Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman keeps insisting that Israel will not supply Gaza with free electricity. He reiterated this in a June 15 interview with the Al-Munaseq website of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), established 10 months ago to provide a direct line in Arabic to the Palestinians, above the heads of their leadership. Liberman explained that Hamas collects 100 million Israeli shekels ($28.3 million) in annual taxes from residents of the Gaza Strip but uses them to fund terror activities rather than the enclave’s education and health systems and its crumbling water infrastructure.

But Liberman’s position has generated criticism within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with senior officers telling Al-Monitor that the Defense Cabinet’s decision to scale back power supply to Gaza (with Liberman one of its main instigators) could result in a military conflagration with Hamas.

The crisis over power to the Strip does not only constitute a security threat to Israel but also an environmental and health hazard.

Absent energy sources, all of Gaza’s waste treatment systems collapsed about a year ago. Indeed, the system collapsed well before Israel started implementing its decision to cut back Gaza's power supply. This Israeli May 2017 decision was designed to exert pressure on Hamas following Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision about a month earlier to disconnect from the Gaza Strip and stop paying for its electricity supplied by Israel. In fact, Gaza authorities had at the time stopped treating the sewage of all the Strip’s main towns — Gaza, Khan Yunis and Rafah. Operating the waste treatment plants requires quite a large amount of energy, and Hamas opted to use what electricity it could get for purposes it considered more important.