Daily Times Editorials 6th September 2026

‘Right to Remain’

Israel’s debate over Gaza has entered a more dangerous phase. Defence Minister Israel Katz said this week that there was “no real solution” without Gazans leaving and that Israel was prepared to move them by sea, air and other routes once Washington agreed.

A day later, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proposed a seven-year programme, complete with a government ministry to facilitate departures. With elections due on Oct 27, there is obvious political theatre here. Yet an idea ceases to be merely rhetorical when ministers begin attaching timelines to it.

The context matters. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel controls about 60 per cent of Gaza and will not retreat from the Yellow Line for now. The US-backed framework, by contrast, explicitly says Palestinians will not be compelled to leave, and those who do may return.

US Ambassador Mike Huckabee has, in the meantime, said there is no American-backed plan to force Gazans out. Washington therefore faces a test of whether its own language has operational meaning when senior Israeli ministers are openly discussing arrangements that point in the opposite direction.

“Voluntary” departure is a particularly slippery concept in a territory where 1.98 million people (94 per cent of the population) require shelter assistance, 58 per cent face critical or catastrophic shelter needs and some 371,888 housing units have been damaged or destroyed. Gaza’s economy has contracted by 84 per cent, while reconstruction is estimated to require $71.4 billion over the next decade.

Reconstruction will determine who can live where, who can recover property and whether communities can be restored. Lost documents, damaged land records, inaccessible neighbourhoods and continuing military control can make a supposedly temporary exit permanent without a formal expulsion order.

This is precisely why the international community cannot treat reconstruction as a neutral engineering exercise. Donor governments, multilateral lenders and Arab states financing Gaza’s recovery must insist that residency, property and return rights are protected alongside every road, hospital and housing project.

Developments in the West Bank sharpen the warning. A UN report released this week says more than 33,000 Palestinians displaced from Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams remain unable to return, while large portions of all three camps have been damaged or destroyed. The larger danger is that military devastation may gradually be converted into a demographic outcome that would have been politically impossible to announce at the outset. -*

Back to Market

Pakistan has raised $3 billion from international investors in its largest single capital-market transaction, placing $1.75 billion of 5.5-year paper and another $1.25 billion for 10 years against orders approaching $6 billion. Coming barely five months after Islamabad returned to the Eurobond market, the latest sale suggests something important has changed: Pakistan is no longer merely testing whether foreign investors will buy its debt. With a hint of cautious optimism, it is once again able to raise meaningful sums across the maturity curve.

The government is entitled to some satisfaction. A combination of IMF-backed stabilisation, stronger reserves, successive rating upgrades and considerably improved perceptions of default risk has reopened a market that had effectively closed on Pakistan during the crisis years. Reports that risk premiums tightened during book-building are, in fact, more instructive because they indicate that investor appetite strengthened sufficiently for Pakistan to improve pricing while the transaction was being executed.

There is an even more interesting liability-management story beneath the deal. As per sources, the proceeds will help repay the $3 billion Saudi financing arranged in April after Pakistan met a UAE obligation. If so, Islamabad is effectively replacing short-duration bilateral support with 5.5- and 10-year market debt. This fits Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb’s stated strategy of gradually reducing dependence on annual bilateral rollovers while diversifying towards commercial markets without increasing the overall debt burden. Pakistan rolled over $4 billion of bilateral deposits in the first half of FY26 alone.Download Interactive Maps

That is a worthwhile shift, though certainly not a free one. Market borrowing gives the sovereign certainty over tenor and removes some of the diplomatic uncertainty surrounding repeated rollovers. It replaces that flexibility with hard repayment dates.

Already, IMF projections put Pakistan’s gross external financing requirement at $19.1 billion in FY27 and approaching $30 billion in FY29 under its current baseline. Much of these requirements is covered through expected rollovers and financing flows, and the numbers will change as liabilities are refinanced. They nevertheless explain why the government is sensibly trying to lock in longer-duration funding while markets are receptive.

There is a second dividend worth cultivating. A credible sovereign curve gives Pakistani banks and larger companies a benchmark against which they too can eventually raise foreign capital. That would represent a much more consequential normalisation of Pakistan’s relationship with international markets.

Islamabad can therefore fairly call the transaction a success. Having spent years persuading creditors to stay, Pakistan has regained the luxury of choosing between them. Good debt management now requires choosing well. *