Jonathan Pollard has argued that the new sand berm and concrete barrier along the Gaza border will not defeat Hamas, and that the only durable answer is to have Gaza's population emigrate and then have Israel annex the Strip. The first half of that argument is correct, but almost impossible to achieve. The second is veritably impossible to achieve even if the Gazan population dwindles. A third option exists, however, and much of its infrastructure is already on the ground:
1. Demand that Hamas disarm.
2. Then divide Gaza into twelve sealed sectors.
3. Then make the difference between a Hamas-free sector and a Hamas-controlled one so immediate and so visible that the residents of each sector enforce the standard themselves.
Concrete alone manages a threat. Concrete plus electricity plus a ballot box can change who holds power inside the concrete.
Already Underway
Sectoral division is not a theory awaiting a hearing. The October framework split the Strip along a "yellow line" marked by concrete blocks; that line was pushed forward repeatedly, and in late May, the IDF was ordered to control roughly seventy percent of the enclave. On July 8, the Board of Peace announced a pilot zone at Tel Sultan near Rafah, moving civilians vetted against Hamas affiliation across the line into the secured portion - described explicitly as the first of many. The Kushner reconstruction blueprint divides Gaza's residential areas into disconnected quadrants separated by green belts. The question is no longer whether Gaza is sectored, but how finely, and what happens inside each sector once the line is drawn.
What Twelve Sectors Would Cost
Gaza is roughly 365 square kilometers, 41 kilometers north to south, six to twelve kilometers wide. Eleven transverse cuts yield twelve bands averaging 3.7 kilometers deep, requiring some 88 kilometers of barrier; a longitudinal spine along the coastal road adds 40 more. Total: 90 to 130 kilometers, or one and a half to two times the existing perimeter.
The 2021 perimeter can work as a benchmark - NIS 3.5 billion, about 1.1 billion dollars, over three and a half years for 65 kilometers of sensor-studded underground wall, six-meter fence, radar, and remote weapons stations. The underground component ran roughly 11.5 million dollars per kilometer. Straight extrapolation gives 1.5 to 2.2 billion for the internal grid, but that is too low: internal lines run through rubble and unmapped tunnel voids with hostile ground on both sides, every line needs the full anti-tunnel specification because the entire network is internal, and every cut severs water mains and sewage lines.
Four to six billion dollars over five to seven years is realistic.
Manning it is the harder constraint - twenty to thirty controlled crossings and patrol responsibility for 130 kilometers of interior line, permanently. And a warning that must not be waved away: the 2021 barrier was technologically superb and failed on October 7, not because the concrete was deficient but because the doctrine substituted sensors for soldiers. Sectoring on that same assumption multiplies the vulnerability.
Why the Military Logic Holds - tunnel segmentation
Tunnel segmentation is the strongest argument. The value of Gaza's underground system is its continuity - moving fighters, weapons, and hostages the length of the Strip without surfacing. Deep concrete every three to four kilometers converts one strategic network into twelve tactical ones, and makes hostage relocation, the capability that most constrained Israeli decision-making for two years, nearly impossible.
Mass mobilization follows. October 7 required assembling some three thousand fighters at multiple breach points; compartmentalization makes any comparable concentration slow and detectable. And intelligence granularity is the oldest argument of the three - precisely the logic Ariel Sharon applied in 1971, dividing Gaza into small squares and instructing each unit to know its square completely. The same principle reduced sectarian killing in Baghdad in 2007.
The Incentive: Certification and the Grid
What determines whether a sector becomes a functioning neighborhood or a smaller Hamas fiefdom is what its residents gain by clearing it and lose by tolerating re-infiltration. This proposal is one of graduated certification: each sector assessed independently against published benchmarks - surrender of crew-served and anti-tank weapons, sealing of mapped tunnel access, absence of armed presence, cooperation with vetting, and a vetted local police component under international supervision. Certification granted sector by sector, publicly, and revocable.
Electricity is the correct centerpiece for a technical reason.
Gaza's grid is already physically sectored.
Before the war Israel supplied 120 to 130 megawatts through ten discrete feeder lines; the Gaza Power Plant added up to 80 when fueled. Total supply peaked near 210 megawatts against demand exceeding 600, which is why residents lived on five to fifteen hours of power a day for fifteen years. COGAT's own figure for genuine round-the-clock supply is about 400 megawatts, and the stalled Gas for Gaza pipeline is designed to support up to 1,100.
Ten switchable feeder lines and twelve sectors is an almost bashert - providential fit.
A certified sector can run twenty-four hours while the sector half a kilometer away, still under armed control, stays on four - and its residents watch the lights burn every night from darkened windows. The distribution network must be rebuilt regardless; the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company assessed at least 728 million dollars in damage, over 5,000 kilometers of destroyed line and 2,200 transformers. Sequencing that reconstruction by certification status costs nothing additional and converts an unavoidable engineering schedule into the most powerful lever available.
The full package:
• Twenty-four hour electricity and desalinated water, restored on certification, cut on decertification.
• Priority reconstruction capital - housing, clinics, schools - with contracts to firms employing sector residents.
• Work permits and crossing access for vetted residents, restoring wage income no aid program replicates.
• Commercial import and export rights, allowing a certified sector to trade rather than receive.
• Telecommunications, internet, and reconnection to banking and remittance channels.
• A per-capita reconstruction disbursement administered by the sector's own elected council.
One certified sector with lit streets, running water, and residents drawing wages argues against Hamas more effectively than any broadcast, because the argument is delivered by neighbors. Twelve sectors create eleven audiences for every success. Reversibility gives it teeth: if benefits can be withdrawn at sector level upon verified re-armament, every household acquires a direct interest in reporting the men digging at night. That is the whole transformation - converting the population from a shield into a stakeholder.
Why Sectorization Itself Promotes Democracy
The democratic argument is not a decorative addition to the security plan. Sectorization is the mechanism that makes Palestinian self-government in Gaza structurally possible for the first time, and it does so for four distinct reasons.
1. Scale. Strip-wide elections are a distant and probably unattainable proposition; no Palestinian national election has been held since January 2006, when Hamas took 74 of 132 legislative seats. But a sector of 150,000 to 200,000 residents is a municipality, not a state. Municipal governance means garbage collection, school hours, water allocation, market permits, clinic staffing - the level at which competence is visible, corruption is detectable, and legitimacy accumulates from performance rather than from slogans. It is also the last level at which Gazans voted meaningfully, in the phased municipal rounds of 2004 and 2005; Gaza was excluded from the later PA Area A and B municipal elections entirely.
2. Plurality. Hamas governed Gaza as a single indivisible bloc, which is precisely what made 2007 possible: one seizure captured everything. Twelve separate electorates cannot be won in one stroke. There is no strip-wide prize, no winner-take-all contest, and no single institution whose capture delivers the territory. Fragmentation of the political unit is hostile to monopoly by design.
3. Comparison. Twelve councils operating simultaneously under identical rules create the one thing Gazan politics has never had - a standard. Voters in one sector can see what a neighboring council delivered on the same budget. Performance becomes measurable against something other than an adversary. That is the ordinary machinery of democratic accountability, and it requires plural jurisdictions to function at all.
4. Reversibility of capture. A council that fails can be voted out. Under a unified Gaza, removing an armed ruling party required a war. Under twelve, a sector that slides is decertified, loses its power and its wages, and its residents retain both the incentive and the instrument to change course.
Sequencing matters: disarmament first certification next, benefits next, elections after residents have lived several months with what a Hamas-free sector actually feels like. Candidates would face the disqualification standard applied to armed factions - a requirement that will be attacked as rigged and deserves an honest defense rather than an evasion.
No democracy anywhere permits armed formations to stand for office while retaining their weapons. Hamas may contest a sector election the day it ceases to be an army. Over time, councils that perform can federate, and an authority assembled upward from twelve working municipalities carries a legitimacy no committee appointed abroad can manufacture. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza remains based in Egypt and has never entered the Strip. Twelve elected councils would already be inside it.
Precedent
The Briggs Plan in Malaya is the closest parallel, and instructive in both directions. The British resettled roughly half a million people into several hundred fortified New Villages, severing the insurgency from its supply base. What made it work was not the wire but what came with it: land title, schools, clinics, water, elected village councils, and a credible promise of independence. The barriers separated insurgents from the population; the benefits and the political horizon separated the population from the insurgents.
Expulsion requires a receiving country, and there isn’t even one. Egypt and Jordan have refused categorically; no third state has volunteered to absorb close to 2 million people. Forcible transfer of a protected population is prohibited under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and enumerated as a war crime under the Rome Statute - a position held not only by Israel's critics but by every government whose cooperation Israel requires, including the Gulf states whose normalization remains the strategic prize.
The 1971 precedent sometimes cited cuts the other way: that summer's campaign displaced some 38,000 people, roughly 12,000 into Sinai. Gaza's population is now more than fifty times that, and there is no Sinai available. Annexation carries its own contradiction - direct Israeli governance of 2 million hostile residents, the precise outcome Israeli governments of every composition have structured policy to avoid since 1967.
Sectoring is legally contestable but not impossible, partially built, fundable within a plausible defense budget, and requires no one's permission to receive two million people.
The Honest Limits
Israel's security cabinet has now approved Board of Peace entry and the deployment of an International Stabilization Force operating alongside the IDF, and hardening interior lines will be called inconsistent with Resolution 2803. The incentive and election components are the answer to that objection - a sector that votes and prospers is difficult to characterize as a cage - but the objection will be made regardless.
Most seriously: sectoring without the incentive architecture produces twelve Hamas cells where there was one, and twelve interior perimeters to hold instead of one exterior perimeter. The walls are worth building only as the delivery mechanism for the political program. Concrete is the vessel; electricity, wages, and the ballot box are the contents.
Conclusion
Pollard is right that a berm manages a threat rather than eliminating it, and he is also correct that engineering projects do not defeat ideological movements. But the sole remaining alternative is not just removal of a population.
The alternative is to accept that the Strip can be compartmentalized, and then make each compartment a demonstration rather than a holding pen. Twelve sectors and grids that switch on independently. Twelve councils elected by residents with something concrete to protect. Israel has spent thirty years building barriers between itself and Gaza's population. This proposal is different: barriers that separate Gaza's population from Hamas.
Would you print this idea?
Twelve Sectors, Twelve Grids, Twelve Ballots vs. Annexation
By Rabbi Yair Hoffman)
Jonathan Pollard has argued that the new sand berm and concrete barrier along the Gaza border will not defeat Hamas, and that the only durable answer is to expel Gaza's population and annex the Strip. The first half of that argument is correct. The second is veritably impossible to achieve. A third option exists, however, and much of its infrastructure is already in the ground.
Divide Gaza into twelve sealed sectors. Then make the difference between a Hamas-free sector and a Hamas-controlled one so immediate and so visible that the residents of each sector enforce the standard themselves. Concrete alone manages a threat. Concrete plus electricity plus a ballot box can change who holds power inside the concrete.
Already Underway
Sectoral division is not a theory awaiting a hearing. The October framework split the Strip along a "yellow line" marked by concrete blocks; that line was pushed forward repeatedly, and in late May, the IDF was ordered to control roughly seventy percent of the enclave. On July 8, the Board of Peace announced a pilot zone at Tel Sultan near Rafah, moving civilians vetted for Hamas affiliation across the line into the secured portion - described explicitly as the first of many. The Kushner reconstruction blueprint divides Gaza's residential areas into disconnected quadrants separated by green belts. The question is no longer whether Gaza is sectored, but how finely, and what happens inside each sector once the line is drawn.
What Twelve Sectors Would Cost
Gaza is roughly 365 square kilometers, 41 kilometers north to south, six to twelve kilometers wide. Eleven transverse cuts yield twelve bands averaging 3.7 kilometers deep, requiring some 88 kilometers of barrier; a longitudinal spine along the coastal road adds 40 more. Total: 90 to 130 kilometers, or one and a half to two times the existing perimeter.
The 2021 perimeter can work as a benchmark - NIS 3.5 billion, about 1.1 billion dollars, over three and a half years for 65 kilometers of sensor-studded underground wall, six-meter fence, radar, and remote weapons stations. The underground component ran roughly 11.5 million dollars per kilometer. Straight extrapolation gives 1.5 to 2.2 billion for the internal grid, but that is too low: internal lines run through rubble and unmapped tunnel voids with hostile ground on both sides, every line needs the full anti-tunnel specification because the entire network is internal, and every cut severs water mains and sewage lines.
Four to six billion dollars over five to seven years is realistic.
Manning it is the harder constraint - twenty to thirty controlled crossings and patrol responsibility for 130 kilometers of interior line, permanently. And a warning that must not be waved away: the 2021 barrier was technologically superb and failed on October 7, not because the concrete was deficient but because the doctrine substituted sensors for soldiers. Sectoring on that same assumption multiplies the vulnerability.
Why the Military Logic Holds
Tunnel segmentation is the strongest argument. The value of Gaza's underground system is its continuity - moving fighters, weapons, and hostages the length of the Strip without surfacing. Deep concrete every three to four kilometers converts one strategic network into twelve tactical ones, and makes hostage relocation, the capability that most constrained Israeli decision-making for two years, nearly impossible.
Mass mobilization follows. October 7 required assembling some three thousand fighters at multiple breach points; compartmentalization makes any comparable concentration slow and detectable. And intelligence granularity is the oldest argument of the three - precisely the logic Ariel Sharon applied in 1971, dividing Gaza into small squares and instructing each unit to know its square completely. The same principle reduced sectarian killing in Baghdad in 2007.
The Incentive: Certification and the Grid
What determines whether a sector becomes a functioning neighborhood or a smaller Hamas fiefdom is what its residents gain by clearing it and lose by tolerating re-infiltration. This proposal is one of graduated certification: each sector assessed independently against published benchmarks - surrender of crew-served and anti-tank weapons, sealing of mapped tunnel access, absence of armed presence, cooperation with vetting, and a vetted local police component under international supervision. Certification granted sector by sector, publicly, and revocable.
Electricity is the correct centerpiece for a technical reason.
Gaza's grid is already physically sectored.
Before the war Israel supplied 120 to 130 megawatts through ten discrete feeder lines; the Gaza Power Plant added up to 80 when fueled. Total supply peaked near 210 megawatts against demand exceeding 600, which is why residents lived on five to fifteen hours of power a day for fifteen years. COGAT's own figure for genuine round-the-clock supply is about 400 megawatts, and the stalled Gas for Gaza pipeline is designed to support up to 1,100.
Ten switchable feeder lines and twelve sectors is an almost bashert - providential fit.
A certified sector can run twenty-four hours while the sector half a kilometer away, still under armed control, stays on four - and its residents watch the lights burn every night from darkened windows. The distribution network must be rebuilt regardless; the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company assessed at least 728 million dollars in damage, over 5,000 kilometers of destroyed line and 2,200 transformers. Sequencing that reconstruction by certification status costs nothing additional and converts an unavoidable engineering schedule into the most powerful lever available.
The full package:
• Twenty-four hour electricity and desalinated water, restored on certification, cut on decertification.
• Priority reconstruction capital - housing, clinics, schools - with contracts to firms employing sector residents.
• Work permits and crossing access for vetted residents, restoring wage income no aid program replicates.
• Commercial import and export rights, allowing a certified sector to trade rather than receive.
• Telecommunications, internet, and reconnection to banking and remittance channels.
• A per-capita reconstruction disbursement administered by the sector's own elected council.
One certified sector with lit streets, running water, and residents drawing wages argues against Hamas more effectively than any broadcast, because the argument is delivered by neighbors. Twelve sectors create eleven audiences for every success. Reversibility gives it teeth: if benefits can be withdrawn at sector level upon verified re-armament, every household acquires a direct interest in reporting the men digging at night. That is the whole transformation - converting the population from a shield into a stakeholder.
Why Sectorization Itself Promotes Democracy
The democratic argument is not a decorative addition to the security plan. Sectorization is the mechanism that makes Palestinian self-government in Gaza structurally possible for the first time, and it does so for four distinct reasons.
1. Scale. Strip-wide elections are a distant and probably unattainable proposition; no Palestinian national election has been held since January 2006, when Hamas took 74 of 132 legislative seats. But a sector of 150,000 to 200,000 residents is a municipality, not a state. Municipal governance means garbage collection, school hours, water allocation, market permits, clinic staffing - the level at which competence is visible, corruption is detectable, and legitimacy accumulates from performance rather than from slogans. It is also the last level at which Gazans voted meaningfully, in the phased municipal rounds of 2004 and 2005; Gaza was excluded from the later West Bank municipal elections entirely.
2. Plurality. Hamas governed Gaza as a single indivisible bloc, which is precisely what made 2007 possible: one seizure captured everything. Twelve separate electorates cannot be won in one stroke. There is no strip-wide prize, no winner-take-all contest, and no single institution whose capture delivers the territory. Fragmentation of the political unit is hostile to monopoly by design.
3. Comparison. Twelve councils operating simultaneously under identical rules create the one thing Gazan politics has never had - a standard. Voters in one sector can see what a neighboring council delivered on the same budget. Performance becomes measurable against something other than an adversary. That is the ordinary machinery of democratic accountability, and it requires plural jurisdictions to function at all.
4. Reversibility of capture. A council that fails can be voted out. Under a unified Gaza, removing an armed ruling party required a war. Under twelve, a sector that slides is decertified, loses its power and its wages, and its residents retain both the incentive and the instrument to change course.
Sequencing matters: certification first, benefits next, elections after residents have lived several months with what a Hamas-free sector actually feels like. Candidates would face the disqualification standard applied to armed factions - a requirement that will be attacked as rigged and deserves an honest defense rather than an evasion. No democracy anywhere permits armed formations to stand for office while retaining their weapons. Hamas may contest a sector election the day it ceases to be an army. Over time, councils that perform can federate, and an authority assembled upward from twelve working municipalities carries a legitimacy no committee appointed abroad can manufacture. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza remains based in Egypt and has never entered the Strip. Twelve elected councils would already be inside it.
Precedent
The Briggs Plan in Malaya is the closest parallel, and instructive in both directions. The British resettled roughly half a million people into several hundred fortified New Villages, severing the insurgency from its supply base. What made it work was not the wire but what came with it: land title, schools, clinics, water, elected village councils, and a credible promise of independence. The barriers separated insurgents from the population; the benefits and the political horizon separated the population from the insurgents.
Expulsion requires a receiving country, and there isn’t even none. Egypt and Jordan have refused categorically; no third state has volunteered to absorb 2.1 million people. Forcible transfer of a protected population is prohibited under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and enumerated as a war crime under the Rome Statute - a position held not only by Israel's critics but by every government whose cooperation Israel requires, including the Gulf states whose normalization remains the strategic prize. The 1971 precedent sometimes cited cuts the other way: that summer's campaign displaced some 38,000 people, roughly 12,000 into Sinai. Gaza's population is now more than fifty times that, and there is no Sinai available. Annexation carries its own contradiction - direct Israeli governance of 2.1 million hostile residents, the precise outcome Israeli governments of every composition have structured policy to avoid since 1967.
Sectoring is legally contestable but not impossible, partially built, fundable within a plausible defense budget, and requires no one's permission to receive two million people.
The Honest Limits
Israel's security cabinet has now approved Board of Peace entry and the deployment of an International Stabilization Force operating alongside the IDF, and hardening interior lines will be called inconsistent with Resolution 2803. The incentive and election components are the answer to that objection - a sector that votes and prospers is difficult to characterize as a cage - but the objection will be made regardless.
Most seriously: sectoring without the incentive architecture produces twelve Hamas cells where there was one, and twelve interior perimeters to hold instead of one exterior perimeter. The walls are worth building only as the delivery mechanism for the political program. Concrete is the vessel; electricity, wages, and the ballot box are the contents.
Conclusion
Pollard is right that a berm manages a threat rather than eliminating it, and he is also correct that engineering projects do not defeat ideological movements. But the sole remaining alternative is not just removal of a population.
The alternative is to accept that the Strip can be compartmentalized, and then make each compartment a demonstration rather than a holding pen. Twelve sectors and grids that switch on independently. Twelve councils elected by residents with something concrete to protect. Israel has spent thirty years building barriers between itself and Gaza's population. This proposal is different: barriers that separate Gaza's population from Hamas.
The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@gmail.com