Israel's Muddled Strategy Gaza

Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza | Foreign Affairs 12/24/23, 7:03 PM
Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza

Time to Make Hard Choices
BY DANIEL BYMAN December 21, 2023
DANIEL BYMAN is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a
Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
If devastation is the goal, Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip has
been a resounding success. More than two months after Hamas killed over
1,100 people on October 7, Israeli air and ground operations have killed
some 20,000 Palestinians, many of them children, according to Gaza’s
Hamas-run Health Ministry. Much of Gaza lies in ruins, with the United
Nations estimating that almost 20 percent of the territory’s prewar
structures have been destroyed. More than half of Gazans are experiencing
severe hunger, unemployment has risen to 85 percent, and disease is
spreading.
But the statements of a few extremist ministers notwithstanding, Israel’s

goals in Gaza are broader and more strategic than in!icting pain on the
Palestinians. On December 12, I landed in Israel for a weeklong research
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1131217 Page 1 of 17
trip, joined by colleagues from the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and several other experts. In an e"ort to understand Israel’s goals
and strategy, we spoke with current and former Israeli military leaders,
senior security o#cials, diplomats, and politicians, as well as ordinary
citizens. $e interviewees related their perspectives on October 7, the state
of the war today, and the future of their country.
Israel’s war in Gaza di"ers from many other con!icts in that there is not a
single %nite objective. $ere is no invading force to be expelled, no territory
to be conquered, no dictator to be toppled. Nonetheless, two months on, a
more or less clear list of goals is emerging. Israel seeks to destroy Hamas,
capturing or killing its leaders, shattering its military capacity, and ending
its power in Gaza. It seeks the release of the hostages who were kidnapped
on October 7 and remain alive, as well as the bodies of those who have been
killed. It wants to prevent another attack, particularly by Hezbollah, Iran’s
proxy in Lebanon. It wants to maintain international support, especially
from the United States, and safeguard the diplomatic gains it has made
with Arab countries in recent years. And it seeks to rebuild the trust in
security institutions that the public lost after the attacks.
Israel’s response can seem confusing to outsiders, but it makes more sense
when these competing goals are considered. Each has its own metrics and
complications, and some are in direct con!ict with one another. So far, the
results of Israel’s campaign have been mixed: Israel has hit Hamas hard, but
it is falling short in many areas, in!icting a devastating toll on civilians in
Gaza and paying a heavy price in terms of international support. Israel’s
leaders are often trying to have it all. Instead, they need to make hard
choices about which goals to prioritize and which to downplay.
Because maintaining U.S support is vital, Israel should focus on targeting

Hamas’s leaders more than destroying the group’s broader military forces
and infrastructure. It should make more of an e"ort to reduce civilian
casualties. It should seek to deter, rather than destroy, Hezbollah,
maintaining larger numbers of forces near Gaza and Lebanon even after
active hostilities end to reassure the Israeli people. And it should focus
more on who will replace Hamas in Gaza, which requires bolstering the
Palestinian Authority and Palestinian technocrats. If Israel instead tries to
have it all, it risks having nothing.
APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION

No visitor to Israel can miss the sense of pain, fury, and mistrust that
pervades every conversation. $e term “earthquake” came up again and
again when I asked about October 7. One Israeli security o#cial declared
that “something fundamental broke” in the country that day. (To encourage
candor, we agreed to not to identify our interview subjects.) Israelis believe
that they cannot go back to a pre–October 7 world, with a hostile and
intact Hamas across the border in Gaza. In their eyes, the brutality of the
attacks showed Hamas to be beyond redemption, unable to be deterred or
contained.
$e problem goes beyond Gaza, however. With justi%cation, many Israelis

blame Iran for Hamas’s impressive arsenal and the innovative methods of
its %ghters. $ey fear that Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will also
attack Israel, using its exponentially larger rocket arsenal and far more
skilled %ghters to launch a much more devastating attack on Israel’s north.
Since October 7, over 200,000 Israelis have !ed areas near Gaza and
Lebanon.
At the same time, Israelis no longer trust their own security institutions. As
one Israeli security o#cial explained, “Before October 7, intelligence told
the country, ‘We know Hamas,’ while the military said, ‘We can handle
Hamas.’” Both, he added, were wrong. It is now hard for Israeli leaders to
reassure the public that next time, the military and intelligence services will
keep them safe.
To rebuild public con%dence, Israeli leaders have vowed to utterly destroy

Hamas. Days after the attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued one
such pledge. “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, o" the face
of the earth,” he said. “It will cease to exist.” But destroying Hamas can
mean many di"erent things in practice.
$e focus of Israel’s current military campaign is to destroy Hamas’s

military wing, which boasted around 25,000 to 30,000 members before
October 7. At the time of my interviews, most Israeli o#cials estimated
that 7,000 of those %ghters had been killed in the war. $at %gure is hard to
verify, however, and it may include Palestinians who fought back against
invading forces yet were not formally part of Hamas’s military wing. $e
number of %ghters appears to be dwindling further: some Israeli o#cials
told me that more and more are !eeing or surrendering.
Although the Israel Defense Forces are in!icting a steep toll on Hamas, the
group’s large numbers and ability to blend in with the population make it
di#cult to eradicate, especially without killing a huge number of
Palestinian civilians. Urban warfare is a nightmare for even the best
militaries, and the IDF has already lost more than 100 soldiers in its
current campaign. Adding to the di#culty, Hamas has located many of its
military assets near or in civilian facilities such as mosques and schools. In
addition, Gaza has a vast tunnel network, more extensive than Israeli
intelligence had originally thought, where %ghters can move undetected
and leaders can hide. Hamas also has deep roots in Gaza, with decades-old
ties to mosques, hospitals, schools, and charities, and since 2007, it has been
the government there. $e group permeates everyday life in Gaza: the
doctor, the police o#cer, the garbage collector, and the teacher may all have
links to Hamas, making it di#cult to eradicate the group beyond its
military wing.
Israel, of course, will not be able to kill every single Hamas %ghter. But it
may be able to kill enough members, especially leaders and veteran forces,
to shatter the group’s military capacity. In this vision of victory, Hamas’s
units would no longer be able to %ght e"ectively and launch operations
against Israel. And if there were a new government in Gaza, the remnants
of Hamas would be more easily suppressed because that administration’s
security forces would have a decent chance of %nding and suppressing
isolated cells of %ghters.
Hamas also has a vast military infrastructure. $is includes not only its
tunnel network but also its rockets, missiles, launch pads, and ammunition
depots. $e assets are everywhere: Hamas has been preparing for an Israeli
invasion for more than a decade. Part of the purpose of Israel’s invasion is
to destroy this infrastructure, which in turn requires bombing or occupying
much of Gaza. $ere isn’t much publicly available data for quantifying this
progress, but it can be measured by the frequency and size of Hamas’s
rocket and missile attacks, the quantity of ammunition Hamas %ghters
have, and the territory that Hamas controls—all of which, according to the
o#cials I interviewed, are steadily shrinking. Some of these observations
are visible to outsiders, whereas others require detailed intelligence to judge.
HIDE AND SEEK

Another metric of success is whether Hamas’s leadership has been
destroyed. Israel has a long history of killing terrorist leaders, and Israeli
o#cials have announced plans to assassinate Hamas’s leaders after the war
ends. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Hamas’s top
o#cial, Yahya Sinwar, a “dead man walking,” and even before October 7,
Israeli forces had repeatedly tried to kill Hamas’s military leader,
Mohammed Deif, as well as his second-in-command, Marwan Issa. $e
Israeli government reports that it has already killed many Hamas leaders in
the current military campaign, with Netanyahu claiming that half of
Hamas’s battalion commanders are now dead.
Yet like destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, eliminating its

leadership is di#cult. Deif, Issa, and Sinwar are believed to be hiding
underground. More junior leaders are clearly being killed, but at least some
of them will be replaced by other competent leaders. Because of the
di#culty of destroying infrastructure and killing Hamas members and

leaders, most of the Israeli security o#cials I spoke with estimated that
another six to nine months of high-intensity military operations are
necessary.
Even if the current cohort of leaders is killed, however, Hamas has a deep
bench of replacements. Ever since Hamas’s founding in 1987, Israel has
routinely killed or jailed its high-level leaders, yet the organization has
endured. It has ample lower-level leaders and large support networks to
draw on. $at said, killing Sinwar and Deif, in particular, would have
political value for Israel, even if Hamas replaced them with equally
competent and hostile leaders. Both have become symbols of October 7,
and an Israeli government could more credibly claim victory if they were
killed, even if many of their fellow leaders survived.
Beyond any individual leader, Hamas embodies an ideology that will be

even harder to eliminate. $e idea behind muqawama, or resistance, is that
the way to defeat Israel (and, for that matter, the United States) is through
persistent military force, a credo also embraced by Hezbollah and Iran.
Should Israel devastate Hamas but a strong new organization with the
same mindset take its place, Israel will only have replaced one foe with
another. In the past, Israel has nearly eliminated individual Palestinian
terrorist groups, such as Al Saiqa, a once-strong Baathist group backed by
Syria in the 1960s and 1970s whose leader, Zuheir Mohsen, was gunned
down by Israeli agents in 1979. Israel has greatly diminished others, such as
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist group famed for
its airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s and a hang-glider attack on
Israel in 1987. But would-be terrorists simply joined other groups,
including Hamas.
$e ideology of resistance is popular among Palestinians, and October 7

has made it even more so. Hamas deeply hurt Israel, which many
Palestinians, humiliated by decades of occupation, regard with glee. Israel’s
destructive military campaign, with its large civilian death toll, has further
angered Palestinians, and Hamas’s seizure of hostages has forced Israel to
release some detained Palestinians, a goal that past negotiations by
moderate Palestinians were unable to achieve. A poll conducted in late
November and early December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and
Survey Research found that 82 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank
support the attack. Eventually, Palestinians may look at the destruction in
Gaza and conclude that violent resistance makes their lives worse, and polls
show that there is less support for October 7 in Gaza, which is paying the
price of Hamas’s brutality. But so far, support for Hamas has grown.
A very di"erent aspect of destroying Hamas involves its long-term

replacement as the government of Gaza. Someone must govern the strip
and prevent Hamas from returning to power, and Israel has no interest in
being a long-term occupier. On this question, however, there is little
progress, and if anything, the situation for Israel is worse than on October
7. No outside power wants to act as Israel’s police force in Gaza.
U.S. President Joe Biden has called for a “revitalized Palestinian Authority”
to govern Gaza. $e PA now controls the West Bank and works closely
with Israel there on security, but its leadership is incompetent and

unpopular. Israel’s harsh policies and expansion of settlements in the West
Bank steadily undermined the PA there, and its invasion of Gaza has
worsened the organization’s legitimacy problem, as Palestinians admire
Hamas’s de%ance and see the PA as complicit in Israel’s occupation. “$ere
is no Palestinian leadership,” one interviewee noted acidly, even as he
added, “Palestinians must control Gaza.” If the PA were put in charge of
Gaza, Palestinians would see it as a handmaiden of the brutal Israeli
occupiers. Without signi%cant support from Israel, the PA’s forces would be
overwhelmed even by a remnant of Hamas.
HELD HOSTAGE
Everywhere I looked in Israel, the faces of hostages stared out from posters.
$eir treatment in Gaza and the need for their release came up constantly
in my conversations. Hamas took roughly 240 hostages on October 7, and a
little under half have been freed. $e remainder, estimated at 129 today, are
still in Gaza, and it is unclear how many of them survive. (Israel believes at
least 20 of them have died.) At a psychological level, the presence of over
100 hostages is an open wound for Israel. At a tactical level, it complicates
the IDF’s operations.
To comprehend the scale of the trauma for Israelis, consider how Israel has
handled hostage situations in the past. In 2011, it traded more than 1,000
Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier whom Hamas had captured,
Gilad Shalit. Since October 7, it has already freed around 240 prisoners in
exchange for Hamas’s liberating more than 100 of those captured on
October 7, including 23 citizens of $ailand and one from the Philippines,
as well as many dual nationals. Many of the remaining hostages are young
Israeli men of %ghting age, and Hamas has vowed to extract a high price
for their release—part of the reason that talks collapsed after the initial
releases. Remaining hostages also include women whom Israelis believe
were raped or otherwise brutalized, and Hamas is reluctant to release them
lest they publicize their abuse. Further complicating the hostage problem,
perhaps around 30 of the remaining hostages are under the control of
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group, or other factions in Gaza.
Conducting high-intensity military operations while trying to free

prisoners is exceptionally di#cult. Just as Hamas places its forces among
civilians, it uses hostages as shields. Friendly %re by the IDF has killed
some Israeli prisoners, and IDF bombing has undoubtedly killed more. If
military operations continue, Israel will likely be able to liberate some of
those kidnapped, but it will also lose many in the %ghting.
THE NORTHERN FRONT

Israel has long relied on deterrence to counter its enemies, trying to
convince them that any attack would leave them worse o". Measuring
deterrence is di#cult. Most Israelis would have said before October 7 that
Hamas was successfully deterred, but Hamas nonetheless attacked, and its
success may inspire other enemies to do so as well. In general, it is hard to
understand the risk-reward calculus of a foe, especially a highly ideological
one.
Even as Israel %ghts on in Gaza, it has engaged in a back-and-forth with

Hezbollah on its northern border, with Hezbollah %ring rockets and
attacking Israeli border posts and the IDF bombing Hezbollah positions.
Israeli leaders hope to demonstrate resolve by making Hezbollah pay a
price for its aggression, but they also wish to avoid a larger war while their
forces are occupied with %ghting Hamas. For now, Hezbollah also seems to
want to avoid full con!ict, launching limited attacks to show solidarity with
Hamas but avoiding a more intense campaign. $e devastation of Gaza has
probably reinforced deterrence: Hezbollah may not want to risk its
strongholds in Beirut looking like the moonscape that is much of Gaza
today.
Eventually, however, Israel may want to wage a larger war against

Hezbollah in the belief that unless it does so, deterrence will not hold and
Israel might be surprised again. As one Israeli security o#cial put it to me,
“Deterrence is something that lasts until the other side is ready for war.”
Hezbollah keeps elite commando units—its Radwan forces—on the
Lebanese border with Israel. It also has a substantial rocket arsenal that can
reach targets throughout Israel and is big enough to overwhelm the
country’s missile defense system.
Israel may be able to continue deterring Hezbollah from launching a war,

but the threat of rockets and commando attacks—a repeat of October 7,
but in the north and from a far more capable foe—keeps Israeli military
planners up at night. In early December, in fact, Gallant, the defense
minister, threatened to open up a second front against Hezbollah if the
group didn’t remove its Radwan units from the border.
FOREIGN FRIENDS
Israel is a small country, and despite its military prowess, it cannot operate
alone inde%nitely. It also sees itself as a Western democracy and is sensitive
to criticism from other members of that club. So Israeli leaders have looked
on with worry as Western support appears to slip. Anti-Israeli protests have
broken out across Europe, and 17 of 27 EU members supported a UN
General Assembly resolution calling for a cease-%re.
Arab leaders, including ones who have recently signed peace treaties with
Israel, are very critical of Israel publicly—even if they strongly oppose
Hamas and its brand of political Islam privately—because Arab publics are
outraged by the Palestinian death toll. Yet the new peace deals with
Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have held, and
there is little sign that they are in jeopardy, even as their leaders’ rhetoric
grows more heated.
Israel can live with fraying European ties and growing criticism from Arab
states, but losing American support would be an altogether di"erent matter.
$e Israelis I spoke with were uniformly glowing about Biden—a
“mensch,” in one interviewee’s words, and, in another’s, “the biggest friend
of Israel since Harry Truman,” who was the %rst world leader to o#cially
recognize Israel. On top of the more than $3 billion Israel receives from the
United States in military aid every year, Congress and the White House are
now considering a package that would provide a $14 billion supplement.
Israel also depends on the United States for munitions, which it needs in
Gaza and would need far more of in a war in Lebanon. $e United States
also regularly provides cover for Israel at the United Nations—for instance,
vetoing a recent Security Council resolution calling for a cease-%re in Gaza.
But many Israeli leaders worry that American support may not last forever,
and those who don’t harbor that fear should. Biden’s own party is
increasingly split over Israel’s conduct in the war, the president himself has
now criticized “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza, and o#cials in his
administration are pressing for an end to major military operations. $e
Biden administration has also strongly discouraged a preventive war in the
north against Hezbollah, with senior U.S. o#cials, including Biden, telling
their Israeli counterparts not to expand the war. $e United States
deployed two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean Sea with the
explicit purpose of deterring Iran and Hezbollah and the implicit goal of
reassuring Israel that the United States has its back—a marked change
from before October 7, when many in the Middle East believed the United
States was turning its back on the region to focus on China.
To maintain strong U.S. support and avoid putting Arab leaders into a box
from which they cannot escape, Israel will need to tone down its military
operations in Gaza. But a less aggressive and less destructive campaign will
make it harder to kill Hamas’s %ghters and demolish its infrastructure. In
the north, Israel is also constrained. Barring a serious act of provocation by
Hezbollah, Israel cannot launch a war in Lebanon and maintain U.S.
support.
KEEPING THE FAITH

Israel was a divided country before October 7, with Netanyahu’s extreme
right-wing government pushing to weaken the judiciary, expand
settlements in the West Bank, and protect the prime minister from
allegations of corruption. Now, Israelis are united behind the goal of
destroying Hamas, but many hold Netanyahu responsible for failing to
prevent the attack and want to see him resign.
Israelis’ loss of faith in their leaders might simply seem like normal politics,
not anything to do with counterterrorism, but in fact such an outcome
represents a major goal of terrorists. Hamas was probably seeking to destroy
Israelis’ con%dence in their government institutions, and even if that wasn’t
a goal, this consequence has surely been a welcome bonus for the group.
Absent such con%dence, displaced Israelis will not return to their homes
near Gaza or Lebanon. And skeptics of the Israeli government will see
some of its continued anti-Hamas operations as a way for Netanyahu to
keep himself in power, not as a genuine necessity in the %ght against
terrorism.
When it comes to restoring faith in government, Israel has a long way to

go. Although Netanyahu has brought some opposition %gures into a war
cabinet, his own support has plummeted, with a November poll %nding
that just four percent of Israeli Jews considered him a trustworthy source of
information on the war. As operations in Gaza ebb, commissions will
investigate the military and intelligence failure on October 7, and the
revelations will in the short term no doubt cause Israelis to lose even more
con%dence in their security institutions. Some con%dence will be restored as
the IDF and Israeli intelligence services demonstrate their combat
pro%ciency in Gaza, as most Israelis agree they have already by hitting
Hamas hard and limiting Israeli casualties. And as a new generation of

military and intelligence leaders replaces those who have taken
responsibility for the October 7 debacle and promised to resign, some trust
should be rebuilt. But in the end, it will probably take years of relative calm
for Israelis to regain their faith.
NO WAY OUT
All of Israel’s goals are di#cult to achieve, and some are at cross-purposes.
A continued military campaign, which would be necessary to severely
degrade Hamas and to help rebuild public con%dence in the military, will
take months to succeed—and even then, it will be unlikely to kill every last
Hamas leader and destroy every last tunnel. Releasing hostages and
maintaining U.S. support, however, will be di#cult to achieve without
reducing military operations. And an intense campaign will not help %nd a
solution to the long-term problem of who will govern Gaza: when the dust
has settled, Israel will need a Palestinian partner to run the strip, and
destructive military operations diminish its credibility among the
population there.
Because its goals are di#cult to achieve separately and even harder to
achieve together, Israel is likely to fall short. Whatever happens, more of
Hamas’s leaders and %ghters will probably survive than Israel would prefer,
and Hezbollah will probably continue its rocket attacks as the war rages in
Gaza. Yet a lack of complete success does not mean failure. Hezbollah, like
Israel, does not appear to want an all-out war. $e October 7 attack has
brought Israel and the U.S. government closer and diminished concerns
that Washington will abandon the Middle East.
But what became clear from my conversations is that Israel’s current

approach to Gaza is too ambitious, and the time has come to correct course.
In the coming months, Israel should move away from high-intensity
operations while continuing to eliminate Hamas’s top leaders through
drone strikes, raids by special operations forces, and other means, doing so
even if some of Hamas’s military infrastructure and regular forces remain.
Israel needs U.S. backing, and that requires limiting civilian casualties in
Gaza, greatly expanding humanitarian e"orts in the strip, and avoiding an
unprovoked war with Hezbollah. To reassure the Israeli population without
fully destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel should station more military
forces near Lebanon and Gaza. Perhaps most important, Israel and the
international community should begin the long process of bolstering the
PA and other alternatives to Hamas to govern Gaza.
Israel must also accept the reality that in many ways, it is damned if it does,
damned if it doesn’t. Its leaders must make hard choices about which goals
to prioritize and which to set aside. One Israeli security o#cial put it to me
best: “$e only resource in the Middle East more plentiful than oil is bad
options.”
Copyright © 2023 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

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Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza | Foreign Affairs 12/24/23, 7:03 PM

Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza

But the statements of a few extremist ministers notwithstanding, Israel’s

Because maintaining U.S support is vital, Israel should focus on targeting

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION

$e problem goes beyond Gaza, however. With justi%cation, many Israelis

To rebuild public con%dence, Israeli leaders have vowed to utterly destroy

$e focus of Israel’s current military campaign is to destroy Hamas’s

HIDE AND SEEK

Yet like destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, eliminating its

di#culty of destroying infrastructure and killing Hamas members and

Beyond any individual leader, Hamas embodies an ideology that will be

$e ideology of resistance is popular among Palestinians, and October 7

A very di"erent aspect of destroying Hamas involves its long-term

with Israel there on security, but its leadership is incompetent and

Conducting high-intensity military operations while trying to free

THE NORTHERN FRONT

Even as Israel %ghts on in Gaza, it has engaged in a back-and-forth with

Eventually, however, Israel may want to wage a larger war against

Israel may be able to continue deterring Hezbollah from launching a war,

vetoing a recent Security Council resolution calling for a cease-%re in Gaza.

KEEPING THE FAITH

When it comes to restoring faith in government, Israel has a long way to

Hamas hard and limiting Israeli casualties. And as a new generation of

But what became clear from my conversations is that Israel’s current

Copyright © 2023 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

Source URL: https://www.foreignaﬀairs.com/israel/israels-muddled-strategy-gaza

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