OP-ED An Answer to the Shin Bet Director: Twelve Sectors, Twelve Grids, Twelve Ballots

Last week, Jonathan Pollard 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 actually quite correct. The second is not very achievable  given the current political climate.

A third option exists, and much of its infrastructure is already in the ground.

Divide Gaza into twelve sealed sectors. Roof the barrier lines with anti-drone mesh. 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 wire mesh plus electricity plus a ballot box changes who holds power inside the concrete.

The Threat That Concrete Alone Cannot Stop

Any serious proposal must begin with the objection that defeats every purely horizontal barrier.

This week, political commentator Amit Segal reported in his Israel Hayom column that the drone threat is now the top concern of Shin Bet Director David Zini, who has headed the agency since October 2025.

According to Segal, Israel’s security establishment increasingly regards drones as a weapon that is fundamentally changing the nature of the battlefield. Defense officials fear that Tehran, having watched its proxy network weakened, may seek to shift the balance of threats by launching drones from southern Lebanon, Gaza, or Judea and Samaria.

Segal noted that drones launched from southern Lebanon are the only Hezbollah weapon to have caused significant loss of life r”l. He asks why the same method would not be attempted from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria. He describes the scenario that most alarms security officials — a coordinated swarm striking a public ceremony attended by the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and the Chief of Staff.

The precedent is not hypothetical.

In late 2024 a Hezbollah drone flew from Lebanon to Caesarea and detonated outside Netanyahu’s bedroom window without warning or sirens, striking a tree by sheer chance.

Segal reported that this week’s Cabinet meeting was held at a secret location, and Israeli officials are separately weighing a nationwide six-month ban on private drone flights on the Shin Bet’s recommendation.

A sand berm answers none of this, and Pollard is entirely right to say so. But the conclusion he draws — that the population must therefore be removed — does not follow, because the drone problem has a physical answer that a flat barrier lacks and a sectored one can carry.  It is expensive, but is feasible.

Wire Mesh: The Vertical Dimension

Every controlled sector line, and the perimeter itself, can be roofed with wire mesh canopy. This is not speculative engineering. Ukrainian and Russian forces have built kilometers of anti-drone netting over supply roads, and it works, for a reason specific to the weapon in question.

The drones that now dominate this threat are fiber-optic guided first-person-view aircraft, and they proliferated precisely because they are immune to radio-frequency jamming. Electronic warfare — Israel’s traditional counter-drone instrument — is useless against a drone flying on a spooled optical cable. Such aircraft must also fly low and short, since altitude and range are limited by warhead weight and trailing fiber. A physical canopy is therefore not merely one option among several. Against fiber-optic drones it is the only reliable countermeasure available.

The economics are the most favorable in the entire proposal. Against roughly 11.5 million dollars per kilometer for underground anti-tunnel wall, mesh canopy is a rounding error — the cheapest line item in the plan by two orders of magnitude. Three placements matter: a continuous canopy along the eastern perimeter face; canopy over every internal sector line and crossing point, so that a drone assembled in an uncertified sector cannot transit to a certified one or reach the border; and hardened cover over crossing infrastructure where personnel concentrate.

Sector geometry reinforces this. Transverse cuts run east to west, which means a drone flying eastward toward Israeli communities travels along a band rather than across the cuts. That is a decisive argument for building the grid rather than a simple stack of bands — a longitudinal spine running north to south along the coastal road is crossed by anything heading toward Israel. The honest limit should be stated plainly: canopy defeats small low-flying quadcopters, not larger fixed-wing loitering munitions cruising at altitude, which still require detection, interceptors, and directed-energy systems. And no one can roof 365 square kilometers. Lines and points can be roofed. That is enough to matter.

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; the longitudinal spine adds 40 more. Total: 90 to 130 kilometers, one and a half to two times the existing perimeter.

The 2021 perimeter is the only honest 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. 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 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.

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

Walls do not govern. 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. The proposal is a graduated certification regime: each sector assessed independently against published benchmarks — surrender of crew-served and anti-tank weapons, sealing of mapped tunnel access, surrender of drone stocks and fabrication equipment, 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 sectoral. 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 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.
• Overhead anti-drone canopy over the sector’s boundary and crossings, furnished as protective infrastructure to certified sectors.
• 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.

The mechanism is not generosity but comparison. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Belfast is a counter-example — the peace lines sharply reduced killing and still stand more than twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement. Barriers built without a political end-state do not come down.

Against Annexation

Expulsion requires a receiving country, and there is 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, by contrast, 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

Rockets and mortars ignore concrete and canopy alike; those remain a matter of interception and offensive action. Drones are the exception — the one standoff category that a sectored, roofed grid genuinely addresses, and the reason the vertical dimension belongs in the design from the first day rather than as a retrofit. Arab governments will argue that division amounts to indefinite occupation and may withhold troops on those terms; 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 and mesh are 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 right that engineering projects do not defeat ideological movements. The argument fails only in concluding that the sole remaining alternative is removal of a population — a course with no destination, no legal standing, no regional support, and no prospect of execution.

The alternative is to accept that the Strip will be compartmentalized, and then make each compartment a demonstration rather than a holding pen. Twelve sectors. Twelve roofs against the weapon that worries the Shin Bet most. Twelve 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 in kind: barriers that separate Gaza’s population from Hamas, with the lights on the other side of the wall doing work no wall has ever done by itself.

The author may be reached at [email protected]