WASHINGTON – Israel has achieved all it can militarily in the Gaza Strip, according to senior US officials, who say continued bombardment only increases the risks to civilians, while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished.
As the Biden administration sought to get ceasefire talks back on track, a growing number of national security officials across government said the Israeli military had severely hampered Hamas but would never be able to eliminate the group entirely.
In many respects, Israel’s military operation has done far more damage against Hamas than US officials had predicted when the war began in October.
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Israeli forces can now move freely throughout Gaza, officials said, and Hamas is bloodied and battered. Israel has destroyed or captured important supply routes from Egypt to Gaza. About 14,000 fighters in Gaza have been killed or captured, Israel’s military said last month. (U.S. intelligence agencies use different, more conservative methods to estimate Hamas casualties, though the exact number remains secret.)
The Israeli military also claimed to have eliminated half the leadership of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, including top leaders Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa.
But one of Israel’s biggest remaining goals — the return of about 115 hostages, alive and dead, in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas — cannot be achieved militarily, according to current and former U.S. and Israeli officials.
Over the past 10 months, “Israel has been able to disrupt Hamas, kill a number of its leaders and largely reduce the threat to Israel that existed before October 7,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, former director of US Central. Command. Hamas is now a “diminished” organization, he added. But he said the release of the hostages could only be secured through negotiations.
IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said in a telephone interview that “the IDF and its commanders are committed to achieving the war’s objectives of destroying Hamas and bringing home our hostages, and will continue to operate with determination to achieve them.”
The latest U.S. assessment comes as a host of administration officials fan around the region in an effort to nail down a Gaza cease-fire deal and possibly prevent a retaliatory attack by Iran and its allies in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of high-level Iranians. supported proxy leaders, US officials said.
CIA director William Burns will arrive in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s Middle East coordinator, is headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to convey is that Israel has little more to gain against Hamas.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday as they prepare for possible retaliatory strikes by Iran or Hezbollah in Israel.
Tensions within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government flared again this week after news media reported Gallant questioned the prime minister’s goal of a “total victory” over Hamas in a closed-door meeting.
Austin and other Biden administration officials agree with Gallant that a ceasefire that returns the hostages is in Israel’s best interest.
Israel’s latest military operations have been seen by American analysts as a Whac-a-Mole strategy. As Israel develops intelligence about a possible regrouping of Hamas fighters, the Israeli military has followed suit.
But US officials are skeptical that the approach will yield decisive results. Hamas has urged them to hide in its vast network of tunnels under Gaza or among civilians to prevent its fighters from entering. Since the beginning of the war, Hamas’ basic strategy has been survival and that has not changed, US officials said.
Retired Major General Yaakov Amidror, who served as Netanyahu’s national security adviser, rejected the notion that Israel had nothing to gain in Gaza by force.
“Israel’s achievements in Gaza are impressive, but they fall far short of what should be achieved,” said Amidror, now a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “If Israel evacuates its forces now, within a year, Hamas will be strong again.”
He stressed that ending the war now would be a “disaster” for Israel.
He added that another two to three months of intense fighting are needed in central and southern Gaza. After that step, Israel could move to conduct intelligence-led raids and strikes for about a year to eliminate remaining Hamas fighters and weapons infrastructure before allowing another side to take control of Gaza, he said.
Although Israel has tried to damage the tunnels, it has not succeeded in destroying them, US officials said. Some of the larger tunnel complexes used by Hamas as command posts have been rendered unusable. But the network has turned out to be much larger than Israel expected, and remains an effective way for Hamas to hide its leaders and move around fighters.
And while the Israeli military has captured areas and killed Hamas fighters from north to south of the region, it has repeatedly been forced back as Hamas fighters regrouped. For example, Israel weakened Hamas’s hold on the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza, but had to return to the area in May after the group rebuilt in a power vacuum.
Current and former Pentagon officials complain that Israel has yet to show it can secure all the Gaza it has captured, especially since its forces withdrew. And even when Israel uses 250-pound diameter compact bombs to destroy pockets of resistance, as U.S. officials have urged it to do, its military still kills civilians, as happened last weekend when a school building sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza was destroyed. hit in an airstrike.
“Hamas is a terrorist organization — for them, mere survival is victory,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official for Middle East policy who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They continue to re-form and re-emerge after the IDF announced it had cleared the area with no further plans for Gaza’s security and governance.”
Despite all the damage Israeli bombs have done to the enclave and all the dead Palestinian fighters, Hamas has some military power.
“Hamas has been largely depleted but not wiped out, and the Israelis may never achieve the complete destruction of Hamas,” said Ralph Goff, a former senior CIA official who served in the Middle East.
But US officials believe Israel has won a meaningful military victory. Hamas is no longer capable of planning or carrying out an attack on the scale of October 7, and its ability to launch smaller terror attacks against Israel is questionable, they say.
Hamas has suffered so much damage in the war that its officials have told international negotiators they are ready to hand over civilian control of Gaza to an independent group after a ceasefire. How long Hamas is willing to give up its power depends on what happens after the cease-fire and what concessions Israel is willing to make, U.S. officials said.
According to US officials, Hamas was dealt a significant blow in May when the Israeli army attacked Rafah in southern Gaza. Officials in Washington had warned against the operation because they feared high humanitarian costs. But Israel used the occupation of Rafah to cut off the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, an important weapons supply route for Hamas.
Israel’s seizure, also in May, of a strip of land along Gaza’s southern border fulfilled another objective of the offensive, although it means further isolation of the Palestinians.
The strip, called the Philadelphi Corridor by Israel and Salah al-Din by Egypt, is about 300 feet wide and runs about 8 kilometers from Israel’s border to the Mediterranean Sea. To the northeast is Gaza, while Egypt lies to the southwest. Egyptian border guards have been policing the country under a 2005 agreement with Israel, when Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza at that time.
Israel accused Hamas of using the tunnels under the strip to smuggle weapons and personnel. However, tunnels have also been used to bring food and other goods into Gaza.
Military officials say the seizure of the area has further isolated an area already facing a widespread hunger crisis.
Although Israel has rescued some hostages held on the ground in elaborate operations, many of the hostages are hidden in a network of tunnels.
Biden administration officials say diplomacy is the only way Israel can achieve what is possibly its biggest goal — getting its hostages back.
For Hamas to agree to release the hostages, U.S. officials say it is crucial to encourage the group to stay on the sidelines after a cease-fire agreement is reached. The biggest incentive, according to US officials, is a meaningful path to an independent Palestinian state.
If a ceasefire comes, Hamas will struggle to regain its strength. Analysts and officials say it must arm itself with a reduced arms flow from Iran and begin what could be a difficult process of recruiting fighters from the war-weary Palestinian population.
The biggest unknown for both Israel and the Palestinians is who or what will come after Hamas, according to U.S. and other Western officials.
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