Indefinitely.

If you’re wondering how long Israel plans to administer martial law in Gaza once the fighting’s over, that’s your answer.

Maybe that’s an inaccurate characterization of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks to ABC, but it’s hard to understand how Israel can have “the overall security responsibility” for the enclave, as he put it, without a military occupation.

“We’ve seen what happens when we don’t have that security responsibility,” he went on. “What we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale we couldn’t imagine.”

From a domestic political perspective, one of Netanyahu’s many problems centers around the idea that what happened on October 7 actually wasn’t unimaginable. Without exonerating US intelligence for whatever failures preceded 9/11, the plot was far-fetched. The only thing far-fetched about the October 7 attacks was the IDF’s assumption that a fence, no matter how technologically advanced, constituted sufficient protection against the murderous agenda of a militant organization operating out of the overcrowded ghetto next door.

You could argue that because the fence suffered a catastrophic failure, and because, the IDF’s Minority Report-esque delusions aside, you can’t preempt all rocket launches, the only way to fix the security situation is by occupying the territory “for an indefinite period,” to quote Netanyahu directly.

No one — not Netanyahu, not Arab governments, not experts on the region and certainly not the US — has any good ideas for how to administer Gaza City once the IDF clears it of militants. Israel encircled the city early this week and the worst of the urban warfare will likely play out over the next month or so. Obviously, Hamas can’t hold the city if the IDF is determined to take it.

Ostensibly, Israel doesn’t want to reoccupy Gaza, but they won’t have a choice. There’s a very real sense in which this is a “you broke it, you bought it” sort of deal. Northern Gaza lays in ruins, but southern Gaza isn’t any better. Remember, the whole strip is just 25 miles long. Lots of Gazans will try to return north, and somebody has to provide basic services for those people. Israel can’t just raze the place then go back behind the fence.

The IDF is killing (inadvertently, one hopes) UNRWA employees by the dozens. 89 UN staff are dead so far and “the number goes up every day,” as one spokeswoman lamented. “They are killed in the north, the middle and the south, men and women, some at home, some at displacement shelters, some bringing refugees to the shelters.” Between them, the World Health Organization, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent have lost 23 staff (three Red Crescent deaths occurred during Hamas’s rampage last month).

By the time the fighting’s over, hardly anything will be left of the territory’s already crumbling critical infrastructure. Hospitals, clinics and schools have suffered catastrophic damage, and it’s probably fair to suggest that at least half (and probably more like two-thirds) of the populace is displaced in one way or another.

Everyone, including Antony Blinken this week, pretends there’s sufficient time to work out a plan for “the day after,” as Blinken put it, but there really isn’t. Gaza has no army. Not a real one. The urban warfare will be brutal, but the outcome in Gaza City is a foregone conclusion. An IDF victory in the initial push to oust Hamas isn’t in question, which means everyone (except the IDF, which obviously has a responsibility to focus on today’s objectives) should be hard at work crafting next steps. Because “the day after” is when the losses (all sorts of different kinds of losses) could start to pile up for Israel.

Those losses — which’ll run the gamut from propaganda coups when innocents get hit by a stray bullets to actual Israeli military casualties in the inevitable counterinsurgency — could eventually add up to a Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq outcome for Israel, with the difference being that by virtue of geography (and you’re gently reminded that this whole macabre ordeal is about humans’ illogical penchant for deifying geography), Gaza will never be out of sight, out of mind for Israelis.

While recapping its own interview with Netanyahu, ABC cited John Kirby, Biden’s national security council spokesman. “We are having conversations with our Israeli counterparts about what governance in Gaza should look like post-conflict and I don’t believe that any solutions have been settled upon one way or the other,” Kirby said. “Who’s going to do what and for how long.” The only thing anyone knows for sure, Kirby said, is that “whatever it looks like, it can’t look like what it did.”

That isn’t a plan. That’s reminiscent of the kind of thinking that ultimately brought the world ISIS. ISIS grew out of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi operations in the decade after the US overthrew Saddam Hussein without a plan for “the day after.”

The only “bright” side is that governing (or administering security for) an area as small as Gaza is at least possible in theory. But the US and Israel need to start thinking seriously about how that’s going to work. Because you can be sure there are some very bad actors on the other side of this equation thinking about “tomorrow” right now. And they’re probably back-channeling both with the Sunni powers and Tehran to line up funding and support for whatever it is they have planned for “the day after.”

Netanyahu’s right: Israel will be tasked with an “indefinite” security responsibility in Gaza. There’s no more urgent concern than mapping out the logistics of that responsibility.