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 huge cost.

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 has protested but done 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 less 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 it’s possible that far more 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.

Israel has failed to set the stage for a new, successful government in Gaza.

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 European publics are 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.

Some of the problems Israel is encountering in Gaza were inevitable.

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, it is possible that Gaza becomes 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.