Israeli tanks at the border with the Gaza Strip, October 2023
Violeta Santos Moura / Reuters

Israel appears poised to launch a major ground incursion into Gaza. If and when an invasion begins, the mission of the Israel Defense Forces will be to destroy Hamas as a military force capable of attacks like the one it carried out on October 7 and to remove the group from power in Gaza. Those goals are ambitious—especially the second one. But they have a logic in the “world of war” in which Israel now finds itself: a place in which an intolerable threat exists and can be eliminated only through the use of force. The many Western observers and

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