As Hamas returns to the north, Israel's Gaza endgame is nowhere in sight

[Celerity]

American and Israeli officials are offering increasingly blunt assessments about Hamas’s resilience and Netanyahu’s failure to plan for postwar Gaza.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/15/israel-hamas-gaza-rafah-jabalya/

https://archive.ph/26kIN

Three rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from the Israeli side of the Gaza border at the southern city of Sderot on Tuesday. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

JERUSALEM — It was last December when the Israeli military declared victory in the Jabalya refugee camp, saying it had broken Hamas’s grip on its traditional stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip. “Jabalya is not the Jabalya it used to be,” Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, commander of Division 162, said at the time, adding that “hundreds of terrorists” had been killed and 500 suspects arrested. Five months later, Israeli forces are back in Jabalya. Ground troops are pushing into the densely packed camp, backed by artillery and airstrikes — one in a string of recent “re-clearing” operations launched by the Israel Defense Forces against Hamas, whose fighters have rapidly regrouped in areas vacated by the IDF.

Israel’s fast-moving offensive in Gaza has given way to a grinding battle of attrition, highlighting how far it remains from its chief military aim — the complete dismantling of Hamas. As an adaptable militant organization that has easy access to recruits, an expansive tunnel network and is deeply embedded in the fabric of Gaza, Hamas has shown it can weather a protracted and devastating war. The resumption of heavy fighting in the north comes as the IDF presses ahead with its heavily criticized campaign in the southern city of Rafah — long framed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a final battle against Hamas’s last intact battalions. Now, American officials and some of the prime minister’s fellow cabinet members are offering increasingly blunt assessments about the resilience of the militant group and Netanyahu’s failure to plan for postwar Gaza.

In striking remarks Wednesday night, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called on Netanyahu to make a public commitment that Israel will not end up governing Gaza after the war, amid mounting fears in the IDF that its mission is creeping toward reoccupation of the territory. “Hamas might regain its strength as long as it maintains civilian control,” Gallant said. Failure to create an “alternative governing authority,” he said, “is equivalent to choosing between the two worst alternatives: Hamas rule or Israeli control of Gaza.”

Palestinians search for bodies and survivors among the rubble of the Jabalya refugee camp on Nov. 1, 2023, one day after an Israeli airstrike hit the area. (Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan sounded a similar note on Monday: “Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas,” he told reporters. “If Israel’s efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza, and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back.” Netanyahu said last week that Israel has killed 14,000 Hamas militants; the IDF put its estimate at 13,000 last month. The numbers are not possible to independently verify — and no evidence has been offered to support them — but even the high-end figure would amount to less than half of Hamas’s estimated fighting force before the war. Thousands of other militants belong to smaller groups that vie with Hamas for local influence.

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[Lonestarblue]

1. Israel is playing whack a mole with Hamas at the expense of thousands of civilian casualties.