Israel-Hamas War

By Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsch

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here.

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Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The military factors shaping the Israel-Hamas war, absent ambassador posts hobble Biden’s Middle East crisis response, a U.S. carrier docks in South Korea as a deterrent against North Korea, and more.

The brewing conflict in Gaza could turn into a full-blown regional crisis depending on how Israel crafts its military response and whether other militant groups in the region get involved.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on Thursday to pledge unwavering U.S. support for its ally, while the humanitarian situation in Gaza goes from bad to worse amid numerous Israeli strikes. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is traveling to Israel on Friday.

SitRep has spoken to more than a dozen officials, regional experts, and U.S. lawmakers about the brewing conflict and what happens if it escalates beyond Gaza. Boiling all their insights down into just one newsletter is incredibly difficult, particularly given how rapidly the situation is evolving, but broadly speaking three factors will shape the conflict.

First, what would a ground invasion of Gaza look like? As Israeli strikes pound Palestinian neighborhoods in Gaza, the Israeli military is readying plans to launch a full-scale ground invasion—but Israel’s political leaders haven’t given the green light on that plan yet. Whether they do and how they do it will have massive military and humanitarian implications.

Gaza, the small coastal strip from which Hamas launched its deadly attacks on Israeli civilians and military bases over the weekend, is considered one of the most densely packed urban areas in the world.

Urban warfare is grim, and no matter which side wins, civilians always lose.

Adm. Rob Bauer, the Dutch commander who chairs NATO’s Military Committee, visited one of the Israeli bases bordering Gaza just a week before it was attacked. “I still believe the Israeli forces are extremely advanced,” Bauer told SitRep in an interview at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. “I still believe they have great capabilities. They have to, because they have been in a state of war for so long.”

Four previous rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas between 2008 and 2021 ended indecisively, with Hamas still retaining control of Gaza, but Israeli officials vow this time will be different.

A full-scale Israeli invasion could decapitate Hamas in a best-case scenario for Israel, but it could also quickly bog down into a military quagmire. Some U.S. and European officials who spoke to SitRep voiced fears of parallels to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon: Israel intended to swiftly defeat the PLO, but the war morphed into a drawn-out mini-Vietnam.

Second, will other actors get involved? The biggest fear for Israeli and U.S. officials is Hezbollah going all-in on joining the fight. The Lebanon-based militant group, backed by Iran and Syria, is considered one of the most heavily armed nonstate actors in the world, and its arsenal of weapons and missiles vastly overshadows Hamas’s military capabilities. By some estimates, it has expanded its missile arsenal to 130,000.

The Biden administration is still determining how many fingerprints Iran put on Hamas’s massive attack on southern Israel.

“The intelligence community should be the ones to determine how much involvement Iran had in this attack, as that is what policy should be based on. Not selected leaks,” said Mick Mulroy, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and a retired CIA officer.

If Hezbollah fully dives into the fight, it will turn the conflict into a two-front war for Israel and draw in, at least in a more meaningful way, Iran and Syria to the conflict—though Iran always prefers to operate through proxies. Israel has already deployed tens of thousands of troops to the border with Lebanon to head off any plans by Hezbollah, and the situation remains on a knife-edge. Austin, the U.S. defense chief, said the United States had “not seen any masses of forces on the border” between Lebanon and Israel, as of Thursday afternoon Europe time.

“For years, I’ve believed that Israel has effectively deterred Hezbollah from a major escalation, but things are more dangerous now,” Daniel Byman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told SitRep. Byman indicated that there’s a risk for even small skirmishes to quickly spiral. “As regional passions rise, it is harder to be removed from regional events. In addition, military ‘signaling’ on both sides can easily be misunderstood or get out of control.”

Third, what’s Uncle Sam’s plan? The Biden administration has already deployed a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group to the region, in large part as a signal of support to Israel and also to deter Hezbollah or other groups from jumping into the fight.

The USS Gerald R. Ford and its entourage—five guided missile ships, a cruiser, and four destroyers—have a lot of firepower, including systems that could help defend Israel against missile attacks from Hezbollah. (Retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis has a good rundown in Bloomberg of what the carrier strike group’s deployment means, if you’re interested in learning more.)

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking to reporters in Brussels on condition of anonymity, said the Ford’s move into the Eastern Mediterranean would help prevent the conflict from expanding. The official mentioned the possibility of a second U.S. carrier entering the region in the future but didn’t give more details.

“You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself, but as long as America exists, you will never, ever have to,” Blinken said in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.

Will the United States become militarily involved in the conflict? Top National Security Council official Jon Finer told MSNBC on Thursday: “We are not contemplating U.S. boots on the ground.” But planes in the air and ships in the sea aren’t boots on the ground, and it’s not yet clear what authorities the carrier group and the deployment of fighter jets would have—if any—to provide backup to Israel if it ends up on its heels.

Still, it is a sign to Iran and groups such as Hezbollah to stay out. “I don’t necessarily think these are resources that would be flying in support of the Israelis,” said Joseph Votel, a retired U.S. Army general who led U.S. Central Command until 2019. “Iran has to appreciate that there is a cost to be paid for stepping more into this.”

There’s another factor on the U.S. side: money.

President Joe Biden and Congress, or at least most of Congress, are hankering to send Israel more military aid—to the tune of $2 billion—but the current Republican political fiasco in the House of Representatives amid the battle over a new speaker makes that difficult.

Biden has the ability to send Israel limited military aid through presidential drawdown authority—basically allowing the rapid shipment of existing U.S. stockpiles to Israel—but Congress needs to write the bills (and the checks) for future military and security assistance packages. Can Congress do that without an elected House speaker? In short, maybe not, but it’s complicated and legally unprecedented territory.

Former Republican Rep. Will Hurd has quit the Republican presidential primary race and endorsed Nikki Haley.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joins Liberty University as the conservative Christian school’s new distinguished chair of the Helms School of Government.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Understaffed. When the Biden administration leaped into crisis mode after the Hamas attack on Israel, it did so with an understaffed bench of Middle East envoys, as Robbie reports this week. Due to sweeping blocks by a handful of Republican senators on national security nominees, the United States has no ambassador to Israel, Egypt, Oman, or Kuwait; the State Department has no top counterterrorism envoy or human rights envoy; and the U.S. Agency for International Development has been without a top official for the Middle East for nearly three years. What does all that mean? SitRep asked a former Biden nominee for a top State Department job her thoughts.

“At such a pivotal moment in the Middle East, the absence of our front-line senior diplomats is glaring,” said Sarah Margon, the foreign-policy director at Open Society Foundations, a human rights grant-making network. Margon was Biden’s pick to be the top State Department human rights envoy but withdrew her nomination after waiting for nearly two years in Senate confirmation limbo.

“Equally important, the normal Senate process for moving national security nominees forward isn’t functioning with any urgency—partly because of an abuse [of] power afforded to individual senators but also because [Senate Foreign Relations] Committee rules—established to generate bipartisan collaboration—have become hardened and a hurdle to confirmation in and of themselves,” Margon told SitRep. “This may sound like ‘boring backroom process,’ but it matters: The absence of an affirmative process that moves qualified nominees along with all due speed causes great risk to America—and to Americans.”

Still pivoting to Asia. As one carrier deploys to the Eastern Mediterranean, another is headed to South Korea. The USS Ronald Reagan and its battle group docked in a South Korean port on Thursday, in a not-so-subtle show of force to remind North Korea of U.S. military power.

Cold case. British courts have opened an independent inquiry into claims that British special forces operators killed dozens of civilians during operations in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. The probe will look into previous investigations by the Royal Military Police on alleged wrongdoing by British armed forces in Afghanistan that ended without any prosecutions.

Today: European Union foreign-policy boss Josep Borrell is in China until Friday.

Saturday, Oct. 14: New Zealand holds a general election.

Sunday, Oct. 15: Ecuador holds a presidential runoff vote. Poland holds parliamentary elections.

Tuesday, Oct. 17, to Wednesday, Oct. 18: Chinese President Xi Jinping hosts the third-annual Belt and Road Forum in Beijing.

“As a result of my unremarkable high school football career, it was determined that I needed a full knee replacement for my left knee.”

—Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, issuing an announcement that he had knee replacement surgery this week. Suffice to say, the Senate had a lot more time on its hands this week than the House.

• What You Need to Know About the Israel-Hamas War by Daniel Byman and Alexander Palmer
• Israel Could Win This Gaza Battle and Lose the War by Stephen M. Walt
• The Hamas Attack Has Changed Everything by Steven A. Cook