The Daily Populous Thursday August 22nd, 2024 morning edition
Authored by foreignaffairs.com and submitted by ForeignAffairsMag

Reading the news today often leaves the impression that Israel is struggling in its war against Hamas. The fighting in the Gaza Strip has carried on for more than ten months, a peace deal remains elusive, and the threat of regional escalation looms. More than 100 hostages taken on October 7 have yet to be released, with dozens of them presumed dead. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, and Gaza faces a dire humanitarian crisis. Critics of Israel’s military strategy have argued that the devastation it has caused has increased support for Hamas and left the group stronger. According to this common perspective, Israel’s prosecution of the war has served only to lock in a cycle of deadly violence.

In the flurry of commentary, however, it is easy to lose sight of what it means to win the war Israel is fighting. War is the pursuit of political objectives through force. A war has a start and a finish, so its progress can be assessed based on how close each side has come to meeting its political objectives. By this measure, it is Israel, not Hamas, that now holds the advantage.

Hamas initiated the war when it invaded southern Israel on October 7. The group launched over 4,000 rockets at civilian areas, and more than 3,000 Hamas militants and Palestinian civilians crossed into Israeli territory. By the end of the attack, around 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and foreign nationals were dead and 251 hostages were taken to Gaza. Hamas has never formally stated its political objectives for the current bout of fighting, but the group’s overarching goal is Israel’s destruction—not a more moderate outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as a two-state solution. Its goals for the October 7 attack were likely multiple: to trigger a string of attacks by other militant groups on Israel, stop the process of Arab-Israeli normalization, and drive a wedge between Israel and its principal ally, the United States. After Israel’s devastating counterassault, however, Hamas’s objectives are clear: to survive the attacks, maintain power, and retain Palestinian and international support.

Israel has defined its own war aims more explicitly. It formally declared a war of self-defense against Hamas the day after the October 7 attack, outlining three strategic objectives: to recover all hostages, secure its borders, and destroy Hamas. After ten months of high-intensity fighting, Israel has made significant progress toward or nearly achieved each of these goals. More than half the hostages have returned from Gaza, and strong defenses are in place at Israel’s southern border. Hamas today has a fraction of the military power it boasted on October 7. The group had already been forced to govern from the shadows before Israel assassinated its political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran last month, dealing a major blow to Hamas’s ability to rule in Gaza.

Israel’s degradation of Hamas’s military and political strength puts it in a position to move toward a postconflict phase in some areas of the Gaza Strip. Even if significantly lowering the intensity of the fighting is possible in only a small part of the territory right now, Israel must show constituencies in Gaza, in the international community, and within Israel itself that it has a larger political plan to follow its military achievements. Israeli leaders need to understand and clearly communicate that the focus of the war must begin to shift. If Israel does not take this opportunity to secure new leadership in Gaza to replace Hamas, it will forfeit its current advantage and end the war in defeat.

Israel’s military campaign has made progress on the first of its war aims, the release of those kidnapped on October 7. The number of hostages retrieved, released, or rescued stands at 146. Israeli soldiers have retrieved seven living hostages, as well as the bodies of 30 deceased hostages. Some argue that the fact that a majority of the hostages—105—were returned to Israel through prisoner exchanges means that negotiation, not military force, was the only viable way to bring them home. But it was Israeli military action in Gaza that created the conditions for Hamas to agree to release hostages during the temporary cease-fire in November 2023. Historically, Hamas has not returned the Israelis it has captured without significant pressure forcing its hand. Recall that Hamas held a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for more than five years before agreeing in 2011 to free him in exchange for the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who would go on to plan the October 7 attacks. To this day, Hamas holds two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two deceased Israeli soldiers it captured in 2014 and 2015. For the remaining October 7 hostages, there is still hope that Israel can secure their release through negotiations with what is left of the Hamas leadership.

Israel has mostly secured its southern flank, too. Within days of last October’s attack, it had regained control of all border crossings and the places along the wall separating Israel from Gaza that Hamas breached to enter Israel. Today, residents have returned to some semblance of normal life in most major urban areas in southern Israel, such as Sderot and Ofakim, cities that Hamas militants attacked on October 7 and Hamas rockets targeted several times afterward. The small communities within a few miles of the border wall remain evacuated until the end of August, after which the Israeli government will assess whether it is safe enough for residents to return to their homes. The imminent danger of rocket attacks has dropped significantly in these areas. There were more than 6,000 alerts about incoming rockets from Gaza the week of October 7, but now most weeks the number of alerts is in the single digits, low double digits, or even zero.

Israel is even adding an extra layer of defense to its border with Gaza. In the past, Israel relied on just a wall at the border for protection. Now Israeli forces are creating a security zone of around half a mile from the wall. They are clearing all buildings from the area, which will allow Israeli forces to more easily patrol and to set up outposts along the border. Building this buffer zone also requires finding and destroying Hamas’s tunnels that lead to the wall, such as the one Israel forces discovered in December 2023 just over 400 yards from the Erez crossing point on Gaza’s northern border. That tunnel was 2.5 miles long, reached depths of 165 feet, and was wide enough to drive a truck through. The Israeli military is also establishing control of a passage through the middle of the Gaza Strip, the Netzarim corridor, which connects Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. This corridor and various new humanitarian entry points and roads will allow Israeli forces to move freely and rapidly into Gaza on security missions or to provide other forms of support to a post-Hamas governing body.

That leaves Israel’s objective of destroying Hamas. Many observers have suggested this goal is unrealistic because military action can never destroy Hamas’s ideology, but what Israel actually needs to do to achieve its war aims is much more attainable. It must destroy Hamas politically, which means removing the group as the governing power in Gaza. And it must destroy it militarily—that is, dismantle and degrade the group’s military capability to the point that it cannot conduct organized attacks or defend the territory it now controls. It is necessary for Israel to accomplish both, as brute force is what gives Hamas the ability to rule over the population of Gaza. If it succeeds, Israel can prevent Hamas from reclaiming its pre–October 7 position.

Hamas’s authority in Gaza is much shakier today than it was on October 7. Although Hamas remains the main political power, it must now use heinous force in order to govern. Hamas militants kill civilians in Gaza, including clan or tribal leaders, who challenge the group’s brutal rule. The fact that residents increasingly criticize Hamas on social media and in comments to the international press is in itself a sign that the group is losing its grip. Even more telling, Hamas’s political rivals in the West Bank see it as weak enough to criticize. In the aftermath of October 7, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the longtime ruling body and representative of the Palestinian people in the West Bank, was careful not to criticize Hamas directly. But by July, Abbas had said publicly that Hamas bore some of the “legal, moral, and political responsibility” for prolonging the current war. The same month, a senior Fatah official, Munir al-Jaghoub, called on the group to stop using civilians in Gaza as human shields.

As it clings to power, Hamas has also warned that it would attack any Arab forces that enter the strip—forces that could end up providing security assistance to a post-Hamas government in Gaza, with the express goal of keeping the group from resurging. And the group is stealing, hoarding, selling, and distributing international humanitarian aid, which has become one of its last remaining ways of holding on to power. The death of Ismail Haniyeh, moreover, will make it far more difficult for Hamas to maintain the international political networks and financial infrastructure that have been essential to keeping the group well resourced.

It is Israel, not Hamas, that now holds the advantage.

Destroying Hamas’s military capabilities has been an arduous task for Israel. Hamas had spent more than 15 years and billions of dollars to build a heavily armed terrorist network covering all of Gaza. More than 30,000 militants were organized into brigades and battalions, each assigned a geographic area of control and equipped with antitank guns, rifles, heavy machine guns, grenades, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and other weapons. Hamas possessed between 15,000 and 20,000 rockets, and had the manufacturing capability to produce its own rockets and munitions.

Hamas also built one of the world’s most expansive military tunnel networks, estimated to be more than 300 miles long—longer than the New York City subway system—and range in depth from a few feet below the surface to more than 200 feet underground. Hamas uses its tunnels for a variety of purposes. Some help the group move freely throughout Gaza, including travel beneath Wadi Gaza, a wetland area that separates the north and south parts of the strip. Other tunnels help Hamas brigades carry out specific tactical maneuvers, both offensive and defensive, in key areas.

Israel has made significant progress degrading these military capabilities. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas militants, but the damage it has done to Hamas’s combat power is greater than the raw numbers suggest. Combat power is a combination of leadership, command-and-control systems, trained units, weapons and equipment supplies, manufacturing capability, and infrastructure, among other things. Israel has destroyed 22 of Hamas’s 24 organized battalions, killing three of five brigade commanders, more than 20 battalion commanders, and approximately 150 company commanders within these units, as well as taking out their weapons supplies and infrastructure. In July, Israel conducted a strike in central Gaza that killed Mohammed Deif, the founder and head of Hamas’s military wing and second in command of the organization as a whole; Hamas’s third-highest-ranking member, Marwan Issa, was killed a few months earlier. When Israeli forces reenter areas of Gaza they previously cleared, the Hamas formations they find are weaker than the ones they encountered before, with fewer experienced leaders and fighters, weaponry, and tunnels from which to conduct guerrilla-style attacks.

It is almost impossible to say what percentage of the tunnels in Gaza have been destroyed, as Israeli forces have not yet discovered all of them. That process will take years. But Israel has demolished many of the most valuable tunnels, including two separate mile-long tunnels that ran under the river valley that divides the northern and southern ends of Gaza, large tunnels that opened within a few hundred yards of the Israeli border and were designed for launching attacks, tunnels that crossed from Gaza to the Sinai, and many tunnels that connected brigade areas within Gaza and served as command-and-control areas. In addition to curtailing Hamas’s movements within the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has isolated it from the outside world. Gaza’s border with Egypt is now under Israeli control, and Israeli forces are methodically finding and destroying cross-border tunnels. Without these routes through Egypt, Hamas is cut off from external military support.

For all the progress Israel has made toward its war aims, however, it will lose in the end if it fails to secure a replacement for Hamas as a new ruling power in Gaza. The United States knows such defeat well: it lost in Vietnam when the North Vietnamese took South Vietnam in 1975, and it lost again in Afghanistan when the Taliban seized power in 2021 from the government the United States had backed for 20 years.

It is now Israel’s responsibility to create the conditions that would allow new leadership in Gaza to survive. The first step is to reduce Hamas’s capabilities enough to let an external force enter Gaza and provide security in population centers. When a new body, such as the Palestinian Authority, takes over governance from Hamas, Israel will need to provide it security assistance, including with counterterror operations. The role of Israeli forces should not amount to a constant presence in Gaza. As parts of the strip are stabilized, the new authority can lead the postconflict work of deradicalization, disarmament, demobilization, and reconciliation. By supporting this new government in Gaza, facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid, and making it possible to rebuild, Israel can show the Palestinian public it is committed to a better future without Hamas.

To realize such a future, Hamas must be destroyed with no hope of resurgence. How Israel goes about that task does matter. It must follow international law and maintain foreign and domestic support if it is to sustain its war effort. At this point, however, Israel is losing the public relations battle. It has failed to communicate consistently how its day-to-day operations were linked to its strategic goals. All the world sees are reports of an ever-climbing civilian casualty count and images of vast destruction, without reference to how the fight against Hamas is progressing or how similar urban battles have proceeded in the past.

Israel must show that it has a political plan to follow its military achievements.

No previous example is exactly like Israel’s operation today in terms of the number of Hamas combatants embedded in populated urban areas, the tactics Hamas uses, or the vast bunker and tunnel complexes at its disposal. But a few battles are comparable. In the 2016–17 Battle of Mosul, more than 10,000 civilians died in a campaign by U.S. and Iraqi forces to liberate the city from around 4,000 Islamic State fighters, a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of roughly 2.5 to 1. In the 1945 Battle of Manila, the U.S. military operation led to the death of 100,000 civilians to rout 17,000 Japanese defenders, for a ratio of nearly 6 to 1. Figures are less reliable in other battles, such as the 1950 Second Battle of Seoul, urban fighting during the 1999–2009 Second Chechen War, or Russia’s more recent attack of Mariupol. But the civilian-to-combatant death ratio for Israel’s operation in Gaza today, typically estimated between 1 to 1 and 3 to 1, is at the lower end of the historical range.

Neutralizing Hamas and securing a new governing authority in Gaza may be Israel’s best chance at recovering its damaged global reputation. Israel must now show it has a plan to reach that outcome. Wars have been lost when the governments that enter a conflict, their populations, and their allies do not understand the strategy, tactics, and timelines for achieving their goals. Sun Tzu’s maxim still applies: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, while tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Today, the world mostly sees Israel’s tactics, reported through the lens of civilian casualties. But to win, Israel needs to emphasize its strategy. It must consolidate the gains it has made against Hamas by pushing forward a political solution. If Israel cannot fully remove Hamas from power, demilitarize the strip, and back a new authority in Gaza, then Hamas will likely reconstitute itself and fight another day. That result would be no victory for Israel or for the region. Israel must therefore take advantage of the present moment, when it has the upper hand and Hamas is on the run.

Command0Dude on August 21st, 2024 at 19:17 UTC »

This think piece is pretty well reasoned, from a very utilitarian point of view. It's hard to think how it would be possible to deradicalize Palestine. It took a lot of suffering and hopelessness before the Germans gave up on fascism.

kjr2k96 on August 21st, 2024 at 18:14 UTC »

The article talks about a winning strategy but is tht strategy actually feasible? With the way Israel’s ruling party has conducted itself against the Palestinians, I do not see how they will succeed in establishing new leadership that won’t be hostile towards them. You cannot bring pain and suffering while withholding the necessary resources for a thriving society and expect those peoples to just comply.

The article rightfully criticizes the Hamas leadership but the Likud is exacerbating the conflict as well. Propping up a government is not easy, especially when the population hates your guts. Ask the US

seen-in-the-skylight on August 21st, 2024 at 16:36 UTC »

Way I see it, peace and development for Palestine will require them to accept the installation of their government by Israel. The best case scenario is like how we dealt with the Axis powers after WW2: you can have formal sovereignty, but you accept the occupation, we write your constitution, and we purge your radicals.

The reason being that I don't see any viable voices among the Palestinian political leadership who are moderate or pro-peace. Not Hamas, not Fatah/PLO, not PFLP etc. etc. etc. They need to accept that the struggle is over. What they've got now is all they're going to get, and they're going to lose it if they don't drop the militarist attitude.

That isn't to absolve the ruling, right-wing Israeli factions who likewise don't want peace either and sabotage with with things like promoting the settlements. But on the whole, it's time for the Palestinian leadership to reappraise their approach. If they had accepted any of the half-dozen or so two-state proposals they've been offered, they wouldn't be in this situation. Instead, whenever one group of Palestinian leaders make progress towards peace, some other group of extremists screws it up with acts of terror. And then they turn around and act like they're the victims and it's all Israel's fault, as if they don't have any agency themselves.

It's a terrible tragedy for all the civilians caught in the crossfire, sacrificed by their self-imposed leaders whose entire strategy relies on getting as many of them killed as possible.