The number is fifteen. That is the membership of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the body that as of eleven days ago holds administrative authority over the territory: fifteen Palestinian technocrats, none of them elected, chaired by Ali Shaath, reporting to Nikolay Mladenov in his capacity as director general of the Board of Peace.
It is a precise number and it describes almost nothing, because not one of the fifteen has been able to enter Gaza.
What happened on the sixth
On Monday of last week the Hamas run administration in Gaza announced that it was dissolving its Emergency Committee, the body that had run the territory since October 2023, and transferring administrative authority to the NCAG.
The NCAG is not new. It was constituted in January under the mandate of the Board of Peace, the structure created by the twenty point plan that produced last year’s ceasefire. It has had a chairman, a membership and a reporting line for six months. What it has not had is the authority it was created to exercise, and what it still does not have is a physical presence in the place it administers.
Israel called the announcement a stunt. The Board of Peace was cooler, saying its assessment would be guided by actions rather than promises, and specifically by whether the critical needs of people in Gaza were met. Neither response addressed the practical question, which is how a committee that cannot cross a boundary exercises authority on the other side of it.
The place
Consider what administration means here in the most ordinary sense, because the word has been doing a great deal of work in the coverage and very little of it is specific.
Administering a territory of roughly two million people means deciding which bakeries get flour and on what schedule. It means holding the list of who is owed a salary and finding a way to pay them. It means staffing clinics, allocating fuel to the generators that run water pumps, issuing the paperwork without which a person cannot prove who they are, and deciding which of several thousand damaged buildings gets a crew first.
Every one of those is a decision made against physical facts that change hourly and are not legible from outside. A committee sitting in Cairo or Ramallah can hold the legal authority to make them. It cannot hold the information required to make them well, and it cannot supervise anyone carrying them out.
So the transfer that occurred on the sixth moved a title. The people who will actually decide which bakery gets flour tomorrow morning are the same people who decided it last month, because they are the ones standing next to the flour.
Why this is a familiar shape
It is worth setting this beside another case, because the pattern is not unique to Gaza and the comparison clarifies what is likely to happen next.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has been administered since 1995 under an arrangement in which an internationally appointed High Representative holds extensive authority over a territory whose local institutions hold the day to day power. That office has worked, in the sense that it has prevented the worst outcomes for three decades. It has also never resolved into normal government, and the position remains occupied. Christian Schmidt resigned from it at the start of this month, thirty one years after the arrangement was designed as a transitional measure.
The structural feature the two share is a separation between the body that holds authority and the body that holds capacity. That separation is sometimes necessary. What it is not is temporary, because nothing in the design creates pressure toward closing the gap. The authority holder has no incentive to hand power to a capacity holder it does not trust, and the capacity holder has no route to becoming trusted that does not run through exercising power it is not permitted to exercise.
There is a second difference worth naming, and it cuts the other way. The High Representative in Sarajevo could always go to Sarajevo. The office had a building, a staff and a street address inside the country it supervised, which meant that however contested its authority was, it could observe what it was deciding about. The NCAG has the opposite arrangement: a local membership with an external location. That is rarer, and it removes the one advantage an external administrator usually has, which is the ability to see for itself and to be seen doing it.
The condition nobody has met
Underneath the administrative question sits the one that has not moved in months. Israel’s position, stated again by Netanyahu at the start of July, is that there will be no reconstruction of Gaza until Hamas is disarmed. Hamas has dissolved a governing committee. It has not disarmed and has not undertaken to.
The dissolution is therefore best read as a move in that negotiation rather than as an administrative event. It offers the one thing that can be given without cost, which is a title, while withholding the thing that is actually being asked for. And it puts the Board of Peace in the position of having to say whether the offer counts, which is why the Board’s response was careful to the point of saying nothing.
There is movement elsewhere. Morocco signed an agreement on Wednesday to join the International Stabilization Force for Gaza, which adds a state to a force that has been short of them. A stabilization force is the mechanism by which the NCAG could eventually enter, since the objection to its entry is a security objection. Whether that sequence runs is the open question of the autumn.
It is worth saying that none of this makes the committee illegitimate or its members unserious. A technocratic body assembled to administer a territory after a war is a recognized instrument and the people on it have accepted a job with no upside and considerable personal risk. The criticism here is of an arrangement rather than of the fifteen individuals inside it, and the arrangement was made by parties who are not on the committee.
What fifteen means
Return to the number. Fifteen technocrats, unelected, named in January, holding administrative authority since the sixth of July over a territory none of them has set foot in.
Each of those clauses was a compromise and each was defensible on its own. Unelected, because an election in Gaza is not currently possible and a body that waited for one would not exist. Technocrats, because the alternative was factional appointees. Named by an external structure, because the alternative was a process nobody would have accepted.
Taken together, they produced a government with every attribute of a government except the ability to be in the country. The bakeries opened this morning. Somebody decided how much flour. It was not the fifteen.
