2024-01-07 05:44:00
(CNN) — Three months ago, addressing citizens shaken by a horrific day of Hamas attacks, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a promise.
“The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will immediately use all its strength to destroy Hamas’ capabilities,” Netanyahu said. “We will destroy them.”
Now, the IDF is moving to a new stage of its war once morest Hamas in Gaza, and there are signs that its objectives are also changing.
“The record is not very favorable to military campaigns that seek to eradicate a deeply rooted military political movement,” Bilal Y. Saab, research associate on the Middle East and North Africa at Chatham House, told CNN.
“The IDF leadership understands very well that the most they can do is seriously degrade Hamas’s military capabilities,” Saab declared.
Israel has had some successes in that regard: its forces claim to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, including some high-ranking members, and have dismantled some parts of the group’s vast network of tunnels under the enclave.
But challenges remain and the end game is far from in sight. Few countries at war set deadlines. Israeli authorities have warned of a protracted war that might extend into 2024 and beyond.
The conflict will unfold before an international community increasingly horrified by the extraordinary humanitarian crisis and spiraling civilian deaths in Gaza.
And as international pressure mounts, so might domestic unease toward Netanyahu, an embattled prime minister eager to point to tangible victories.
“There is a race once morest time,” Saab said, outlining the key issues facing Israel’s leadership. “At what price is this tactical success going to come, and how much time do the Israelis have to achieve that tactical success without suffering more significant international outrage?”
A “new approach to combat”
The destruction of Hamas, the objective that Netanyahu proclaimed on October 7, was an idealistic, elusive and, according to many analysts, impossible goal.
“This type of mission cannot be completed: we have seen it fail many times over the years,” Saab said.
Hamas’s influence extends far beyond Gaza, meaning that a complete defeat of the group is, at the very least, very ambitious for Israel, if it can be achieved.
But it remains unclear whether IDF leaders place that overarching goal among their priorities. Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, the IDF’s intelligence chief, omitted the destruction of Hamas when listing military targets in a speech on Thursday, Israeli media reported.
And later on Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant unveiled plans for the next phase of the war in Gaza, emphasizing a new combat approach in the north and targeting suspected Hamas leaders. that are present in the southern territory of the enclave.
In the third phase, IDF operations in northern Gaza will encompass “raids, destruction of terrorist tunnels, air and ground activities and special operations,” according to Gallant.
“This phase will be less intense, but it will take longer,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute and former member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) for the Kadima party, told CNN.
If the most realistic goal is a severe reduction in Hamas’ combat capability, many analysts say tangible progress has been made in the past three months.
“The definition of success will not be to catch or kill all Hamas operatives, but to ensure that Hamas can no longer effectively govern Gaza,” Plesner said. “Hamas is organized like an army, with command and control centers, regiments and brigades. This command structure is being seriously challenged and dismantled.”
Speaking to reporters in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu said last week that the Israeli military is “fighting with strength and new systems above and below the ground” and claimed that they have killed 8,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza, according to Army Radio.
CNN cannot verify this figure. Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry says nearly 23,000 people have died in the territory since the war began. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but both the Gaza ministry and its counterpart in the occupied West Bank suggest that approximately 70% of those killed or injured are women and children.
Israel believed Hamas had regarding 30,000 fighters in Gaza before the war began on October 7, the Israel Defense Forces told CNN in December. The fighters were divided into five brigades, 24 battalions and approximately 140 companies, the IDF told CNN, each with capabilities including anti-tank missiles, snipers and engineers, and rocket and mortar batteries.
Hunting Hamas leaders
Israel has also claimed some success in attacking Hamas tunnel shafts, a complex notoriously difficult for IDF troops to infiltrate. The IDF this week released a video it said showed the dismantling of a route of tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, which it accused Hamas of excavating.
Last month, it released other videos that it said showed a network of tunnels connecting to residences and offices of senior Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif.
But Israel has so far failed to achieve its goal of finding and killing Hamas’s most senior leaders in Gaza.
“This is where intelligence is king,” Saab said. Gallant and other officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of their efforts to eliminate senior Hamas leaders. The defense minister promised in late December that Sinwar would “soon meet the barrels of our guns.”
A longtime figure in the Palestinian Islamist group, Sinwar was responsible for building Hamas’s military wing before forging important new ties with regional Arab powers as the group’s civilian and political leader.
“Organizations like these replace commanders quite easily. I don’t think anyone is irreplaceable in Hamas,” Saab said. “But if you remove the symbolic heads of the organization, who knows if that might have a trickle-down effect, especially with people who have military responsibilities.”
The new phase of Israel’s war seems unlikely to bring relief to Palestinians trapped in Gaza, where the humanitarian crisis has reached extraordinary levels.
But Netanyahu is more likely to bow to domestic pressure, which has been mounting particularly over the ongoing captivity of more than 100 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7.
Israel believes 25 hostages have been killed and their bodies remain in Gaza, Netanyahu’s office told CNN on Friday. 107 hostages from last year’s Hamas attack are believed to be still alive.
The return of those hostages remains an objective in the new phase of the war, and failure to achieve it would intensify political pressure on a decisive leader whose popularity among Israelis has only plummeted since October 7.
“From day one there was a clear disparity: there is support for the goals of the war and the IDF, (but) trust in the Israeli government is at historic lows,” Plesner said. “There is a huge chasm.”
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