By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Stuck In Gaza
Six months after
Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Israel seems stuck.
Its war in Gaza has inflicted grievous blows on Hamas, and the group is
unlikely to be able to carry out another comparable attack for some time, if
ever. The price for this success is high, however, both in terms of Palestinian
lives and Israel’s reputation. Israel remains far from its goal of destroying
Hamas, and it seems trapped in a military campaign that is likely to make only
incremental progress at a huge cost.
When Israel declared war against Hamas last October, it stood unified at
home and enjoyed broad backing from around the world following an unprecedented
attack by the Islamic militant group.
Six months later,
Israel finds itself in a far different place: bogged down in Gaza, divided
domestically, isolated internationally and increasingly at odds with its closest ally. The risk of a broader regional war remains real.
Despite Israel’s
fierce military onslaught, Hamas is still standing, if significantly weakened.
The offensive has pushed Gaza into a humanitarian crisis, displacing more than
80% of the population and leaving over 1 million people on the brink
of starvation. Yet
Israel hasn’t presented a postwar vision acceptable to its partners, and
cease-fire talks remain at a standstill.
especially following
its killing of seven aid workers in what it says was an errant airstrike. Six
of the victims were volunteers from countries allied with Israel, antagonizing
them and outraging U.S. President Joe Biden. The alleged Israeli airstrike on an Iran’s embassy
in Syria and Netanyahu’s efforts to shutter the Arab satellite channel Al
Jazeera have further alienated allies.
After a period of
broad unity early in the war, Israel has returned to its divided self — with
its polarizing leader at the center of the storm.
After October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu swore to “destroy Hamas” by killing its leaders, shattering its
military forces, and demolishing its infrastructure. He has vowed to prevent
another such attack and promised to seek the return of the hostages Hamas took,
including the bodies of those who are dead. And he has made clear that he wants
to ensure that Israel’s other enemies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, are
deterred from attacking.
Although Israel has
hit Hamas hard, it has failed to set the stage for a new, successful government in Gaza, a prerequisite
for keeping Hamas down in the long run. And despite pressure from Washington,
Israel appears to be doubling down on its current short-term approach, planning
a major operation in the city of Rafah that would offer only marginal military gains
but would exacerbate Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and further diminish Israel’s
reputation. Because Israel’s current leaders don’t seem to care about answering
the question of who will govern Gaza, the best one can hope for in the next six
months is that Israel dials down the intensity of its violence in Gaza while
dialing up the amount of aid flowing in. But this approach will satisfy neither
Israelis nor Palestinians.
A Glass Half Full?
Israel has made
significant progress toward its goal of destroying Hamas. The Israeli military
claims that its operations have forced 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions to disband.
Israel has also killed several of the group’s top military leaders, including
Marwan Issa, who helped plan the October 7 attack and was perhaps the third
most important Hamas leader in Gaza. And Israeli forces have destroyed many of
Hamas’s tunnels, fortified positions, and arms depots.
A repeat of October 7
is unlikely not just because Hamas’s forces are weak but also because Israel
has been shaken from its complacency. More than a year before the attack,
Israeli intelligence had intercepted Hamas’s battle plan and, after that,
identified specific indicators that the plan was in motion. Had Israel acted on
that intelligence—by attacking fighters as they were gathering, sending even a
few helicopters to the border, or reinforcing garrisons in southern
Israel—Hamas would have failed. Since October 7, however, Israel has become
hyperalert to the threat, and the danger now is not complacency but
overreaction. It’s easy to imagine Israeli forces striking hard and fast when
even a glimmer of intelligence suggesting a Hamas attack appears, with little
concern about validating the information first.
When it comes to
Israel’s other enemies, deterrence appears to be holding. Hezbollah, perhaps
Israel’s fiercest foe, has moved cautiously in its back-and-forth with Israel
along the Lebanese border, in large part because it fears that if it doesn’t,
its strongholds in Beirut may end up looking like Gaza. When Israel has struck
Hezbollah-linked targets in Syria and in the process killed Syrian soldiers, as
it did in March, the regime of Bashar al-Assad protested but did little else.
Even now, after six
months of war, Israelis remain willing to sacrifice: over 200 Israeli soldiers
have died during the campaign, a high number for the casualty-averse country.
The scale and horrific nature of October 7, including widespread sexual violence,
generated a strong will to fight. Immediately after the attack, Israel called
up around 300,000 reserves. Although many of these Israelis have ended their
service, some are still mobilized, and Israel plans to lengthen service in the
future despite the cost to the Israeli economy and the disruption to ordinary
Israelis’ lives. “Destroying Hamas” may be a strategic bumper sticker—a vague
slogan—but it remains popular.
Or Half Empty?
Yet despite these
accomplishments, Israel’s military campaign is sputtering. Killing Issa dealt
Hamas a blow, but the two most prominent leaders, Mohammed Deif and Yahya
Sinwar, remain at large. Although Hamas’s battalion structure has been hit hard
and the group may not be able to fight in large formations, it is far from
crushed. Hamas still has thousands of fighters under arms. Its members now
fight in smaller groups, with bands of a dozen or fewer attacking Israeli
forces and then hiding in the rubble, darting into the remaining tunnels, or
blending in with the civilian population.
Perhaps Israel’s
biggest failure concerns the hostages. The release of 112 hostages and rescue
of several more left 130 in Hamas’s hands. The Israeli government has announced
that 34 of those are presumed dead, and far more may have perished. Hamas claims
that Israeli military operations have killed over 70 hostages. The same tunnels
that hide Hamas’s fighters and leaders also hide its captives, and it is hard
to target Gaza as extensively as Israel has done without inadvertently killing
some of them. There is no simple answer to the hostage conundrum. Almost all
Israelis want to hit Hamas hard, but the country is split between those who are
willing to embrace a cease-fire so the hostages can be returned and those,
including Netanyahu, who would rather risk the hostages’ lives than let up on
Hamas.
If Hamas regained
power, it would try to siphon off aid to rebuild at least some of its
infrastructure and recruit new military forces. Thus, destroying Hamas also
means destroying its political power, and you can’t beat something with
nothing. But whatever damage Hamas’s military has suffered, the group remains
popular compared with its rivals. Most Palestinians see the October 7 attack as
justified, including 71 percent of people in Gaza. Although polls suggest that
Palestinians are disillusioned with all the current factions, Hamas is more
than twice as popular as its chief rival, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which
holds sway in the West Bank.
Israel’s tactical
successes have come at a huge human cost. Over 32,000 Palestinians have died in
Gaza, many of them children. Over 1.7 million people have been displaced, and
much of the population is at risk of famine and disease. Beyond the carnage of
the war itself, Israel has put in place numerous burdensome procedures for aid
to reach Gaza, reducing them only slowly in the face of international
criticism. The problem is even worse within the strip itself, where the absence
of a government makes it hard to distribute aid to the neediest.
As a result, Israel’s
international reputation is suffering. Citing Israel’s seeming indifference to
the human costs of its war, European officials are increasingly criticizing the
country, with polls showing that the European public is less and less supportive,
too. For the last decade, Israel has focused not on courting the West but on
normalizing relationships with pro-Western Arab states, with Saudi Arabia as
the prize. Now, however, Arab governments that made peace with Israel, such as
Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, are under pressure from their own people,
who express outrage at Israel’s campaign in Gaza and its broader treatment of
the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia, which had been exploring normalization with
Israel before October 7, now insists that Israel must first agree to a plan for
a Palestinian state before talks can resume.
Support from the
United States, Israel’s most important ally, has also fallen. Among Americans
in general, favorable views of Israel have declined from 68 percent to 58
percent over the past year. The decline is even sharper among younger
Americans, where favorability has fallen by a staggering 26 percentage points,
dropping from 64 percent to 38 percent. The Gaza war may be setting the stage
for a generational shift in U.S. foreign policy. Democratic voters now evince
more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis. President Joe Biden, who
in the days after October 7 strongly sided with Israel, is now steadily
becoming more critical. In early March, his administration declined to veto a
UN Security Council resolution calling for a lasting cease-fire in Gaza.
Although the war is
popular in Israel, the Netanyahu government is embattled, and its political
weakness has profound consequences for the fight against Hamas. Before October
7, antigovernment protests had swept much of Israel, and concerns about the Netanyahu
government’s far-right agenda, such as its plan to weaken the Israeli
judiciary, endure. Netanyahu himself faces corruption charges even as the war
goes on, and he is desperate to keep his coalition together. If an election
were held today, polls indicate he would lose to his rival, Benny Gantz of the
National Unity party, who is currently serving in Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
To ensure a united
political coalition and thus avoid an election in the near term, Netanyahu has
opposed a cease-fire and otherwise tried to keep the far right happy, resisting
calls for more religious Israelis to serve in the military and distributing arms
to far-right settlers in the West Bank. Extremist ministers such as Bezalel
Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir not only oppose a cease-fire with Hamas, they also
rabidly oppose the PA. Their dislike of the group explains why Netanyahu has
rejected calls for the PA to play a role in governing postwar Gaza—a stance
that puts him directly in opposition with the United States.
Netanyahu also
rejects Palestinian sovereignty in general. In a January news conference, he
criticized U.S. calls for a pathway to a Palestinian state and vowed that
Israel would maintain “security control” over the West Bank, explaining his
logic this way: “All territory we evacuate, we get terror, terrible terror
against us.” That position pleases Israel’s far right, but it antagonizes Arab
states that, however much they hate Hamas, still need to listen to popular
demands for Palestinian rights. It also falls flat with many Western leaders
who have spent decades pushing a two-state solution.
The War Goes On
Some of the problems
Israel is encountering in Gaza were inevitable. Given the scale of the violence
on October 7, it would have been impossible for any Israeli leader not to have
ordered at least a limited, short-term invasion of Gaza. And a campaign in Gaza
was always bound to be fraught. With its high population density, the strip is
an extraordinarily difficult place to run sustained military operations. There
is no easy way to move civilians out of harm’s way, and Hamas’s willingness to
hide among civilians made considerable Palestinian casualties inevitable.
But even so, there
were missed opportunities. Israel could have allowed far more aid to flow to
Gaza to alleviate some of the humanitarian cost and fend off international
criticism that it was punishing noncombatants. It could have embraced a
cease-fire (beyond the seven-day one in November) as part of a hostage
exchange, which would not only have perhaps freed more prisoners but also
helped the country regain international support. And it could have kept its
military operations in Gaza more precise and more limited, reducing civilian
casualties. All these steps, of course, would have given Hamas more breathing
room, which is why Israel avoided taking them. Perhaps most important, if least
politically realistic, both before and after October 7, Israel could have
supported a Palestinian alternative to Hamas as a government of Gaza, working
with Arab states to ensure its legitimacy and international partners to fund
it. Hamas would have hated this step—but so would the Israeli right, a
coalition Netanyahu has determined he cannot ignore.
Such counterfactuals
aside, it is questionable that Israel’s actual, hard-hitting approach can
achieve much more on the ground in a way that would significantly change the
overall picture in the coming months. In March, the Netanyahu government
approved a plan to attack Rafah, the final Hamas stronghold in Gaza where over
a million displaced Palestinians have now sought refuge. If the government goes
through with the plan, Israeli forces could presumably kill more fighters and
maybe even finally corner Sinwar, Deif, or both. They would do so, however, at
a massive cost to Gaza’s civilians, who have nowhere left to go and are at risk
of starvation and disease. And although killing Deif and Sinwar would provide
some catharsis for Israelis (and political benefit for Netanyahu), the tactical
benefit would be limited: Hamas has a deep bench of leaders it can draw from to
replace those it has lost.
More important,
permanently uprooting Hamas requires a different government in Gaza, one that
can rule for years and, in the process, displace Hamas’s role in providing law
and order, social services, and other essentials. Failing to establish that
sort of government means that in the event of an Israeli withdrawal, even a few
thousand fighters—and Hamas currently boasts far more than a few thousand—could
easily reestablish Hamas’s control, especially given the credibility the
organization has gained in its latest fight with Israel. Without a strong force
replacing Hamas throughout Gaza, the group will try to reestablish itself in
weakly controlled areas. Israel already got a glimpse of this problem in March,
when Hamas fighters regrouped in al Shifa hospital, which Israel had previously
cleared at the cost of much opprobrium, forcing Israeli forces to attack the
facility once again.
A new government in
Gaza, however, would be very hard to establish. The PA is the best bet, and it
remains the Biden administration’s preferred postwar ruler. But the PA is
corrupt and illegitimate, as well as discredited by its longtime failure to
wrest meaningful concessions from Israel. Even with revitalized leadership,
Hamas would oppose it in Gaza, especially if it sought to displace the group
rather than simply provide basic services. A PA government in Gaza would need
billions of dollars in outside support to hold on to power and years to
establish itself as an independent source of authority. But Netanyahu rejects
even this modest proposal.
The result, then, is
a military campaign facing diminishing returns but no plan for what comes next.
No one is governing the Gaza Strip now. Should Israeli forces largely or
entirely withdraw, Gaza may become akin to a failed state, with a mix of local
leaders, warlords, and tribes ruling different areas, or simply no one in
charge at all—as has already begun to happen in much of the strip. Such a
situation wouldn’t rock the far-right coalition, because it doesn’t offer any
hope of greater Palestinian autonomy, but it also won’t solve the problem of
who will govern Gaza.
Israeli military
forces thus are likely to stay in Gaza for a long time to come. Even if Israel
and Hamas agree to a cease-fire as part of a hostage release, it probably won’t
last indefinitely, since Israeli forces are likely to conduct regular attacks to
keep Hamas off balance, as nothing else would prevent the group from again
consolidating power, at least in select areas, in the absence of an alternative
government. In this scenario, which may already be coming to fruition, the
meager hope is that the conflict transforms into simply a more limited war.
Israeli forces would incur far fewer casualties, while Palestinians in Gaza
would benefit from less violence and more aid. As the conflict settled down and
the humanitarian catastrophe eased, Israel would hope that world headlines
would move on from Gaza. At that point, perhaps the country could restart
normalization talks with Saudi Arabia and mend its relationship with
Washington.
If this scenario
comes to pass, day-to-day life for Palestinians would go from horrific to
miserable, an improvement but hardly a satisfying one. Hamas, meanwhile, would
gain breathing room as Israeli operations diminish but still not be able to
return to power in the face of regular raids and bombing campaigns. Gaza would
remain a war zone, and any serious rebuilding would still have to wait.
Time For Pressure
Israeli society as a
whole, not just Netanyahu and his right-wing allies, is committed to crushing
Hamas, and it will be difficult to force the government to change its
self-defeating approach to Gaza. Nonetheless, the Biden administration should
try to persuade Israel to do more than merely manage the conflict by
threatening to limit both military aid and diplomatic support. Given the
fraught U.S. politics around Israel, however, it is difficult to imagine the
Biden administration greatly increasing pressure on Israel. And even if it did,
Netanyahu’s political weakness makes it unlikely he would agree to concessions
that would risk his coalition.
For now, Netanyahu
and Biden seem to be trying to wait each other out, hoping that the other will
leave office and thus make his country more cooperative. The Biden
administration’s decision to allow a cease-fire resolution to go through the UN
is a good first step. Biden’s suggestion that further U.S. aid to Israel would
be conditioned on a course correction in Gaza, a threat made during a tense
phone call with Netanyahu, was also promising. Similar signaling is
necessary—for example, more public statements from the president and other
senior officials on the need for a cease-fire as part of a hostage exchange—as
is continuing to press against the Rafah invasion.
The United States
often has trouble influencing small allies when its vital interests are at
stake. That is why in years past leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq often ignored
U.S. requests even when the United States had thousands of troops helping
secure peace in their countries. It is why today Ukraine often ignores U.S.
military advice and why Taiwanese leaders at times flirt with declaring
independence despite U.S. pressure not to do so. The same is true of Israel.
The country sees itself as fighting an existential fight in Gaza, and its prime
minister is locked in a struggle for political survival, so it is unlikely to
accommodate itself to Washington.
But even though the
United States’ influence is limited, it does exist. After half a year of nearly
steadfast support, it’s time for the Biden administration to firmly push Israel
in the direction it should go anyway. Honesty is what friends owe friends.
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