Three years after Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, a growing share of Israeli Jews no longer wants any part of Gaza returned to Palestinian hands. New polling from the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) shows support for extended Israeli military rule over the Strip climbing sharply over the past year, even as most Israelis remain doubtful that any deal to disarm Hamas will actually hold.
The JPPI Israeli Society Index for September 2026, based on interviews conducted September 1-3 with 663 Jewish and 206 Arab respondents, found that 36% of Israeli Jews now “generally agree” that Israel should occupy the entire Gaza Strip and administer it through the IDF for at least several years, up from 27% one year earlier. Add those who say they “might agree,” and 55% of Israeli Jews are somewhere on the spectrum of accepting extended occupation. Only 40% remain opposed “under any circumstances,” a figure that has held steady even as the undecided middle shifted toward acceptance.
The same survey found that 72% of Israeli Jews reject, under any circumstances, an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-October 7 Gaza border without retaining a security perimeter inside the Strip — up from 68% a year ago. Among all Israelis, including Arab citizens, 59% reject such a withdrawal outright. Arab Israelis moved in the opposite direction: 49% now support a full withdrawal without any Israeli security presence, up from 36% last year.
The divide inside Jewish Israeli society is stark. On the right, 62% back full occupation and only 9% oppose it under any circumstances. Among secular Jews, 64% oppose occupation outright, compared to just 16% of religious Jews and 13% of Haredim. The gap is not about security assessments. It is about identity.
So why is Jewish opinion moving toward permanence in Gaza rather than away from it, three years after the war that was supposed to end with withdrawal and reconstruction? The Bible answers that question more directly than any pollster can.
Gaza was never Israel’s to give away in the first place. When Joshua divided the land among the twelve tribes, Gaza was allotted to the tribe of Judah, along with Ashkelon and Ashdod, “as far as the Great Sea” (Joshua 15:47). The Philistines held it anyway, by force, for most of biblical history. Israel’s claim to Azza — the Hebrew name for Gaza, meaning “the strong” or “the stronghold” — was written into the inheritance long before Israel had the power to enforce it.
The return of Gaza was described by the prophets. Zephaniah, prophesying the destruction of Philistia, wrote: “And the seacoast shall be for the remnant of the house of Judah; they shall feed their flocks there; in the houses of Ashkelon they shall lie down at evening, for the LORD their God will visit them and restore their fortunes” (Zephaniah 2:7). The prophet did not say Judah might one day negotiate access to the coast. He said the land would belong to Judah’s remnant, and that its own people — not a foreign administrator, not a peacekeeping force — would sleep secure in the houses the Philistines had built.
Zechariah went further, describing a day when Gaza’s king would perish and its population would be absorbed rather than expelled: “A king shall perish from Gaza, and Ashkelon shall not be inhabited. A mixed people shall dwell in Ashdod, and I will cut off the pride of the Philistines” (Zechariah 9:5-6). The prophecy does not describe a two-state arrangement or a temporary security perimeter. It describes the end of Philistine sovereignty over the coastal strip altogether.
Israel has already run the experiment the current polling now regrets. In August 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel dismantled all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and forcibly evacuated more than 8,000 settlers, some of them dragged screaming from synagogues by their own soldiers. The withdrawal, part of a “road map” pushed by the United States, the UN, the EU, and Russia, was completed within weeks and cost Israel more than $2 billion. Palestinians celebrated in the streets of the settlements Jews had built and later abandoned. Mahmoud Abbas himself planted a Palestinian flag in the sand of an evacuated community and called it “a day of happiness and joy.”
Eighteen months later, Gaza voted, and Hamas won. What followed was a terror state: rocket fire on Israeli civilian communities that began almost immediately and never fully stopped, a coup against the Palestinian Authority in 2007 that left Hamas in total control of the Strip, and eighteen years of tunnels, weapons smuggling, and buildup that culminated in the October 7 massacre. The land Israel handed over in the name of peace became the launching ground for the deadliest single day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Israelis did not need a poll to teach them that lesson. They lived it.
None of this means the JPPI numbers describe Israelis “returning to biblical borders.” They do not. The poll measured attitudes toward the IDF’s administration of Gaza, not sovereignty, and certainly not the fulfillment of prophecy. Most Israeli Jews weighing in on this question are almost certainly thinking about rocket fire, tunnel networks, and three years of war — not Zephaniah. But the direction of Israeli public opinion and that of the prophetic text are, for the first time in decades, pointing in the same direction. A nation battered by October 7, and instructed by 2005, is losing patience with the idea that security can be outsourced to anyone else, in Gaza above all. Zephaniah and Zechariah were not writing recommendations for Israeli policy. They were describing what Israel’s God had already decided about a strip of coastline that has never, in three thousand years, stayed peacefully out of Jewish hands for long.
The polling will shift again with the next round of violence, the next election, the next headline. The prophecy will not. Israelis are, slowly and for their own reasons, arriving somewhere the text already told them they were going.
