This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
What are we missing here?
Closing in on two years since Hamas burst through the largely undefended Gaza border and committed the deadliest one-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the IDF is gearing up for yet another intensified operation intended to achieve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endlessly touted imminent “total victory” over the terror group and the return of the remaining 48 hostages still held alive and dead in Gaza.
In the interim, Hamas has been radically degraded, from a full-fledged terrorist army that Israel unconscionably watched take shape over the years in Gaza, to a much reduced but still potent guerrilla force, as the IDF worked methodically but ponderously to target its battalions, vast web of subterranean tunnels, weapons factories and arsenals, reducing much of the explosives-laden Gazan terror-state to rubble in the process. Tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, so too some 460 soldiers.
Many thousands of the Gazan fatalities have been civilians, often killed in circumstances that Israel has struggled to justify. Other fatalities have been misrepresented by Hamas’s ultra-savvy and cynical propaganda machine.
Hamas cold-bloodedly initiated this conflict on October 7, 2023, by gleefully massacring hundreds upon hundreds of civilians inside sovereign Israeli territory, knowing full well that Israel would fight back, at terrible cost to the Gazan civilians beneath and inside whose homes, schools and hospitals the terrorist-government was operating. To begin to understand quite how effective Hamas has been, nonetheless, at depicting this conflict as a case of genocidal Israeli brutality against the defenseless Gazan masses, and how utterly Israel has failed to fight on the key battlefield of global public advocacy, ask yourselves how often you have actually seen photographs or footage of Hamas’s tens of thousands of gunmen, other than at those nauseating hostage-release propaganda ceremonies.
Gradually, the world has come to internalize a skewed reality in which Hamas is a phantom force, there is one aggressor, Israel, and one victim, Gazans. And global public opinion has consequently moved inexorably to regard Israel’s essential twin goals of destroying Hamas and returning the hostages as marginal, and the ongoing war as indefensible.
Seven months ago, however, Egyptian, Qatari and American mediators brokered a deal intended to chart a path out of the nightmare. Largely formulated by Israel, it provided for a phased release of all the hostages in exchange for large numbers of Palestinian terrorists and security prisoners, and negotiations aimed at the eventual ending of the war. After the first phase, however, Israel essentially abrogated the deal, because Netanyahu was not prepared to enter substantive negotiations on a full IDF withdrawal and a permanent ceasefire. Not coincidentally, his far-right coalition partners were declaredly adamant that they would bring down his coalition if he did so.
Instead, Israel withheld aid from Gaza for 11 weeks, in the delusional belief that this would push Hamas toward capitulation, but in fact only further exacerbating the dire war conditions for Gaza’s noncombatants and inviting a Hamas-fuelled propaganda campaign highlighting the most desperate images and accounts of Gazan suffering. Very belatedly changing course, Netanyahu and his ministers approved a surge in aid, but the damage had long been done.
And now, overriding the unprecedentedly strident objections of Netanyahu’s hand-picked new IDF Chief, Eyal Zamir, the coalition has ordered the invasion of Gaza City, depicted by the prime minister, just like Rafah over a year ago, as the final Hamas stronghold that must fall for victory to be achieved.
Zamir and Israel’s other security chiefs have reportedly been urging Netanyahu in vain to adopt the latest “Witkoff proposal” for another phased deal — broadly similar to terms approved by Israel in July — insisting that Israel can return to the battleground if and when Hamas breaches the terms, but will have gotten back at least some of the hostages. (Ultimately, Zamir stressed when speaking to troops on Tuesday, the IDF will not accept anything less than the destruction of Hamas. “We will not stop the war until we defeat this enemy,” he said. “Hamas will have no place to hide from us. Wherever we locate them, whether they are senior or junior figures – we strike them all, all the time.”)
Netanyahu, however, is now adamant there must be a “comprehensive deal,” in which all hostages are freed at once, and — setting conditions that Hamas self-evidently will not accept and that only the US can broker between Israel and other regional players — that the war can only end when Hamas is disarmed and Gaza demilitarized, to be turned over to non-Hamas and non-Palestinian Authority Arab forces.
Zamir has reportedly warned that the Gaza City operation will put hostages believed held in the area at risk, incur further deaths of soldiers, and cause more Gazan civilian casualties — especially if, as is currently the case, most of the million Gazans currently in Gaza City refuse or are too scared of Hamas to evacuate. He has expressed concern that it will further stretch the already exhausted standing and reserve army forces, the latter of whom, on their fifth and sixth stints of service since October 7, are proving astoundingly resilient and ready to repeatedly leave their families and risk their lives in the defense of Israel, albeit no longer at the previous high turnout levels.
He has reportedly warned, too, that the operation will not be quick, even as Netanyahu has promised that it will be, and as a firmly supportive US President Donald Trump has nonetheless made repeatedly plain his desire for Israel to “get that war over with,” and observed that “they’re not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them.”
Worst of all, Zamir has reportedly stressed that, in the absence of any alternate governing force in Gaza, the imminent expanded operation — which after Gaza City is intended to tackle Hamas in central Gaza’s refugee camps, and ultimately to give the Israeli military what is described as “control” of the whole Gaza Strip — will lead inevitably to ongoing Israeli “military government” of Gaza “because there will be no other body that could take responsibility for the population.” Again, not coincidentally, ongoing Israeli control of the entire Gaza Strip, en route to Jewish settlement and the encouraged relocation of Gazans, is declaredly advocated by the far-right parties that keep Netanyahu in power.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Zamir is reported to have fumed sarcastically at Netanyahu and his key ministers during a Sunday night meeting on the war plans. “You [were] the cabinet on October 7. Now you remember to talk about defeating Hamas? Where were you on the 7th? The 8th? The 9th? Now you remember, after two years?”
It’s not completely clear what Zamir meant by those comments — whether he was denouncing the political leadership for the October 7 failures, for its orders to the IDF since then, for what it wants him to do in Gaza now, or all of the above. What’s unmistakable, however, is the sheer exasperation… and the dismal, debilitating rift between Israel’s political leaders and the head of the military hierarchy obligated to put their policies into life-and-death practice.
And so, again, as “Israel” becomes ostensibly synonymous worldwide with “brutal aggression,” as Israelis and increasingly Jews worldwide are met with hostility by association, as Israel’s erstwhile allies castigate it for presiding over Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and prepare to reward Hamas by unilaterally recognizing a sovereign Palestinian state, the question remains: What are we missing here?
Is there a grand plan, being put into place by the Trump Administration in partnership with the Israeli government, coordinated by senior Trump aides and the likes of that most-trusted Netanyahu emissary Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, the indefatigable former British prime minister Tony Blair and the reemerging former Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, under which an alternative to Hamas is being quietly advanced? A construction of Palestinian technocrats, militarily backed by Egyptian-trained forces, with involvement by other regional players, under the supervision of the United States? A nascent equivalent to the new government in Lebanon, whose declared readiness to attempt to disarm Hezbollah has enabled Israel, at least for now, to drastically scale down its military intervention there? A Gaza-governing framework ready to emerge into public view in the very near future — as soon, that is, as the IDF provides Netanyahu with some kind of achievement that can be marketed as symbolizing victory, as signifying that Hamas has been sufficiently degraded to enable the start of a transition to the “day after” era?
It’s hard to believe that this is the case, the more so when Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s curtain-raised, Trump-hosted “large meeting,” at the White House last week, to discuss the “comprehensive plan” that the administration is putting together for the postwar management of Gaza, reportedly lasted little more than an hour and was described by a White House official as a routine “policy meeting.”
Hard to believe, but deeply, urgently needed.
Because if there is no grand plan, then Israel is exhausting and tearing itself apart, failing those hostages chained and starving in the Hamas tunnels, risking the lives of more soldiers and more Gaza noncombatants, alienating ever greater swathes of the global populace and its leadership, and entangling itself ever more deeply and protractedly in the morass that is Gaza. Not coincidentally, as declaredly sought by the far-right parties that keep Netanyahu in power.