When Hamas launched the largest terrorist attack in Israel‘s history two years ago, killing 1,200 people, the world was collectively stunned and outraged. Israel had significant leeway to respond as leaders saw fit after being attacked.

Fast forward two years, and Israel has exhausted much of the Western world’s support.

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In the two years since Hamas’s attack, the Israeli military has devastated the Gaza Strip and has carried out separate operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, in Syria, Iran, and Qatar, while defending itself from Hezbollah, Houthi, and Iranian attacks. Hamas and its proxies are at their weakest in decades.

“Israel changed the landscape militarily; it created an enormous set of possibilities,” career diplomat Dennis Ross, who was a top Middle East adviser in the H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations, told the Washington Examiner. “But you have to have a political strategy to take advantage of it.”

Civilian Casualties in Gaza

Former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned in remarks made on Dec. 2, 2023, less than two months after Oct. 7, at the Reagan National Defense Forum that Israel was at risk of making the same mistakes the United States made in the Middle East this century.

“Israel is in a hard fight against a cruel enemy, in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. But democracies like ours are stronger and more secure when we uphold the law of war. So we will continue to press Israel to protect civilians and to ensure the robust flow of humanitarian aid,” he said. “I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS.”

“Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during the toughest battles. So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” he continued. “You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

Israel’s military has ordered civilians to evacuate various parts of Gaza before increasing the tempo and intensity of ground operations in certain areas, often making people leave areas they’ve previously been told to go to. There’s been an ongoing bombardment of Gaza as well, making it difficult for civilians to move throughout the enclave safely.

The Gaza Health Ministry, which Hamas controls and is therefore a notoriously unreliable reporter, has reported that more than 60,000 people have been killed, a total that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly last month that “the ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties is less than 2 to 1 in Gaza.”

There have been instances where Hamas has put out statements regarding casualties that Israel disputed, and haven’t borne out. Weeks into the war, Israel was blamed for bombing the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital and was quickly condemned, leading to mounting international pressure. U.S. intelligence later confirmed that it was actually a misfired rocket from a Palestinian armed group.

Despite the difficulties of urban warfare and fighting an enemy that is willing to embed near civilian populations, Israeli forces still have to follow the laws of war.

There are ongoing debates among experts, government, and non-government organizations about whether Israel’s actions constitute genocide, violations of international law, and war crimes, all of which Israeli leaders deny.

The true extent of the destruction in Gaza is largely unknown because international journalists do not have access to the besieged enclave.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, acts that both the Biden and Trump administrations strongly disagreed with, while the court also issued warrants for three senior Hamas officials for the Oct. 7 attack, all of whom Israeli forces have since killed.

In July, two Israeli human rights advocacy groups accused the government of committing a genocide in Gaza, becoming the first to do so.

A major moment in the war was when Israel ended the second temporary ceasefire in March of this year and stopped allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza as a way to put more pressure on Hamas to agree to the proposal on the table. It also meant cutting off aid to Palestinian civilians.

Former Ambassador Barbara Leaf told the Washington Examiner, who was a senior State Department official during the Biden administration, including when the attack occurred, said this decision to stop in flows of aid into Gaza as the moment “things have really sharply tipped against Israel,” because “the open discussion by many governments for the first time was that Israel was, in fact, driving things, whether deliberately or not, driving things to such an end that people were starving to death.”

In the U.S.

Then-President Joe Biden decided to implement a “bear hug” strategy with Netanyahu in the aftermath of Oct. 7, in which he embraced the prime minister fully as a way to hopefully gain additional sway over how Israel carried out its war.

“Biden called himself a Zionist, so he emotionally and instinctively was supportive of Israel,” Ross said.

As Austin noted, the U.S. was quick to warn its Israeli counterparts about the growing number of Palestinian civilian casualties. Those warnings came repeatedly, publicly and privately, but Israel continued its efforts to destroy Hamas.

Biden ultimately decided to pause one shipment of 2,000 lb bombs that Israel could use to target Hamas’s underground tunnel infrastructure over concerns about the civilian toll if Israeli forces invaded the southern Gaza city of Rafah, but continued providing them with other military equipment.

Leaf said Biden didn’t go further in halting military equipment to Israel due to the threats they faced from Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis.

Adham Sahloul, former special adviser in the Biden administration at the Pentagon and USAID, and now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told the Washington Examiner he and others across the interagency felt “a strong understanding” that Netanyahu “was incentivized to keep this conflict going for his own political future.”

Biden refused calls from his own party to withhold additional, if not all, military support to Israel. Those calls have become more common among Democrats, while support for Israel has dropped across party lines in the United States over the last two years.

Social media has been a major factor in shaping Americans’ understanding of the war as well. There have been videos online showing the devastation after Israeli strikes, including the bodies of those killed. Protests supporting Palestinians popped up on college campuses across the country, in which students demanded that universities cut ties with Israel, that the government end military support for Israel, and that they do more to try to end the conflict. Protests dogged Biden’s reelection campaign before suspending it, hampering former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

As far as weapons go, there is a provision within the Foreign Assistance Act that prohibits the U.S. government from selling arms to governments and militaries accused of a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights.

The U.S. has not found Israel to violate Section 502B, though some experts believe the threshold enshrined in law may have been met.

“Along with Section 620I, Section 502B prohibits US arms sales and covered military aid to Israel in light of the Israeli government’s consistent and widespread violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in Gaza and the West Bank,” John Ramming Chappell, a legal adviser for the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told the Washington Examiner. “Independent human rights investigators in Israel and internationally have documented extensive war crimes, extrajudicial killings, and torture carried out by Israeli authorities. The frequency and intensity of abuses appear to satisfy the ‘consistent pattern’ standard laid out in Section 502B.”

International condemnation

Israel’s isolation on the world stage was never more pronounced than last month at the U.N. General Assembly, when dozens of foreign leaders walked out in protest as Netanyahu was set to address them.

The backdrop of his speech at the UNGA was that several countries, including many that have strong ties with Israel, decided to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. Andorra, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Portugal all decided to recognize the country of Palestine last month.

Both U.S. and Israeli officials argued that granting Palestinian statehood amounted to rewarding Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack.

“You know what message the leaders who recognize the Palestinian state this week sent to the Palestinians? It’s a very clear message: murdering Jews pays off,” Netanyahu said during his address to the mostly empty room. “Well, I have a message for these leaders: when the most savage terrorists on Earth are effusively praising your decision, you didn’t do something right. You did something wrong, horribly wrong.”

Israel has long had a contentious relationship with the U.N., in particular the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Israel has accused UNRWA staff members of being Hamas members, and in January, it banned the organization from operating on its territory.

Netanyahu’s standing has fallen to such a degree that his flight from Tel Aviv to New York for the UNGA took a more circuitous route in an apparent effort to avoid flying in the airspace of countries that could enforce the outstanding ICC warrant. Netanyahu’s flight flew the length of the Mediterranean Sea and over the Strait of Gibraltar, according to flight tracking data, while his flight would normally fly over several European countries.

Israel announced its intent to carry out operations in Gaza City in August, one of the last remaining areas of the strip it didn’t occupy, which led to widespread criticism.

Germany decided to suspend the export of military equipment to Israel that could be used in Gaza in response, following several other European Union member states, like Ireland, Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Malta, and Sweden.

Closer to home, Israel has at times angered its Arab neighbors, with whom it is not in direct conflict, such as Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf countries.

Before the Oct. 7 attack, the U.S. was on the verge of securing a historic deal that would see Saudi Arabia and Israel normalize, and that would have been a significant building block on top of the first Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. The deal quickly fell apart after Hamas’s attack.

Another key country in the region is Qatar, which has been a mediator between Israel and Hamas with Egypt and the United States. Qatar hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, but it also houses Hamas political leaders who live outside Gaza.

Israel targeted senior Hamas officials in a strike in Doha, the first time it conducted a military operation in Qatar since the start of the war. President Donald Trump tried to stop the operation when informed, but it was too late.

Netanyahu, while in the White House with Trump, apologized to the Qatari prime minister for killing a Qatari service member in the attack. Trump issued an executive order the same day that announced, as U.S. policy, it would now regard “any armed attack” on Qatar “as a threat to the peace and security of the United States.”

Aaron David Miller, a long-time State Department Middle East official, said the agreement “goes farther than we’ve ever gone before in guaranteeing Qatar’s security. It has Article 5-like language,” referencing one of NATO’s founding principles. “I think that’s a huge mistake, but that’s my personal opinion. But it was done, obviously, to get the Qataris back in the mediating business.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the U.S.-Qatar agreement “is a political-security collapse of the gravest magnitude,” adding, “after the October 7th massacre, in which our finest sons and daughters were murdered, raped, and kidnapped, the government, through its diplomatic failure, has led us to the recognition of a Palestinian state, a U.S.-Qatar defense alliance, and we have yet to see how things will unfold with Syria and Turkey.”

Momentum to end the war?

During Netanyahu’s visit to the White House, where he apologized to the Qatari prime minister, President Donald Trump unveiled the newest ceasefire proposal. Netanyahu had already provided input on the deal that Trump announced had Israeli support and that Hamas needed to approve it.

The 20-point plan that Trump announced would have Hamas release all of the 48 remaining hostages, living and deceased, within days in exchange for the release of 250 Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli prisons and another 1,700 Palestinians who have been detained since the war began.

In their response to the proposal, Hamas said they agreed to some of the conditions and are willing to negotiate other points. But it’s unclear if Hamas military leaders in Gaza would be willing to disarm and give up governance of Gaza.

Leaders from across the globe have come out in support of the proposal.

Both Trump and Netanyahu have warned that Israel’s operations will intensify if Hamas does not reach an agreement.

Indirect talks began on Monday in Egypt with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying, “We want to move very quickly on this, and the president wants to see the hostages released as soon as possible.”

“That’s how the president’s team feels, so we can get some momentum, get the hostages out, and then move to the next part of this, which is really ensuring that we can create a lasting and durable peace in Gaza, and ensure that Gaza is a place that no longer threatens the security of Israel or the United States,” she said.