Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right to argue that there can be no true security for the Jewish state or future for the people of Gaza if Hamas is allowed to stay in power. But having the Israeli military take over all of Gaza would be a big risk.

In the wee hours of the morning in Israel on Friday, the cabinet approved a plan to take over Gaza City, home to about 800,000 Gazans. The residents will have until October 7 — about two months — to move south. The timeline reported by Israeli media was that it would take three months to conquer the city and another two months to clear out remaining members of Hamas.

In an interview with Fox News, however, Netanyahu said the longer-term plan was to take over all of Gaza. He said the goal wasn’t to rule over Gaza, but to “liberate” its people from the terrorist group. He insisted that Israel had no interest in keeping it. Instead, he said the idea was to root out Hamas, create a security perimeter, and then “hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly.”

It is reasonable for Israel to want a security barrier inside Gaza that runs along the border with Israel and could create a bit of a buffer zone to help protect against the sort of invasion by thousands of terrorists that happened on October 7. And its war against Hamas remains well-justified.

But in terms of taking over all of Gaza, there are plenty of examples — from the U.S. in Iraq to Israel’s own experience in Lebanon — that point to the difficulty of occupying an area and then simply handing it over to a third party. The Gaza situation may have been solved long ago if there were an obvious responsible alternative to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

It’s possible that the current plan, with its two-month windup, is designed to pressure Hamas into finally agreeing to a deal to release all the hostages. But were Israel to pursue the current plan and expand it further to all of Gaza, it would assume responsibility for administering an area of 2 million people, many of them hostile. The Israel Defense Forces are already stretched thin with lengthy repeat deployments of reservists after nearly two years of war. The seven-month plan to take over Gaza City alone would require calling up 200,000 reservists. It would put more IDF soldiers in harm’s way in fierce urban warfare that could surpass anything seen to this point in the war. It would also raise the risk that Hamas will simply execute the remaining hostages.

And even if Netanyahu is earnest in his desire to leave, making that contingent upon a responsible third party stepping in to administer Gaza could delay that date indefinitely.

Taking over all of Gaza would also increase demands among some voices on the Israeli right to start to resettle there. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, which it had conquered in the 1967 war. This required uprooting thousands of Israelis from settlements within Gaza. The Hamas takeover that shortly followed has convinced a majority of Israelis that withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a mistake. Even if withdrawal was a mistake, however, it does not mean that resettlement — which would require lots of money and a long-term IDF presence in Gaza — is the answer.

While we know that there are no easy answers to rooting out Hamas, securing the hostages, and having a responsible party govern Gaza, an Israeli takeover of the entire strip represents a significant risk.