Israelis divided over plans for military takeover of Gaza

After 22 months of fighting, those goals elude them still. Israel controls about 75% of the Gaza strip and has wiped out Hamas’s leadership, but the group remains active and is holding around 50 hostages, though only around 20 are believed to be alive.

Faced with mounting opposition, the Israeli government is doubling down on a strategy that doesn’t seem to be working. The prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the military to prepare to take over Gaza city in a potential escalation of what is already the country’s longest war. The fighting has devastated the enclave and killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, a third of them children.

“We have to ask what will change after almost two years of fighting [in which] Israel has deployed military power as never before,” says Nimrod Sheffer, a former head of planning for the Israeli military who is now a member of the left-wing Democrats party.

Last week Netanyahu floated the idea of taking over the whole of Gaza, prompting criticism from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Eyal Zamir, who said it would endanger the hostages and overstretch the military. After a 10-hour meeting that began on Thursday and lasted through the night, Israel’s security cabinet approved a more limited plan to take over Gaza City. It has yet to be endorsed by the wider cabinet.

The aims of the plan, as outlined in a statement from the prime minister’s office, include disarming Hamas, demilitarising Gaza and imposing Israeli security control over the enclave, while granting power to a local authority run neither by Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians sheltering in the western portion of a shattered city would have until 7 October to move south.

From the fifth-floor apartment in Gaza City where Sora Sufian lives with her husband and two young daughters, the prospect is bleak. “We’ve already experienced displacement, lived in tents, and gone through hell,” she says over the phone.

This time, her husband insists they will stay. “He tells me it’s better to die in our home than to go back to a life of suffering and humiliation.”

A recent UN analysis of satellite imagery showed that 78% of structures in the Gaza strip have been damaged or destroyed. Hamas, which governed the territory for nearly two decades, has also been battered.

The IDF estimates the group had somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 fighters on the eve of 7 October 2023 when it burst out of the strip, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.

“They were the size and effectiveness of a lot of militaries in Europe, with heavy firepower, tens of thousands of rockets and missiles,” says an Israeli military official.

Israel’s military claims to have killed between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters and destroyed large parts of Hamas’s tunnel network and weapons. Rocket attacks from the Gaza strip have dwindled, with only two projectiles landing in Israel last month.

The former US secretary of state Antony Blinken said earlier this year that Hamas had recruited almost as many militants as Israel had killed, but the experience and knowhow the group has lost are irreplaceable. Israel has killed all the organisation’s top-tier leadership, including the commanders of its five brigades in Gaza.

The group’s authority in Gaza has broken down. Once fearful of criticising Hamas, the enclave’s beleaguered population now openly curse it. Security has deteriorated, with gangs and criminals filling the vacuum, and it is no longer functioning as a government.

Still, the group continues to wage a stubborn insurgency against Israeli troops, killing 18 in July.

Hamas now resembles the clandestine guerrilla movement it was in the 1990s. Autonomous cells of three to six militants carry out pin-prick attacks with small arms, improvised explosive devices and booby traps made with unexploded Israeli ordnance.

Slick videos released by Hamas’s armed wing show men burying homemade barrel bombs in the ground and detonating them as Israeli armoured vehicles approach. In one clip, a fighter steals up on an Israeli armoured troop carrier to drop an explosive device through its hatch.

“Wars don’t usually end when one side has zero combatants,” says the Israeli military official, acknowledging that Hamas still has thousands of fighters. “It’s about getting to breaking point.”

Where that point may be is unclear. Hamas has said it won’t disarm until an independent Palestinian state is established. Even if Israel could eliminate the group, Netanyahu has ruled out handing over control to the Palestinian Authority. There is no ready alternative.

The plan to escalate fighting and besiege Gaza City is bound to fail, says Michael Milshtein, a former adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Israeli military body that administers Gaza. “But during this failure it will cost a lot of Israeli casualties, a lot of Palestinians will be killed and the status of Israel in the international community will be even worse.”

Images of skeletal children have provoked global outrage in recent weeks. The world authority on hunger has warned of famine across Gaza after Israel imposed a full blockade on the territory in early March.

The UN convened an emergency security council meeting in response to Netanyahu’s plan, and the body’s human rights chief Volker Türk said it would violate international law. Prime minister Keir Starmer said it was wrong and urged Netanyahu to reconsider. Germany, which is Israel’s second largest supplier of arms, suspended exports of military equipment until further notice.

Among the most vocal opponents of the plan in Israel are relatives of the remaining hostages, who fear it will put their loved ones’ lives in greater peril. A poll last month found that nearly three-quarters of Israelis support a deal to stop the fighting in order to bring the hostages home. And there is mounting dissent within the military itself. To take control of Gaza, the IDF would need to call up dozens of divisions of reservists, already exhausted from spending much of the last two years on the battlefield. In a letter to US president Donald Trump, about 600 retired Israeli security officials urged him to pressure Netanyahu to end the war. "It is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel,” they wrote.

Netanyahu's move to escalate signals that he has decided to prioritise domestic political concerns over any potential international criticism, says former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy. Prolonging hostilities could further enable Netanyahu to evade corruption charges brought by Israel's attorney general, after his recent move to fire her.

“This has little to do with battlefield successes,” Levy says. “It is about killing and displacing the Palestinian population, preparing the ground for the physical removal of Palestinians from Palestine. In that respect he is making advances.”

There is still room to avert escalation if the IDF can persuade the government to change course and Hamas returns to the table, says Zohar Palti, a former senior Mossad officer now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Still, he says, the war is unlikely to end soon. After 9/11 the Americans and coalition were in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years. “We are only 22 months in.”

Photograph by Jehad Alshrafi/AP, Ohad Zwigenberg/AP and Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty