Israeli Press
Netanyahu's bureau blocked the Erez opening Israel had promised the UN
Image credit: Nickolay Mladenov — European People's Party / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 · License
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Israel's security establishment spent weeks preparing to open the Erez crossing to goods for Gaza. Then the prime minister's office said no decision had ever been taken.
The account is by Itamar Eichner, the diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli news site Ynet, who published it on Friday under the heading of a political farce.
What was prepared#
The National Security Council, headed by Shmuel Ben Ezra, approved the opening, Eichner reports. Southern Command and the crossings authority worked on the infrastructure, examined the routes trucks would take and assessed the forces needed to secure them.
The commitment was then made in public and abroad. Israel's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Noa Furman, named 1 September as the date Erez would open.
What the prime minister's office said#
Officials in Netanyahu's bureau told Ynet that no decision was made, that the security work was staff preparation unrelated to a transfer of goods, and that a step of that weight requires the approval of the prime minister and the defence minister, which they said was never given.
Eichner's reporting sets the two accounts side by side without resolving them, and the contradiction is the story: the preparation says commitment, the denial says political caution.
Erez is Gaza's northern crossing. Opening it to commercial goods would shorten the road into Gaza City and the north, which is why it appears in the American plan as an early and comparatively easy step.
The Americans see opening Erez as a relatively simple signal of progress. Israel's bureau says nothing was decided.
Itamar Eichner, Ynet, 28 August 2026
Washington's irritation, and the election#
The Trump administration is frustrated, Eichner writes, because it reads the opening as exactly that kind of low-cost signal. Nickolay Mladenov, working within the Board of Peace framework, criticised Israel for preserving the status quo rather than changing the conditions that produced 7 October.
The Israeli position in the dispute is that Hamas must disarm first. The American position is that incremental steps should proceed regardless. Hamas maintains it retains military capacity.
Over all of it sits 27 October. Eichner's argument is that an election campaign turns any movement on Gaza into a charge of giving Hamas a gift, and that the bureau declined to pay that price.
For Palestinians in northern Gaza the sequence has a plain reading. A crossing was prepared, a date was given to the United Nations, and the date now belongs to an Israeli election calendar rather than to a decision anyone will own.
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