In mid-November, a month after the Hamas massacre of October 7, the IDF was fighting with intensity in Gaza. Divisions of troops were deployed around Gaza City and the terrorist group was facing a major onslaught of Israeli armor and infantry as well as hundreds of airstrikes during the night and day.
The ground battles in November, which had begun with an offensive on October 27, achieved some of their goals. One of the goals was to return hostages. A deal was agreed to and hostages were released in late November 2023.
At the time, the Israeli public was told that the military pressure of the ground offensive had worked to secure the release of the hostages. Now, all that had to be done was to apply more pressure, and more deals would take place. But there were no more deals for months. Hamas, backed and hosted by Western ally Qatar, continued to stick to its demands and even increase them.
Meanwhile, Israel seemed to give Hamas a lot of what it wanted without any kind of need for its adversary to give it anything in return. The IDF withdrew from northern Gaza and then it withdrew from Khan Yunis in April.
Today the IDF is fighting in Rafah and Shejaiya, but Hamas still controls most of Gaza. Hamas control of the central camps, in Nuseirat, Bureij, Maghazi and Deir al-Balah has never been contested. There remain key areas the IDF has not operated in throughout Gaza.
Change in military doctrine
What happened to the military pressure doctrine? On July 6, CNN reported that Hamas had slightly changed its position in regards to a new deal with Israel. “The change in Hamas’s position was first reported by Reuters, and comes amid intensified efforts towards reaching an agreement. The group has long demanded Israel agree to a permanent ceasefire before signing any deal, terms Israel sees as unacceptable,” CNN noted.
“The apparent willingness to compromise raises the possibility a deal could be reached. Hamas would instead accept that talks on reaching a permanent ceasefire would take place throughout the first phase of any deal, which would last six weeks, the official told CNN,” the report said.
IT APPEARS that today, the big discussions around a ceasefire deal relate to whether the IDF will withdraw from the Netzarim corridor or from Rafah, and whether this will be “permanent.” This is a big change from back in November when Israel’s defense minister had said “this will be a brief pause. When it ends, the fighting will continue forcefully, and will create pressure that will allow the return of more hostages.”
It’s clear that the pressure was removed from Hamas sometime in February or March of 2024. This is when the IDF not only shifted to a lower-intensity conflict under pressure from the West, but also when Israel chose to reduce the fighting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Since then, Hamas has felt that it almost achieved a kind of de facto ceasefire in much of Gaza. The IDF went into Rafah in May and has returned to areas in northern Gaza, such as Jabaliya and Shejaiaya, and carried out various raids in other places, but Hamas can sit content thinking these operations will be short and temporary.
This means that the terrorist group is not facing increasing pressure. Hamas likely hears from its foreign backers and hosts abroad that if it just holds out a little longer, some kind of deal will take place.
Israel’s messaging on the war has also shifted, or has changed depending on the politician or official who is speaking. Back in November, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was quoted as saying he expected two more months of fighting. At the end of May, almost half a year later, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said, “We are now in the fifth month of 2024, which means we expect another seven months of fighting to deepen our achievements and achieve our goal of destroying the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
HAMAS CAN read these reports as well. They know that a timetable seems to exist. All they have to do is hold out for a bit longer and they can expect Israel to leave. The Jewish state also seems to move its goal posts, from talk of “Hamas is ISIS” and “there won’t be Hamas” to talk of just reducing its capabilities.
Hamas knows that its capabilities have been reduced before – back in the Second Intifada, back in 2006 and 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. Back in 2021, the IDF and officials had claimed that Hamas had been dealt a heavy blow in Israeli strikes against its underground “metro.”
At the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted, “I said we would strike Hamas and other terror groups with significant blows, and we are doing so. In the last day we have attacked underground targets. Hamas thought it could hide there, but it cannot.”
However, Hamas was still hiding in tunnels after that war and it has been hiding in them for the last nine months of the current war. There is lack of clarity on why the military pressure that Israel believed would bring hostage releases was relaxed in March and April.
Hamas has had the breathing space it needed to continue to believe it can win the war by surviving. It works with its foreign backers, such as Doha, Ankara, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing and others – and those countries likely tell it to keep going.
It’s not clear if current hostage talks will go anywhere. In the past six months there have been similar, endless rounds of talks. The hostages continue to languish in Gaza, and some have been killed. For most countries, it would be unconscionable to leave its soldiers and civilians, including young women hostages, to be held just a mile or two from the border by a relatively weakened terrorist group. But for Israel, this has become the norm.
Why it has become the norm is not clear. There was a time when Israel rescued hostages, such as at Entebbe, but those days are gone. Today, when foreign terrorist groups such as Hamas kidnap Israeli soldiers, the first thing that happens is to wait. Israel waited for three weeks from October 7 to 27 before launching a ground offensive. What was the point of waiting? It allowed Hamas to regroup and move hostages around, including to civilian homes.
THEN IN November when the ground offensive was successful, Israel moved to a belief that military pressure would bring hostage releases. However, that motto quickly changed because the pressure was reduced systematically beginning in January and February, until in March and April there was almost a de facto ceasefire. Rather than trading pressure for hostages, Israel gave Hamas breathing space, perhaps due to pressure from the US, Qatar or others.
It’s unclear why the policy changed from “military pressure brings deals” to a belief that a kind of de facto ceasefire, letting Hamas run Gaza, and giving it most of what it wanted would succeed. Clearly, this policy has not succeeded.
Even if there is a deal and some hostages return, the tragedy of having left them in Gaza for nine months leaves a black mark on Israel. They should never have been left one day in Gaza. The fact that some of them were killed while in Gaza should haunt us.
The decision to move from “there won’t be Hamas” and “military pressure brings hostages home” to some kind of de facto ceasefire and managed conflict – and leaving Hamas in power while only reducing its capabilities – is a strange strategy that likely will not end well.
Furthermore, there is an inherent contradiction in the theory that the current tactic of IDF raids in Gaza will be able to be modeled on a similar tactic in the northern West Bank. If there is a ceasefire deal, it is unlikely the raids will continue, meaning Gaza will not end up like that restive region. In fact, the more likely scenario is that the northern West Bank may end up like Gaza in the coming years, rather than the other way around. This will be the case unless tactics and strategy shift in Gaza.