The decision to move from “there won’t be Hamas” and “military pressure brings hostages home” to some kind of de facto ceasefire and managed conflict, and leaving Hamas in power, will not bode well.
SETH J. FRANTZMAN
JULY 7, 2024 16:50
IDF troops operate in the Gaza Strip. July 3, 2024.(photo credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT)
In mid-November, a month after the Hamas massacre of October 7, the IDF was fighting with intensity in Gaza. Divisions of troops were deployed around Gaza City and Hamas was facing a major onslaught of Israeli armor and infantry as well as hundreds of airstrikes during the night and day. The ground battles in November, which had begun with an offensive on October 27, achieved some of their goals. One of the goals was to return hostages. A deal was agreed to and hostages were released in late November, 2023.
At the time the Israeli public was told that the military pressure of the ground offensive had worked to secure the release of the hostages. Now, all that had to be done, was to apply more pressure and more deals would take place. However, there were no more deals for months. Hamas, backed and hosted by Western ally Qatar, continued to stick to its demands and even increase them. Meanwhile, Israel seemed to give Hamas a lot of what it wanted without any kind of need for Hamas to give Israel anything. The IDF withdrew from northern Gaza and then it withdrew from Khan Younis in April. Today the IDF is fighting in Rafah and Shejaiya, but Hamas controls most of Gaza. Hamas control of the central camps, in Nuseirat, Bureij, Maghazi and Deir al-Balah has never been contested. There remain key areas the IDF has not operated in throughout Gaza.
What happened to the military pressure doctrine? On July 6 CNN reported that Hamas had slightly changed its position in regards to a new deal with Israel. “The change in Hamas’ position was first reported by Reuters, and comes amid intensified efforts towards reaching an agreement. The group has long demanded Israel agree to a permanent ceasefire before signing any deal, terms Israel sees as unacceptable. The apparent willingness to compromise raises the possibility a deal could be reached,” CNN noted. “Hamas would instead accept that talks on reaching a permanent ceasefire would take place throughout the first phase of any deal, which would last six weeks, the official told CNN,” the report said.
It appears that today the big discussions around a ceasefire deal relate to whether the IDF will withdraw from the Netzarim corridor or from Rafah, and whether this will be “permanent.” This is a big change from back in November when Israel’s Defense Minister had said “This will be a brief pause. When it ends, the fighting will continue forcefully, and will create pressure that will allow the return of more hostages.”
It’s clear that the pressure was removed from Hamas sometime in February or March of 2024. This is when the IDF not only shifted to a lower intensity conflict under pressure from the West but also when Israel chose to reduce the fighting for Ramadan. Since then, Hamas has felt that it almost achieved a kind of de facto ceasefire in much of Gaza. The IDF went into Rafah in May and it has returned to areas in northern Gaza, such as Jabaliya, and Shejaiaya and carried out various raids in other places, but Hamas can sit content thinking these operations will be short and temporary. This means Hamas is not facing increasing pressure. Hamas likely hears from its foreign backers and hosts abroad that if it just holds out a little longer, some kind of deal will take place.
Israel’s messaging on the war has also shifted, or been different depending on the politician and official that is speaking. Back in November Gallant was quoted as saying he expected two more months of fighting. At the end of May Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said “we are now in the fifth month of 2024, which means we expect another seven months of fighting to deepen our achievements and achieve our goal of destroying the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
Hamas can read these reports as well. They know that a timetable seems to exist. All they have to do is hold out for a bit longer and they expect Israel to leave. Israel also seems to change its goal posts, from talk of “Hamas is ISIS” and “there won’t be Hamas” to talk of just reducing its capabilities. Hamas knows that its capabilities have been reduced before, back in the Second Intifada, back in the 2006 and 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021. Back in 2021 the IDF and officials had claimed that Hamas had been dealt a heavy blow in Israeli strikes on the Hamas underground “metro.” At the time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted, “I said we would strike Hamas and other terror groups with significant blows, and we are doing so. In the last day we have attacked underground targets. Hamas thought it could hide there, but it cannot.”
However, Hamas was still hiding in tunnels after that war and it has been hiding in them for nine months of the current war. There is lack of clarity on why the military pressure that Israel believed would bring hostage releases, was relaxed in March and April. Hamas has had the breathing space it needed to continue to believe it can win the war by surviving. Hamas works with its foreign backers, such as Doha, Ankara, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing and others and those countries likely tell it to keep going.
It’s not clear if the current hostage talks will go anywhere. In the past six months, there have been similar endless rounds of talks. The hostages continue to languish in Gaza, and some have been killed. For most countries it would be unconscionable to leave its soldiers and civilians, including young women hostages, to be held just a mile or two from the border by a relatively weakened terrorist group. For Israel, this has become the norm. Why it has become the norm is not clear. There was a time when Israel rescued hostages, such as at Entebbe, but those days are gone. Today when foreign terrorist groups such as Hamas kidnap Israeli soldiers, the first thing that happens is to wait. Israel waited in October from October 7 to 27 before launching a ground offensive. What was the point of the waiting? It allowed Hamas to regroup and move hostages around, including to civilian homes.
How to bring the hostages home: Military action or negotiating with terrorists.
Then in November when the ground offensive was successful, Israel moved to a belief that military pressure would bring hostage releases. However, that motto quickly changed because the pressure was reduced systematically beginning in January and February until in March and April there was almost a de facto ceasefire. Rather than trading pressure for hostages, Israel gave Hamas breathing space, perhaps due to pressure from the US or Doha or others. It’s unclear why the policy changed from “military pressure brings deals” to a belief that a kind of de facto ceasefire and letting Hamas run Gaza and giving Hamas most of what it wanted would succeed. Clearly, this policy has not succeeded and even if there is a deal and some hostages return, the tragedy of leaving them in Gaza for nine months leaves a black mark on Israel. They should never have been left one day in Gaza. The fact that some of them were killed while in Gaza should haunt us.
The decision to move from “there won’t be Hamas” and “military pressure brings hostages home” to some kind of de facto ceasefire and managed conflict, and leaving Hamas in power while only reducing its capabilities, is a strange strategy that likely does not end well. Furthermore, there is an inherent contradiction in the theory that the current tactic of IDF raids in Gaza will be able to be modelled on the tactic in the northern West Bank. If there is a ceasefire deal, it is unlikely the raids will continue, meaning Gaza will not end up like the northern West Bank. In fact, the more likely scenario is that the northern West Bank may end up like Gaza in the coming years, rather than the other way around. This will be the case unless tactics and strategy shift in Gaza.
Content retrieved from: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-809259#809259.