How Israel Expects the War in Gaza to Go

Israeli officials are planning to wage war against Hamas for several months to come, without interruption, despite—or, in some ways, because of—widespread calls for a cease-fire.

At a recent sit-down with Israeli reporters, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant outlined what he saw as the “four phases” of the war. The second phase—the “expanded ground activity” that started last week, with Israeli troops and fighter jets closing in on Gaza City, destroying Hamas’ vast network of tunnels and killing its commanders—will go on, Gallant said, “for months.”

In the third phase, Israeli troops will hunt down “pockets of resistance” and prepare to transfer control of Gaza to some entity that is neither Hamas nor Israel, though there’s no clear plan as to whom this will, or should, be.

Gallant described the fourth phase as “the end of Israeli responsibility for life in Gaza”—though it’s not apparent who would assume this responsibility or how other terrorist groups or brands of militants would be prevented from rising in Hamas’ place.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for a cease-fire, saying that it would be synonymous with surrendering to Hamas, whose attackers killed 1,400 Israeli civilians and abducted more than 200 in their Oct. 7 raid. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, Netanyahu argued that Hamas poses a threat to not only Israel but all of civilization, noting that the United States hadn’t observed a cease-fire after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor or al-Qaida’s attack on the World Trade Center.

President Joe Biden, while continuing to support Israel’s right to defend itself, has—with growing urgency—called on Netanyahu to go out of his way to minimize civilian casualties, in accordance with international law. (Israeli strikes have reportedly killed 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza since Oct. 7.) State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Monday sternly warned Israel to “take measures to protect Palestinians from extremist settler violence” in the West Bank and to “hold accountable” those settlers and any Israeli soldiers who stand by or fail to intervene.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, these settlers have killed at least 115 Palestinians, injured more than 2,000, and forcibly expelled almost 1,000 from their homes—without evidence that any of the victims played any role in the attack. (The West Bank is governed by the more moderate Palestinian Authority, not by Hamas.) One danger of these rampages, quite apart from their murderous immorality, is that they are likely to radicalize many residents—and possibly top P.A. officials—thus making any sort of reconciliation between Israel and Palestine still more difficult.

The U.S. vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning all violence in the war. Not long after, the U.N. General Assembly failed to muster the necessary two-thirds majority to pass a resolution condemning Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack and, instead, called for a cease-fire. Together, the two votes illustrate how this conflict has polarized the world—mainly to Israel’s detriment, a dynamic that is likely to intensify as the war does.

Many Israelis are shocked that so much of the world seems to overlook Hamas’ terrorist attack and, in some cases, laud it as an act of resistance against Israeli occupiers. Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief for Bloomberg News and a veteran Middle East correspondent, recently reported that many Israelis have reacted to these protests by hunkering down. If much of the world can’t condemn Hamas for killing more Jews in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust, and swiftly blames Israel for an attack on a hospital in Gaza just on the basis of a Hamas report (even though it turned out to have almost certainly been struck by an errant rocket fired by Islamic Jihad), then—so their reasoning goes—it doesn’t matter what the world thinks. Israel’s very survival is at stake, so Israel must do what it must do.

And that means, according to Gallant’s four-phase war plan, ensuring that Hamas can no longer threaten Israel’s borders. (The son of Holocaust survivors, Gallant, like many Israelis, takes very seriously the phrase “Never again.”)

Throughout the three weeks since Hamas’ attack, Biden—long an ardent supporter of Israel—has embraced the Jewish state, but with strong caveats. On Oct. 18, when Biden flew to Israel (his second active war zone, after Ukraine), he sat in on a Cabinet meeting (another first) and asked tough questions: What’s your plan for the day after the war is over? Who is going to control and rebuild Gaza? How will you ensure that the enclave’s next leaders, whoever they are, won’t also pose a threat?

The Cabinet ministers had no answers. Biden told them they needed to think through postwar objectives before dashing into a full-scale war. He reminded them that the U.S. dashed into Afghanistan and Iraq with pumped-up rage after 9/11 but no long-term plan—with disastrous results. He also urged the officials to restore the corridors for humanitarian aid and find some way to get the hostages out.

Under this pressure, Israel has restored water and turned back on some of the electricity and internet connections that it had briefly turned off. (It said it turned them off in order to conceal the first movements of their tanks, troops, and combat engineers into Gaza.) Along with Egypt (which has blockaded Gaza’s southern border for as long as Israel has been doing so from the north), it has also opened a corridor to allow in trucks carrying food, medicine, and other supplies—though, so far, only a fraction of what is needed for Gaza’s 2 million people, half of whom have been displaced from their homes.

It may also be that Biden’s pressure slowed down Israeli plans for an all-out invasion—that it persuaded some of Netanyahu’s unity war Cabinet to think through their objectives before going wild.

Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan have also been in near-constant conversation with leaders in the Middle East—either directly or through much-practiced intermediaries—to keep the war from widening and, somehow, free the hostages. Iranian leaders have told the U.S. that they would rather not provoke a war with either Israel or the United States, but that if the bombing of Gaza continues, they might not be able to hold back a response. Hamas is still firing rockets into Israel. Hezbollah is doing so from the north in Lebanon. Israel has exchanged rocket fire with both. (Iran has long supported and supplied both Hamas and Hezbollah.)

Hezbollah’s attacks have done little damage so far. They seem designed to signal support for Hamas without getting very involved in the war. But escalation is a slippery thing. One side’s signal of support can be taken by the other side as an existential threat. Small wars have tumbled into big wars on the swells of such miscalculations.

Qatar, which has been funneling supplies to Hamas for years but which has also been deemed a “major non-NATO ally” by the United States, has been trying to negotiate the release of hostages, but with only mild success so far. Hamas has publicly offered an “all-for-all” trade—it will release all hostages if Israel releases all its Palestinian prisoners. There are about 10,000 such prisoners—half of them arrested since the Oct. 7 attack.

Numerically, the trade would not be unprecedented. In 2011 Israel exchanged 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for the release of one Israel Defense Forces soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been nabbed on the Gazan border by Hamas five years earlier. Some family members of today’s hostages have urged Netanyahu to take the deal. But Gallant has said the offer is “phony.” He has also said that, thanks to the IDF’s presence on the ground in Gaza, Israel has intelligence on the location of many hostages and that the IDF has proved that it can free them in armed raids. So far, though, just one of them—a female soldier named Ori Megidish—has been freed in that way. (Just four civilian hostages have been released through negotiation.)

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, an IDF spokesperson said Israeli troops were engaged in “fierce battles against Hamas terrorists deep in Gaza.” IDF spokespeople will likely be announcing this daily for many weeks to come.