Increasingly, the U.S. is pressuring Jerusalem to formulate a postwar plan for the Gaza Strip. From Washington or Brussels, the most obvious solution would be to return the territory to the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), ruled by the aging Mahmoud Abbas. Hussain Abdul-Hussain explains why this would be impossible:

Extremists are likely to pose a persistent threat in postwar Gaza; Abbas’s PA has shown that is something it cannot handle. It has allowed large pockets of the West Bank to become strongholds of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups. In July, Abbas visited Jenin for the first time in twenty years, after Israel had operated against militants’ strongholds. Abbas’s senior officials were booed and chased out. In the West Bank, Nablus too has become notoriously lawless, allowing for the rise of a new radical militia, the Lion’s Den.

But if not Abbas, then who? Every possibility seems either far-fetched or likely to be disastrous. Abdul-Hussain makes a proposal that could be one of the least-bad options, namely allowing an Arab League force to police the Strip:

Should the Arab League try [to maintain order] in Gaza, the command should be put in the hands of the United Arab Emirates, whose military is among the most capable in the region. The Arab force can help develop and stand up a local security force that can win Israeli trust. The UAE has been the most trustworthy peace partner of Israel among all six Arab nations that have normalized relations with the Jewish state since 1979.What the UAE needs for such an endeavor in Gaza is global and regional cover. Enter Washington and Riyadh, two capitals that can impress on the PA to bestow whatever legitimacy it still has on the new Gazan local government and security force.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.