Israel faces one of its most difficult dilemmas since the beginning of its war with Hamas. The occupation of Gaza City, announced by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday (8 August) marks a major expansion of a war that has already gone on for almost two years. But it only replicates the binds that Israel has faced since this war began: waging a conflict that is existential for the Israeli nation, with no national consensus around its prosecution.
After 7 October, Israel has sought to achieve two goals, each one entirely reasonable on its own. First, it has sought to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, ending its 18-year rule of the enclave. And second, it has sought to liberate the 251 Israelis abducted into Gaza on the morning of the 7 October attack.
The problem all along has been that it is nearly impossible to achieve both of those ends. While some hostages have been recovered, mostly in two ceasefire deals that were effected in November 2023 and January 2025, Hamas will not give away the last ones without a guarantee that it can hold on to its weapons and some measure of political power in the Strip. This would leave it in a position to claim victory, bide its time and prepare for the next enormity in five or ten years, a shock to all that will instantly be remembered as inevitable in retrospect.
On the other hand, destroying Hamas by moving forces into its last redoubt in the centre of the Gaza Strip would be a death sentence on the 20 living Israelis still held in Hamas tunnels for nearly 700 days, starved and abused by their captors.
To that end Israel has pursued a series of ground offensives, wearing down and destroying Hamas battalions along the Strip’s perimeter and along key corridors. Early in the war it ordered an evacuation of the northern part of the Gaza Strip and conducted a massive offensive there – and then left. After the first ceasefire, it extended its perimeter deeper into Gaza, and in May 2024 the IDF moved into Rafah and captured the strip of land where Gaza borders Egypt. Israeli forces vacated much of this land too during the second ceasefire earlier this year.
After that ceasefire ended, the IDF moved even deeper into Gaza, facing off against a Hamas fighting force that was able to marshal only a small fraction of the firepower that was at its disposal in 2023 when the war began. Hamas’ territorial losses this time around are greater than at any point in the war so far. The IDF holds more than 75 per cent of the Strip’s land. Most of Gaza’s civilian population is concentrated in the remaining 25 per cent, including in Gaza City and the camps around Deir al-Balah. With them, or below them, are the 20 Israeli hostages believed to still be among the living – and their captors.
From May to July this year, officials from both sides engaged in intensive talks around the proposal of US envoy Steve Witkoff for a 60-day ceasefire. The Witkoff plan would have seen a significant withdrawal of Israeli forces and a release of ten of the 20 living hostages in exchange for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees held by Israel, including convicted terrorists, as well as a ramping up of aid provisions into Gaza.
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Just before the deal was due to be inked in Doha on July 23, a flurry of international initiatives directed against Israel, convinced Hamas that it could get for free what it nearly paid for with ten of its captives. The deal fell apart, with the Israelis and Americans convinced that Hamas has no intention on releasing the hostages anytime soon – and even the Egyptians and Qataris quietly hinting that they have reached the same conclusion.
If there is no way to liberate the hostages by negotiations, then Israel’s biggest reason for forbearance outside the gates of Gaza becomes considerably less forceful, and the temptation to move in grows larger. The risks are still enormous. Any military operation in Gaza City would incur losses for Israeli forces and risk soldiers being taken hostage themselves. Forces would be moving into a dense urban environment that they either haven’t operated in at all or that they vacated months ago in the previous ceasefire. Either way, booby traps and mines are a guaranteed danger.
It’s impossible to assess what the capabilities of the IDF to operate in such an environment are, especially after nearly two years of nonstop combat, though there are reasons for concern. It is even more difficult to assess what the defensive capacities of Hamas are after two years of attrition.
This was equally true on the other fronts where Israel fought. Anyone could have pontificated in advance about the wisdom of an Israeli strike on Iran or on Hezbollah, but without clear intelligence about the degraded state of Iran’s anti-aircraft capabilities or prior knowledge of the Israeli beeper operation in Lebanon, it would have been impossible to make a coherent cost-benefit analysis of Israel’s decision to launch an offensive.
There was one big difference, however, between Israel’s military operations in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen on the one hand and its war in Gaza on the other. Israel could nowhere afford embarking on a military adventure where it might lose or where its soldiers or civilians would be killed in numbers so high as to render any gains wasted. But in Iran and Lebanon and Yemen and Syria, Israel could make do with efforts that brought about significant strategic gains and call it day.
In Gaza, this option simply doesn’t exist. Anything that leaves Hamas in power will be a victory for Hamas and a vindication for its gamble that the invasion and killing spree of 7 October would benefit the Palestinian cause. An end to the war that not only leaves Hamas in power but leaves it still holding some of the Israelis it took hostage that Saturday morning nearly two years ago would be a double victory.
This would seem to indicate a straightforward path for Israel, even in light of international opposition. If after 22 months of attrition in Gaza, and after campaigns and operations elsewhere in the Middle East have shattered the regional axis that Hamas might have needed as a deterrent reserve, Israel can actually carry its campaign into Hamas’s lair in the Gaza Strip’s centre and bring about the comprehensive defeat of the militia that initiated this war at a bearable cost to itself, then it should.
That at least, would be the obvious strategic consideration. But, of course, there are more than strategic considerations at stake here. There is also a domestic political consideration. In fact, there are two. But they are so different from each other in their claims, their goals, their methods, their moral valence and their electoral impacts that it can be hard to make sense of them.
First is the dependence of Netanyahu on far-right coalition partners who are committed to Israel’s West Bank settler movement. For them, 7 October was both a tragedy and an opportunity. For 20 years, they have nursed the bitter pain of Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, when Israel withdrew all its armed forces and dismantled all 21 settlements inside the Gaza Strip. Settler leaders fantasise about restoring Jewish settlement to the Strip and, more importantly, definitively winning the argument against any future withdrawals in the West Bank.
In normal coalition politics, a prime minister has to take into account the priorities of his more extreme flank, but can always play them off the demands of potential partners from the centre. Netanyahu is no normal prime minister, however. His criminal indictments have meant that centrist parties have effectively boycotted him (except conditionally in two emergency situations), meaning that the far right, despite holding only about 10 per cent of the seats in Parliament, can exercise a veto on policy.
This isn’t just a rhetorical burden, though it is that too. Each time a middling MP from a far-right faction makes an inflammatory statement about the Gaza war or the push to resettle Israelis in the Strip, it becomes a propaganda victory for Israel’s enemies. But the problem is more than rhetorical. The government has refused in the last 22 months to formulate any plan for governing Gaza after the war, rendering even impressive military achievements hollow. It hasn’t refused to do so because it is lazy. It has refused to do so because any credible plan for post-war Gaza that doesn’t involve Hamas will necessarily prefigure a post-war plan for the West Bank as well, and this is something the radical settler movement cannot tolerate. With no alternative partners to replace the far right in his coalition, and no credible threat to them to find a replacement if they don’t grant him some space on the issue they care about most, Netanyahu can’t risk alienating them.
Then there is the issue of the hostages. Entrenching the settlement enterprise doesn’t inspire any overriding moral commitments outside the religious right, but securing the release of the hostages is a paramount moral imperative as far as nearly all Israelis are concerned. Israelis struggle to make sense of the comparative indifference of Western governments to the fate of hostages taken by ISIS in the previous decade. The ransom demands ISIS made were much less onerous than those that Hamas has sought to impose on Israel, but Western and allied governments only rarely gave in, and their hostages were gruesomely tortured in captivity and beheaded or immolated on camera.
But the sociological profile of the hostages couldn’t be further from the current coalition’s electoral base. The men and women and children abducted on 7 October and their families look nothing like this government’s supporters. People taken from their homes after watching their family members murdered were overwhelmingly kidnapped on a kibbutz, where voting preferences lean heavily to the left. Not many religious conservatives were to be found at an outdoor rave on a Saturday morning, not just because of the music or the drugs, but because an observant Jew wouldn’t be out on shabbat. And soldiers can have all sorts of political leanings, but Netanyahu’s cabinet comprises a large number of religious ministers who avoided the draft for religious reasons and seek to entrench in legislation draft exemptions for the growing ultra-Orthodox minority.
This is the opposite kind of political problem which Netanyahu’s dependence on the far-right settlers presents. He can’t openly place any military needs above the release of the hostages because he has no moral authority to do so. Not just because they do not come from his public or his political partners’ publics, but because he spent the months leading up to the massacre in 2023 pursuing a constitutional reform that alienated the liberal Israeli public from him to an extreme degree. And because the very failure to protect those who were taken hostage and the failure to recover them so far stand as the ultimate symbols of his overall failures on 7 October.
And just as his bargaining position with his coalition partners is weakened because they know he has nowhere else to go, so too is his bargaining position with Hamas over a hostage release weakened because they know that he can’t take Israel into an offensive that could see the hostages sacrificed without tearing Israeli society apart.
This then is the dilemma Israel faces as it stands outside the gates of Gaza preparing to move in for a final offensive. The dilemma could be attenuated somewhat if international actors applied pressure on Hamas and on the states which support and protect it, not least Turkey and Qatar, to release the hostages. But at present they seem more inclined to indulge inflamed publics at home and take actions which only harden Hamas’ position.
And it could be attenuated somewhat if Israel’s government made some minimal steps to achieve a consensus at home before taking any broad action, especially one that could put hostages and soldiers at risk. But the domestic political machinations of the past week, with the government seeking to oust an attorney general leading investigations into its own corruption and its parliamentary faction ousting a committee chair who had blocked legislation to protect ultra-Orthodox draft deferments, only achieved the opposite. In the meantime, the Israeli cabinet has approved the new offensive into Gaza. It will take some time before such an operation gets underway. Only a comprehensive deal that sees the release of all Israeli hostages can stop it before it starts.
[See also: Israel’s calculus on Syria]