legislation exempting yeshiva students from mandatory military service, a demand that has become politically toxic after more than two years of war that stretched Israel’s reserve forces to their limits. Approximately 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men of military age have not enlisted. The High Court has ordered enforcement against draft evasion. The coalition’s internal contradictions on this issue alone could bring down the government at any moment.
Netanyahu’s response has been to treat the election as a campaign to be waged rather than a judgment to be faced. His approach combines several elements. First, the cultivation of proximity to Trump: seven meetings in a year, more than any other world leader, each one generating days of favorable domestic media coverage. Netanyahu has invited Trump to Israel’s Independence Day celebrations in May to receive the Israel Prize—the first ever awarded to a non-Israeli. Senior Likud sources have suggested the prime minister would prefer to hold elections close to a Trump visit, using images of the two leaders together for a campaign crescendo. Second, the instrumentalization of the ceasefire and hostage releases as proof of wartime leadership. As Israeli political scientist Ori Goldberg has observed, the peace plan allows Netanyahu to present himself as the complete package: the leader who waged the war, destroyed Gaza, went further than anyone thought possible, and then delivered peace.
Third, and most consequentially, the manipulation of electoral rules themselves. Netanyahu’s coalition has advanced legislation that would make it easier to disqualify Arab candidates from parliament—a structural intervention designed to maintain his bloc’s power even as his personal popularity declines. In a system where Arab parties hold ten or more seats that could theoretically swing the balance between blocs, restricting their participation changes the mathematical equation fundamentally.
The far-right flank presents its own electoral calculations. Smotrich and Ben Gvir face a dilemma: their maximalist positions on Gaza and the West Bank appeal to their base but risk alienating the broader Israeli electorate, which is exhausted by war and increasingly resentful of the conscription inequity. Religious Zionism’s Aliyah Minister Ofir Sofer has warned privately that advancing the Haredi draft exemption against the wishes of reservists would cause “the collapse of the Right” at the polls. The far-right’s response has been to accelerate territorial gains in the West Bank while they still hold ministerial authority—a sprint to entrench outcomes that will outlast their time in office regardless of electoral results.
Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who leads the opposition polling, represents the most significant threat to Netanyahu’s survival. Bennett’s “Bennett 2026” party appeals to both right-wing voters dissatisfied with Netanyahu’s leadership failures on October 7 and centrist voters attracted to his proven ability to lead a broad coalition. Polling shows the race between the two men at a near-tie—40 percent to 41 percent in head-to-head matchups. But Bennett has signaled he would not include Arab parties in his coalition, limiting the mathematical pathways available to an alternative government and potentially producing another inconclusive election—a scenario that, paradoxically, would serve Netanyahu’s interests by extending political uncertainty.
The Logic of Permanent Interim
The connecting thread across these arenas—Gaza’s stalled transition, the West Bank’s accelerating consolidation, the domestic electoral positioning—is a strategy that might be called “permanent interim.” Netanyahu’s ideal outcome is not a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but the indefinite perpetuation of a transitional state in which Israel maintains security control over both territories, reconstruction proceeds slowly enough to sustain international engagement without creating an independent Palestinian governance capacity, and the absence of a defined political endpoint allows him to tell different audiences different things.
To Washington, he signals commitment to the 20-point plan while ensuring its implementation remains perpetually incomplete. To his coalition’s far right, he enables territorial maximalism while maintaining that formal annexation is not government policy. To the Israeli electorate, he presents himself as both warrior and peacemaker, the only leader capable of managing the contradictions. And to the Palestinians—whose agency in this framework is minimal—he offers neither sovereignty, nor statehood, nor even the prospect of meaningful self-governance, but rather the management of a humanitarian crisis under permanent international supervision.
This approach carries significant risks. The gap between the architecture of the peace plan and the reality on the ground is growing increasingly difficult to obscure. Hamas retains approximately 30,000 armed fighters in Gaza according to IDF estimates and has signaled willingness to disarm only if Israel fully withdraws—a condition Netanyahu has explicitly rejected. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza cannot function without physical access to the territory it is supposed to administer. Reconstruction donors are withholding funds pending security arrangements that do not exist. The humanitarian crisis persists: over 71,000 dead, massive infrastructure destruction, and a healthcare system operating at a fraction of its pre-war capacity.
In the West Bank, the escalation of settlement activity and administrative control is eroding the Palestinian Authority’s remaining legitimacy, accelerating a dynamic that could produce institutional collapse. The PA—already weakened by age, corruption, and the perception of collaboration with Israel—is being systematically stripped of the civil powers that justify its existence. If the PA ceases to function as a governance entity, Israel will face an ungovernable territory of nearly three million Palestinians with no institutional intermediary—a scenario Israel’s own security establishment has repeatedly warned would be catastrophic.
Implications for US Policy
The challenge for American policymakers is that Netanyahu’s strategy of calculated ambiguity is specifically designed to be difficult to confront without appearing to undermine the very peace process Washington has invested its prestige in building. Several implications follow.
First, the Trump administration faces an emerging credibility gap between its public commitment to the Comprehensive Plan and Israel’s observable behavior. Trump has explicitly opposed West Bank annexation. Yet his administration has not sought to curb Israel’s accelerated settlement building, its expansion of military control in Gaza, or the systematic administrative measures that achieve annexation’s practical outcomes without its formal declaration. The Board of Peace’s inaugural meeting in Washington this week will produce pledges and commitments, but these will be measured against the reality that Israeli forces control half of Gaza, the transitional governing committee cannot enter the territory, and the West Bank is being carved up at a pace not seen in decades. If the gap between rhetoric and reality continues to widen, Arab states that have joined the Board of Peace—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar—will face domestic pressure to distance themselves from a process perceived as providing diplomatic cover for Israeli territorial consolidation.
Second, the administration must reckon with the reality that Netanyahu’s election-year incentives and American regional interests are increasingly misaligned. Washington’s broader Middle East agenda—which includes Saudi normalization with Israel, containment of Iran’s nuclear program, and stabilization of the region’s multiple conflict zones—requires at minimum the appearance of progress toward Palestinian self-governance. Netanyahu’s domestic survival strategy requires the opposite: the indefinite deferral of any Palestinian political horizon that his far-right coalition partners would interpret as a betrayal. The administration’s assumption that Netanyahu will ultimately deliver on Phase Two commitments once the political conditions align may underestimate the degree to which the prime minister has structured those conditions to never align.
Third, the administration should anticipate that the October 2026 Israeli elections—or earlier elections triggered by a coalition collapse—will consume Netanyahu’s attention entirely in the months ahead. Every decision on Gaza and the West Bank will be filtered through electoral calculation. Actions that might advance the peace process but alienate his base—meaningful withdrawal from Gaza, restraining settlement expansion, engaging with the Palestinian Authority—will be deferred or reversed. Actions that play well domestically but complicate American diplomacy—expanding the Yellow Line, legalizing outposts, objecting to Turkish and Qatari participation in the Board of Peace—will continue. The United States will need to decide whether it is willing to condition its support on implementation benchmarks, or whether it will accept that the Comprehensive Plan will remain aspirational until a new Israeli government—potentially with different priorities—takes office in 2027.
Fourth, the West Bank’s trajectory deserves far more attention than it is receiving. The focus on Gaza’s post-conflict transition has created a permissive environment for actions in the West Bank that may prove more consequential over the long term. Settlement expansion, administrative annexation, and the erosion of the Palestinian Authority’s authority are creating irreversible realities that will constrain any future peace effort regardless of who governs in Jerusalem or Washington. If the current pace continues, the physical and legal conditions for a viable Palestinian state will be foreclosed—not through a dramatic act of annexation that would trigger international consequences, but through the quiet accumulation of bureaucratic decisions, land registrations, and infrastructure projects that individually seem technical but collectively are transformative.
Finally, the administration must be clear-eyed about the nature of the partner it is dealing with. Netanyahu is not failing to implement the Comprehensive Plan because of logistical challenges or security complications, though both exist. He is calibrating the pace of implementation to serve domestic political imperatives that are fundamentally at odds with the plan’s stated objectives. This is not a failure of execution but a feature of strategy. The sooner Washington internalizes this distinction, the sooner it can adjust its approach accordingly—whether that means conditioning military assistance on implementation benchmarks, engaging more directly with alternative Israeli political leaders, or recalibrating expectations about what is achievable during an Israeli election year. What the administration cannot afford is the continuation of a posture in which it publicly celebrates a peace architecture that its closest regional partner is quietly dismantling from within.
The author is a former CIA intelligence officer with extensive experience on the Near East. This analysis draws on open-source reporting, regional analysis, and publicly available assessments. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.