Tornado Alley (PROG)

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A War They Both Are Losing: Israel, Hamas and the Plight of Gaza

4th June 2024

When the fighting subsides, both Israel and Hamas are likely to be worse off than they were when the Gaza war started.



On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a devastating terrorist attack on Israel, killing almost 1,200 Israelis and seizing around 243 hostages. The scale of the attack was off the charts for a small state – the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust – and the nature of the killings, which included the deliberate killing of children and old people, as well as mass sexual violence, seared itself into Israel’s consciousness. In the months that followed, Israel waged a destructive campaign in Gaza, killing more than 34,000 people, including many children, in an attempt to destroy the terrorist group, putting all Palestinians in Gaza at grave risk of disease and starvation. The campaign continues, albeit at a slower pace than in its initial months.

Both Hamas and Israel may be losing. Each can point to quite real successes against the other, but when the fighting subsides, both are likely to be worse off than they were when the war started.

Hamas can claim to have brought pain to its enemy in a way that the Jewish state has not experienced in its history. Hamas has also restored its previously languishing ‘resistance’ credentials and, for the time being, increased its popularity among Palestinians at a time when leadership of the Palestinian national movement is in play. It has also at least temporarily stalled Israel’s regional normalisation. Yet Hamas has paid a tremendous price for these successes, and ordinary Palestinians have paid an even greater one. Hamas’s military forces and infrastructure are battered, its leadership under siege and its long-term popularity uncertain.

In addition to hitting Hamas hard, Israel has preserved deterrence vis-à-vis Hizbullah in Lebanon, and dispelled any notions, often bruited, that the Israeli people will not fight hard and suffer casualties. At the same time, Israel has rescued only a few of the hostages Hamas took on 7 October. Its military campaign and slow-rolling of humanitarian aid into Gaza are widely and justly criticised for their indiscriminate impact on ordinary Palestinians. This toll has degraded international opinion of Israel and may be turning a generation of Americans against the Jewish state. Most importantly, Israel has no plan for the day after in Gaza and may find itself mired in a forever war in the strip or compelled to withdraw and allow a battered Hamas to return to power and claim ultimate victory.

Any mid-course assessment must also consider the effects of the Gaza war on the broader region. Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian-backed militants in Iraq and Syria, and Iran itself have all launched attacks against Israel and the United States. US forces have in turn attacked Iraqi militias and the Houthis, as well as helping defend Israel against Iranian attacks. The United States and Israel have demonstrated their military superiority, and the Israeli partnership with the Gulf Arab states has proven durable and valuable. Iran, however, benefits from a region where the focus is on Israeli aggression and the US embrace of Jerusalem, diverting attention from Tehran’s backing of unpopular regimes like Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria and its ties to militant groups in the region.

The war is largely at an impasse, with Israel likely to make only marginal military gains in the near term while Hamas clings to survival. The United States enjoys considerable leverage over Israel, and it should use this to push Israel to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza, agree to a ceasefire with Hamas so hostages can be exchanged and begin to install an alternative Palestinian government in Gaza, which in turn will also require changing Israeli policies on the West Bank.

Hamas’s gains and losses

It’s hard to look at the ruins of Gaza and imagine that Hamas has achieved much, but its leaders probably believe they have made major political advances. Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif – the leader of Hamas in Gaza and the head of Hamas’s military forces there, respectively — were the architects of the 7 October attacks and appear to have launched them without informing the external Hamas leadership. Many of Hamas’s losses are likely to become more acute over time. But if Israel and external actors handle the aftermath of the war poorly, Hamas may enjoy an eventual triumph.

Hamas is not a mob of fanatics like the Islamic State, but completely discounting its ideology is also a mistake. The group’s leaders see Israel as fundamentally illegitimate and believe that the Zionist movement has been at war against the Palestinians since its inception. From that perspective, the sheer quantifiable pain that Hamas has inflicted on Israel – 1,200 Israelis dead and nearly 250 prisoners taken – was itself an achievement in the eyes of Hamas leaders, particularly the more ideological ones like Sinwar and Deif.

[ Insert: Hamas: What has happened to its most prominent leaders?
18 October 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67103298 ]

Moreover, the ‘limited’ wars that Israel has conducted since Hamas seized power in Gaza didn’t seem so limited from Hamas’s point of view. Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09 led to more than 1,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, Pillar of Defense in 2012 more than 100, Protective Edge in 2014 more than 2,000, and back-and-forth hostilities in 2021 several hundred. In addition, Israel has raided Gaza with seeming impunity, imposed crippling economic restrictions and otherwise immiserated the Palestinian population there. Now, from Hamas’s standpoint, Israel has had a taste of its own medicine. Hamas has also forced Israel to release some 240 Palestinian prisoners, which constitutes a tremendous propaganda victory for the group. (In return, Hamas released 105 captives, mostly Israelis but also 23 Thais and one Filipino who were working near Gaza and got caught up in the raid.)

As noted, Hamas has reasserted itself as a force of resistance. Since winning elections in 2006 and seizing power in Gaza a year later, Hamas has juggled two identities: the government of Gaza and a resistance group dedicated to fighting Israel. Success at either one could win over ordinary Palestinians, making Hamas, not rival secular groups like Fatah or the Palestinian Authority (PA), the heart of the Palestinian national movement. In recent years, it has appeared that a governance mindset was predominant. Hamas repeatedly negotiated with Israel over fishing rights, work permits and conditions in Gaza. In 2022, Hamas even sat out a round of fighting between Israel and Hamas’s frenemy, Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ). This seeming passivity led not only supporters of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State but also some activists within Hamas’s own military wing to criticise it.

Yet Hamas’s ability to win over Palestinians through better government was limited. For years, Israeli economic pressure and international isolation made it hard for Hamas to bring even a modicum of economic health to Gaza. Repeated Israeli attacks destroyed infrastructure and made it clear that the strip’s economy was at Israel’s mercy. As Hamas cracked down on PIJ and others who wanted to fight Israel in the name of Gaza’s economic stability, the group increasingly became a version of its PA rival, perceived as doing Israel’s bidding however grudgingly. As governance seemed a dead end, resistance became more alluring. Although its ability to govern Gaza is non-existent today, Hamas has re-established itself as Israel’s most hated foe. Hamas leaders probably believe their losses on the governing side are worth the increase in resistance credibility.

Prisoners and their families are an important bloc within Hamas, and gaining the release of prisoners was a major motivation behind the 7 October attacks. In 2006, Israel released more than 1,000 prisoners in exchange for captured soldier Gilad Shalit, and Hamas probably reasoned that it could gain many more such releases with a mass-capture operation. By contrast, the PA – which holds power in the West Bank, has cooperated with Israel on security for many years and has engaged in peace negotiations with Israel – has long sought such releases, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by successive Israeli governments. Hamas’s message is vindicated: resistance, not negotiations, produces results.

For now, polls show a significant increase in support for Hamas, especially in the West Bank. A March poll by the highly reputable Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 71% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank believe Hamas was correct to launch the 7 October attacks, with almost two-thirds believing Hamas will emerge victorious. More than 90% of those polled did not believe that Hamas had committed atrocities, making the Israeli response seem even more disproportionate. Few Palestinians blame Hamas for their suffering.

Hamas’s popularity comes at the expense of the PA, and at a critical time. Polling also shows that most Palestinians, particularly those in the West Bank, would prefer Hamas’s leadership in Gaza to the PA’s. The prevailing view is that Hamas has demonstrated that it will act, while the PA has no real theory of success to offer ordinary Palestinians; it suppresses rather than bolsters resistance, and its bet on a peace process to bring about a Palestinian state has appeared increasingly delusional.

The PA itself is in crisis. It has long been plagued by dysfunction, corruption and authoritarianism. As a result, it is deeply unpopular, and Mahmoud Abbas, the 88-year-old chain-smoker who has led it for 20 years, is not going to revive its support. Fearing that it would lose at the polls, it has not held an election since 2006. Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, settlers’ pogroms there and regular raids by the Israeli military have further undermined the PA’s credibility, and many Palestinians see it as a handmaiden of the Israeli occupation. Abbas has no clear successor, and it is possible that the more pro-Western Palestinian leadership will splinter when he no longer is able to lead, in which case Hamas could well supplant the PA in the West Bank.

The 7 October attacks and the Israeli response derailed Israel’s regional normalisation. To be clear, Israel and Saudi Arabia were not on the verge of normalisation before 7 October. But talks were serious, and the prospect that Saudi Arabia, the most politically and economically important Arab state, would establish relations with Israel was at least plausible, as the plight of the Palestinians could be swept under the rug with a few wiggle words, while political elites in the region focused on the Iranian threat. Today, Arabic-language news outlets present non-stop coverage of the deaths of children in Gaza and the suffering of the people there. Saudi and other Arab leaders cannot forge a full rapprochement with Israel in this environment.

Finally, although it probably was not Hamas’s primary aim to disrupt Arab–Israeli normalisation, doing so was a top concern of Iran, which arms, trains and funds Hamas. Tehran rightly fears that Israel–Saudi normalisation is directed against Iran and that it would increase security cooperation between Israel and Iran’s Arab rivals, as well as legitimise Israel. Thus, 7 October increased Hamas’s strategic value to Iran.

The price of hurting Israel

Hamas’s successes came at a steep price for both the group and Palestinians in general. Israel has devastated Hamas’s military infrastructure. At the end of April, estimates of the number of Hamas fighters killed ranged from 6,000–8,000 (Hamas figures) to 11,000–13,000 (Israeli figures), with US officials gauging somewhere in between. In any case, the personnel losses constitute a large portion of Hamas’s estimated strength of 25,000–30,000 fighters. They are the heart of Hamas’s military threat to Israel and key to Hamas’s control of Gaza. Hamas has also lost several leaders, including mid-level commanders. Fighters and leaders can be replaced, but it will not be easy: even if Hamas’s recruitment remains strong or even grows, capable soldiers and authoritative leaders take time to develop.

While Hizbullah, the Houthis and others have joined the fray, Hamas had hoped for an all-out regional war against Israel. This did not happen, with Hizbullah’s forbearance proving a particular disappointment. Although the Lebanese group regularly attacks Israel and an all-out clash remains possible, it has refrained from sending its fighters across Israel’s northern border to open a second front or use its massive rocket arsenal to punish and terrorise Israel. Hizbullah is far more capable than Hamas, and its full-scale participation would have been a game changer.

The 7 October fallout also cost ordinary Palestinians dearly. It is hard to know how many Palestinian civilians have died, but the Palestinian Health Authority, generally deemed reliable, reported around 34,000 deaths at the end of April. That figure includes soldiers, but it could well be an undercount according to some international experts. Around 12,000 of the dead are children. On top of the death toll, roughly three-quarters of the population is displaced. The strip is in ruins, and many ordinary Palestinians have suffered grievous economic as well as personal loss. The destruction of Gaza will increase disease and malnutrition in the longer term. Reconstruction of Gaza is likely to be slow and limited, with people displaced for years to come.

In this light, Hamas’s popularity may decline over time. After past attacks, there was initial enthusiasm for striking Israel and then anger at the Israeli response, both of which bolstered Hamas. When Israel imposed further penalties, however, and the cost of Hamas’s actions became clear, support for Hamas fell. Already, there are some indications that support for the 7 October attack among Palestinians is declining, particularly in Gaza.

It goes almost without saying that Hamas will find it even harder to engage with Israel in the future. That may not matter to Hamas diehards, but Israel’s power dwarfs that of Hamas, and the organisation will inevitably need to engage with Israel at some point. The second intifada, which raged from 2000 to 2005 before slowly petering out, scarred a generation of Israelis, convincing them that Palestinian leaders do not want peace. The memory of 7 October is likely to function similarly, increasing support for Israeli politicians hostile to anything that smacks of Palestinian rights, especially if it involves concessions to Hamas. For now, this may not matter. But Hamas has often followed a political as well as a military strategy. Any hope that Israel might tolerate Hamas playing a quiet role in the Palestine Liberation Organization, having sympathisers participate in governing the West Bank even at a municipal level or otherwise assuming a mainstream political role is greatly diminished.

Israel had grown complacent about the Hamas threat before 7 October, believing the group could not and would not stage such a massive attack on Israel. In the coming years, Israel is likely to take the opposite approach, acting on sketchy intelligence and generally taking a shoot-first-investigate-later approach to Hamas threats. This will result in more Israeli mistakes and deaths of innocent Palestinian, but it will also mean constant pressure on Hamas. Even if Hamas remains popular and legitimate in the eyes of many Palestinians, that pressure may elevate the PA or perhaps some other Palestinian faction seen as more politically acceptable to Israel. At the very least, the rival would have greater Israeli and international support.

Israel’s gains and losses

Before 7 October, Israel both negotiated with Hamas and attacked it. The hope was to use a mixture of limited carrots, such as permits for Palestinians in Gaza to work in Israel, to induce good behaviour while employing the threat of force to tamp down Hamas attacks on Israel. This was, by design, an approach without end. Israelis regularly use the term ‘mowing the grass’ to describe their approach to Palestinian terrorism. They sought simply to manage terrorism, believing that it was enduring and inevitable, and that extinguishing it was unrealistic. Israel, however, would need to regularly strike the Palestinian groups and otherwise disrupt them, or the grass would grow too high again.

[ISIS is seen as an increased threat in Syria now, yet Netanyahu
said a war aim was to extinguish Hamas. That was never a chance,]

Indeed, Israel even sought to boost Hamas politically as a way of weakening the PA and undermining the chances of a two-state solution. By encouraging financial payments to Hamas from Qatar, the Netanyahu government kept Hamas strong. This, in turn, kept Abbas from gaining the upper hand in the Hamas–PA rivalry, and Israel could claim that there was no partner for peace because the Palestinians were divided. ‘The Palestinian Authority is a burden’, commented far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. ‘Hamas is an asset.’

This approach appeared to collapse after the massive Hamas attack, which strongly implied that neither inducements nor threats would stop Hamas from killing, capturing and raping on a mass scale. Israel responded to 7 October without any clear goals beyond destroying Hamas and freeing captured Israelis. Yet Israel also cares about restoring deterrence, particularly vis-à-vis Iran, ensuring a modicum of international and especially US support, preserving relations with moderate Sunni states and, in the long run, preventing a repeat of 7 October.

The Israelis claim to have shattered 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions. They have also killed several senior Hamas leaders, among them Marwan Issa, one of the architects of 7 October who was a leading Hamas member in Gaza. Less dramatically, Israeli forces have blown up Hamas tunnels, destroyed strongpoints and ammunition caches, and otherwise eliminated much of Hamas’s military infrastructure. Another such attack is unlikely not only because of Hamas’s resulting military weakness, but also because Israel is likely to respond aggressively to even a hint that Hamas is planning a major attack, loath to continue the complacency that allowed 7 October to happen: a year earlier, Israeli intelligence had intercepted the Hamas battle plan and collected specific indicators that it was moving forward, but Israel did not act.

With its harsh military campaign in Gaza, Israel has sent a message to other potential aggressors, notably Hizbullah, about the price of attacking Israel. Hizbullah and Israel have engaged in only a limited back-and-forth since 7 October, and Hizbullah has made clear it does not seek all-out war. Several factors shape Hizbullah’s calculus, but the ruin major war would bring to already-fragile Lebanon is likely the primary one.

The Israeli public has also demonstrated a clear will to fight, which is an important element of deterrence. Israel’s enemies, including Hizbullah, have long subscribed to a ‘spider web’ theory whereby Israel looks strong but on close examination is fragile, with casualty sensitivity its greatest weakness. Pre-war internal tensions in Israel added to concerns that the country was too divided to resist its enemies. After 7 October, however, the nation rallied around the military. The massive reserve call-up and the deaths of 600 soldiers on 7 October and in the days immediately thereafter produced grim support, not beseeching protests.

Israel’s responses to provocations apparently weigh heavily on Iran and its allies as well. On 1 April, Israel attacked a diplomatic facility in Damascus, killing seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, including two senior ones. On 13 April, Iran responded with a barrage of more than 300 missiles and drones, the first direct attack ever launched against Israel from Iranian soil. The attack fizzled. Israel intercepted most of the drones and missiles with the help of the United States, Jordan and various Gulf states. Israel responded with a small, but precise, strike on an Iranian air-defence system. The exchange demonstrated the strength of Israeli defences and regional Arab states’ reluctance to break with Israel even in dark times for the Palestinians. On balance, Iranian personnel outside Iran are vulnerable to Israeli targeting and substantially deterred from directly attacking Israel. Furthermore, Israel has demonstrated to its Sunni Arab partners that it can strike Iran and its proxies with relative impunity and will do so if provoked. While the Sunni Arab states pay a political price for open cooperation with Jerusalem, Israel now looms as an arguably more valuable military partner.

Hamas still stands

Israel’s gains are impressive, but its losses have been daunting. Hamas has declined to release more than 130 of the roughly 240 hostages it took on 7 October, although many of them are probably dead. Israel has been able to extract only three hostages through the use of military force, the others being freed by way of a brief ceasefire and prisoner swap. This record indicates the extraordinary difficulty of hostage rescue – always a stiff challenge – when the hostages are carefully hidden and well guarded. Israel cannot both attack Hamas and swap for hostages, as the terrorist group demands a ceasefire as part of the exchange. The issue is a highly emotional one for Israelis, with no good answer.

Some of Israel’s military gains have been limited. Although Israel has killed many Hamas leaders, the two most important, Sinwar and Deif, remained alive

[See insert above]

as of mid-May. After 7 October, Israel’s military spokesman declared Sinwar a ‘dead man walking’, yet he and Deif have eluded the Israeli military manhunt. More broadly, Israel’s military campaign appears largely stalled. It has withdrawn most of its forces from the strip, maintaining a presence in the central area and preventing Palestinians from returning to the north. Further military operations, such as the one against Hamas’s remaining stronghold in Rafah, may only yield marginal gains; killing a few thousand more Hamas fighters will not dramatically change the balance of forces. The death of a major figure like Sinwar or Deif would not matter much from a military point of view, though it would yield political benefits for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas has a deep bench of leaders and has shown repeatedly that it can weather the loss of senior staff operationally and even thrive politically.

Hamas’s long-term position is far stronger than Israel would like. Owing to the high death toll and extreme devastation visited by the Israeli campaign, Gaza will be filled with angry and vengeful young men, ripe for recruitment by Hamas. Even if Hamas is militarily defeated, its theory of resistance – that the only way to create a free Palestine is through violence – remains popular.

The deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza also constitute an immense blot on Israel’s international reputation, which was not sterling to begin with. High civilian casualties in Gaza were inevitable, as it is one of the most densely populated places in the world and Hamas fighters intentionally blended in with the population, making it impossible to target Hamas without imperilling civilians. But Israel took this difficult situation and made it worse. Israeli military rules of engagement reportedly allow the killing of up to 20 civilians to take out a single junior Hamas fighter, 100 for a senior leader. By comparison, the United States put the ratio at 30-to-one for Saddam Hussein. A senior Israeli official lamented in April that the Israeli military was shooting first and asking questions later, which is leading to high-profile friendly-fire mistakes, such as the killing of three Israeli hostages shouting in Hebrew and waving a white flag, and the deaths of international aid workers. These errors suggest many Palestinians looking to surrender or simply uninvolved in anti-Israeli action have also been wrongly targeted. Even less justifiably, Israel has blocked or slow-rolled humanitarian aid, with far less getting into the strip than is needed to ensure basic health. Europeans have long seen Israel as a major threat to peace, even more so than Iran, North Korea, Russia and other dictatorships, according to some polls. Since the Gaza war began, demonstrations against Israel have roiled many European cities, and Israeli leaders worry that the International Criminal Court may issue arrest warrants against them because of the Gaza war.

While Israelis might publicly shrug off European criticism, American criticism is another matter. In the United States, approval of Israel’s actions fell from over 50% in November to 36% in March. Disapproval was particularly strong among Democrats, with 75% seeing Israel’s approach as wrong. Overall favourable views of Israel are falling, and younger Americans are particularly scathing. Mass protests on major-college campuses have raised the profile of the issue in the United States and, occurring in a historically critical election year, have added to pressures on the Biden administration. President Joe Biden, a long-time supporter who embraced Israel after 7 October, has grown more and more critical in his public remarks, and on 8 May decided to at least temporarily halt the supply of munitions that could cause mass casualties to Israel for its assault on Rafah.

Israel’s own politics remain fraught. Netanyahu’s political position was weak before the war, with many Israelis outraged by allegations of corruption and by his far-right government’s attempts to neuter the judiciary and impose other far-right reforms. Some Israelis blame Netanyahu for not taking responsibility for the strategic failure that 7 October reflects. Perhaps most fundamentally, the far right wants to keep the war going, while other Israelis are more willing to accept a ceasefire in exchange for a hostage release.

No day after

Israel’s biggest error is especially puzzling to Americans and Europeans with painful memories of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: there is no plan for the day after. To keep Hamas down in the long term, Gaza needs a new government, and Israel has dodged this paramount challenge despite repeated calls by the United States to address it.

The logic of American urgency is simple. Groups like Hamas hide among the civilian population and otherwise remain elusive. If military forces leave an area, they re-emerge and reassert control. For example, in a bloody and controversial operation, Israel first captured the Al-Shifa hospital in November. In March, however, several hundred Hamas fighters took control of the area after Israeli forces had left, forcing Israel to go in again. If Hamas is to be destroyed as a political force, something needs to replace it. Otherwise, even with only a few thousand fighters, it can reassert at least limited control over much of the strip.

Territorial control is also vital for the safe delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel now imposes many restrictions on anything going into Gaza, but once it passes into the strip, it is often seized by local criminals or desperate people rather than distributed efficiently and fairly. A governing entity could provide law and order, allowing humanitarian workers to do their jobs.

To be sure, political constraints do not make for appealing day-after options. The international community cannot send a peacekeeping force to Gaza without deploying a large number of capable forces with the will and authority to fight Hamas, but volunteers are not forthcoming. While Arab leaders privately scorn Hamas on account of the group’s Islamist orientation and Iranian backing, they claim to support the Palestinian people, and their publics are outraged by the Israeli attack and champion Palestinian rights. For them to deploy troops to Gaza to suppress Hamas would complicate their political messaging and put them at odds with their own people.

By default, that leaves the PA, which as noted is deeply flawed. The Biden administration, to its credit, has proposed a revitalised PA that would involve new leadership. In March, Abbas made a gesture in this direction, appointing Mohammad Mustafa, his long-serving economic adviser, as prime minister with an eye to creating a technocratic government. This is a useful step, but Mustafa is hardly a new broom, and in any event such an appointment is only one among many that would need to be made before the PA had the competence to manage a devastated Gaza as well as the West Bank, which it now only tenuously governs.

Political credibility will be even harder to establish. Before 7 October, PA security forces regularly cooperated with Israel against Hamas and other mutual foes, though Israel found them increasingly unwilling and unable to act. At the same time, Abbas seemed to do little in the West Bank to discourage excessively aggressive Israeli military operations undertaken in defence of settlers, who themselves often attacked Palestinian civilians. The situation reached the point where the Biden administration threatened sanctions against several Israeli military units for their ‘gross human rights violations’ against Palestinian civilians.

The West Bank has been a tinderbox for some time, with both Palestinian and settler violence constant risks. Since 7 October, Israel has grown far more aggressive in the West Bank, and settlers there have run amok. Through the end of April, the Israeli military had arrested more than 8,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, and more than 400 Palestinians had been killed. Although many of those detained were released, the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is higher than it was before 7 October, and demonstrations persist. Amnesty International reports that settler violence has ‘drastically increased’, with murders and property destruction common. The Israeli government has also ramped up land seizures, dispelling any lingering hopes that 7 October would lead to a policy reset. Israel has made it easier for the settler community in the West Bank to arm, and far-right ministers are giving them carte blanche in an already combustible situation, requiring overstretched Israeli troops to be deployed to prevent the situation from exploding.<

Perhaps unsurprisingly, only 24% of Palestinians polled in March wanted the PA to rule Gaza, in contrast to 59% who favoured Hamas. Of that 24%, less than half wanted Abbas at the helm, the rest favouring alternative PA leadership.

* * *

If there is no credible international or Palestinian actor to govern Gaza, it is likely to become a failed state. There may be pockets of order, but large parts of the strip will be essentially ungoverned. Israel will continue to conduct raids to keep Hamas off balance and prevent it from consolidating control anywhere. The Gaza war’s legacy may simply be another indefinite grass-mowing exercise rather than any major change in Israeli policy. Whether deliberate or not, this leaves Israel where Hamas wants it: increasingly isolated internationally, divided internally and embracing policies that marginalise the PA and undermine Israel’s regional integration.

Given diminishing Israeli returns and Hamas’s unyielding posture, new approaches are necessary. A ceasefire is a logical next step. Israel gains little from the current fighting, and its citizens desperately want surviving hostages and the remains of those who have died returned. This will require painful Israeli concessions in terms of freeing Hamas terrorists and easing military pressure on Hamas, at least in the short term, but there is no viable alternative course.

At the very least, far more humanitarian aid must enter the strip, ideally with some form of escort that prevents massive looting or at such a scale that the black market effectively collapses due to oversupply. This will require streamlining the many hurdles Israel has imposed for aid delivery, as well as increasing overall capacity. Diminishing civilian suffering will ease Americans’ criticism of Israel and reduce pressure on Israel’s Arab partners.

Most importantly, the planning for the day after needs to begin promptly. The choices are vexing, but no one, including Israel, should welcome an indefinite crisis. To avoid it, someone must govern Gaza. The PA is the best of an array of bad options, and the international community along with Israel should be working to support PA leaders. The success of the PA in Gaza will depend heavily on its performance in the West Bank. Calls for Israel to end settlements, arrest violent settlers and restore a modicum of respect for PA governance there may seem hollow given years of perversely antagonistic policies on the part of multiple Israeli governments, but they must continue. The Biden administration’s threats of sanctioning military units, labelling some settler groups as terrorists and conditioning some aid on moderations in Israeli policy in the West Bank are necessary and overdue, and the White House may have to act on them.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the United States has considerable leverage over Israel. Israel not only needs US ammunition and other military assistance for the Gaza war, but it also relies on the United States for intelligence and air-defence assistance to address the ongoing Iranian threat. In addition, Israel is preparing for a possible war with Hizbullah, and its military needs for that conflict will dwarf what was required for Gaza. Israel is sensitive to US concerns, and carefully scrutinises matters such as delays or curtailments in weapons deliveries as potential signs of a larger decrease in support.

Hopes that the Gaza war might restart the peace process or have some other silver lining for now have been flattened, but even this crisis can still be an opportunity. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships may be in transition, and major changes in either – ideally both – could usher in new approaches focused on ending the blood and tears of the last months. Meanwhile, external actors should seek not only to solve the immediate crisis, but also to set the conditions for longer-term progress, allowing Palestinians and Israelis to wrench some hope from a war they both are losing.

This article appears in the June–July 2024 issue of Survival: Global Politics and Strategy.

Authors Daniel Byman
Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and
a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies
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Rated least biased .. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center-for-strategic-and-international-studies/ .. top level credibility.