By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Current Devastation of Gaza

After nearly 700 days of war, the death toll in Gaza has risen to extraordinary levels. Amid heavy bombardment that has turned the territory into a wasteland.

Commercial satellite images also show the Israeli military building up troops and equipment near the border with Gaza that would support a possible new ground invasion of the Palestinian enclave, according to three U.S. officials and a former official who viewed the imagery.

The Western official said an offensive remains a very dangerous prospect for the Israeli military because Hamas is very dug in and there is “no chance they can kill every fighter.”

The Western official added that there is concern that Hamas will kill hostages or put them in the way of fighting if it is threatened.

Israeli forces know the general area where all the hostages are, said the person briefed on Israeli discussions and the Western official, one of whom added that the belief is that the area is in central Gaza.

“Looking at the condition of hostages, it’s clear that they don’t have much more time,” one of the sources added about a recent video of an emaciated Israeli hostage inside a cramped Gaza tunnel digging his own grave.

In February, the medical journal The Lancet published an extensive analysis based on a wide variety of sources (including obituaries) and estimated that the official death toll underreported the direct war deaths in Gaza by at least 41 percent and perhaps by as much as 107 percent, while not accounting at all for nontrauma-related deaths resulting from the impact of Israeli military operations on Gaza’s health services, food and water supplies, and sanitation.

Netanyahu gave a recent interview to Fox News in which he said Israel intended to take full control of Gaza to assure Israel's security, remove Hamas from power, and enable the transfer of civilian governance to another party. He suggested that Israel did not want to keep the territory. "We don't want to govern it," Netanyahu said, in English. "We don't want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces."

As of late July 2025, Israel’s war in Gaza has led to the deaths of between five to ten percent of the prewar population of about 2.2 million. This represents an unprecedented slaughter. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is the most lethal case of a Western democracy using the punishment of civilians as a tactic of war.

Israel’s defenders may insist that civilian deaths are inevitable in a conflict against a burrowed-in terrorist enemy. But it has been clear from Israeli actions—including the targeting of children by snipers, the relentless bombing of civilian infrastructure and residences, and the blockade and starvation of the civilian population—as well as the rhetoric of numerous Israeli officials that Israel’s war is not simply against Hamas but aimed at all the residents of Gaza. That is also the conclusion of numerous international institutions and human rights groups. Indeed, the notion that Hamas can be eradicated via military means is a “fantasy,” as former Shin Bet director Yoram Cohen said this week. 

In Gaza, support for Hamas has remained flat, despite the enormous suffering brought upon the territory in the wake of Hamas’s October 2023 attack. In September 2023, Hamas had a 13-point lead over Fatah in Gaza (38 to 25 percent), and in May 2025, the numbers were almost the same: Hamas held a 12-point edge over Fatah (37 to 25 percent). The one sign that the Israeli campaign may have changed some views in Gaza is the drop in support among Gazans for armed attacks on Israeli civilians, which fell from 67 percent in September 2023 to 37 percent in May 2025.

Waiting for food in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, August 2025

But the polling suggests that Israel has not succeeded in severing the connection between Gazans and Hamas. Far from dwindling, support for Hamas has grown or remained the same, and the willingness of Palestinians to attack Israeli civilians remains high enough to satisfy Hamas’s recruiting needs, despite the most brutal punishment campaign by a Western democracy in history. For Israel’s security, the tragic reality is that Hamas likely retains the key asset that could allow it to carry out another major attack down the road: vast numbers of fighters willing to fight and die for the cause.

Hamas’s abiding popularity could be a factor in wider violence beyond Gaza. With Israeli forces stepping up raids on Palestinian refugee camps and settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, the region is now a powder keg. The West Bank is home to 2.7 million Palestinians and 670,000 Israeli settlers living in close proximity to one another. Recent Israeli plans to expand settlements in the West Bank and rhetoric from far-right figures calling for the territory’s annexation will likely add fuel to this potential fire.

Israel’s announced intention to seize control of at least 75 percent of Gaza and then confine Gazans to a small portion of territory won’t succeed in divorcing the population from Hamas. As Palestinians are driven into a small corner of the enclave, Hamas will just move with them; this plan is no more likely to defeat Hamas than were the previous population transfers that forced people from area to area inside Gaza. Indeed, such Israeli actions will cause more suffering among civilians—and produce more terrorists. Israel could go further still, expelling Gazans into the Sinai Desert, but such a drastic measure would stoke the possibility of future retributive violence targeting Israelis. And most damaging for long-term Israeli security, throwing Gazans out of the territory would leave Israel open to accusations of engaging in ethnic cleansing, undermining any moral case for supporting the country.

Military operations that, intentionally or not, result in historic levels of civilian deaths are ultimately leading to a more dangerous situation for Israel, making it a less desirable home for Jews and a more likely target for those seeking revenge. Instead, Israel should establish a new security perimeter between Israeli civilian population centers and the Palestinians in Gaza, allowing Gazans enough space to rebuild their lives, letting humanitarian and economic aid to flow into the territory unimpeded, and working with international allies to foster alternative political arrangements to Hamas or Israeli control in Gaza.

 

The Strategic Costs

Since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, international support for the country has been based in significant part on the recognition that Jews were the victims of the worst genocide in history. The war in Gaza, however, has seen a swelling tide of condemnation of Israel for committing intentional harm to civilians, mass atrocities, and even genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants that require some 125 countries, including France and the United Kingdom, to detain Israel’s prime minister and other members of Israel’s cabinet. Even within Israel, prominent voices are calling for a course correction: former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza are tantamount to a “war crime,” arguing that “what we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: the indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” As Israel becomes an international pariah and faces stiffening resistance to its rule in Gaza, the historic scale of its punishment of civilians is only jeopardizing the country’s long-term security.

Many Western countries have already begun to make moves to chastise Israel, including by joining much of the rest of the world in formally recognizing a Palestinian state, a step that could lead to large-scale humanitarian intervention in Gaza and economic sanctions on Israel. The United States will likely not follow that path, but U.S. President Donald Trump is mercurial. He has already contradicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and insisted that the starvation of Gaza must end. Rifts within Trump’s base are widening over Israel. U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading hard-right Republican, declared that Israel is in fact committing genocide in Gaza, borrowing from rhetoric heard more often on the left. A tactical alliance could grow in the United States between elements of the far right and the far left that seek to roll back U.S. support for Israel.

Israel is the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East and has scored numerous victories over its opponents in recent years. But it is also a tiny country surrounded by rivals. And it needs close relations with major Western democracies to ensure the viability of its economy. Those relations could be tested and strained as Israel continues waging the worst campaign of civilian punishment ever performed by a Western democracy, a campaign that has not come close to eliminating Hamas and has given Israel more adversaries and left it more isolated.

 

 

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