Netanyahu and Israeli officials appear to have signed an unspoken stake in the Gaza war

TEL AVIV – Year after year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have signaled a paradigm shift in the approach of the nearly nine-month war in the Gaza Strip: an unphased and no longer intense “phase” of combat.

Israel has offered the untouched approaches as a sign of good fortune aimed at freeing up manpower and equipment for the country’s northern gateway, where fighting with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed defense force based in neighboring Lebanon, has been so heated. It seems that America is preparing to evacuate its voters.

For some, however, this change may also be seen as a tacit acknowledgment that it is no longer possible to simultaneously pursue Israel’s dual – and sometimes dueling – military goals in Gaza. Destroying Hamas and freeing Israeli hostages in Gaza cannot be done simultaneously, and Israel’s attempted crackdown has left both objectives unfulfilled.

A former senior Israeli military officer, requesting to be quoted anonymously, said, “Whoever defined these goals should have thought about its contradictory nature, so that he could be frank about ongoing Israeli military policy.” Can talk.”

“They didn’t understand that hostages were limiting their operations. And the hostages’ clock does not keep pace with the time needed to eliminate Hamas,” the former official said.

The notion that the two objectives are strategically unfavorable has persisted in Israeli public discourse for months. Protesters who challenge the release of the hostages at any cost have repeatedly come into conflict with Netanyahu’s right-wing allies, who want a deal that does not completely destroy the militant group.

Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, described the next phase as a reduction in the number of Israeli armed forces in Gaza and the withdrawal of two key Israeli Defense Forces-controlled corridors: Gaza’s border with Egypt. boundary and a central east-west hall to the north that divides the enclosure into two parts.

Eland said Israeli forces could also wait in a kind of buffer zone at the edges of the Strip, which has already been cleared of structures and bushes. From those positions, he said, they would be able to conduct more surgical operations aimed at specific Hamas operatives and installations – a longer battle that would require fewer squads at a distance.

“Our forces will remain in Gaza; We will continue the strike. This is something we will not stop,” Eiland said. “But in practice it means we have given up on the first goal, the complete collapse of the Hamas regime.”

Israel’s public messaging about the transition began on Sunday, when Netanyahu told Israeli television that the “intense phase” of the war in Gaza was ending, although he insisted it would not end until control May it not happen. This area was liberated from Hamas.

For example, Defense Minister Yoav Galant told Amos Hochstein, the White Space official appointed to de-escalate tensions along the Israel-Lebanon border, that Israel would soon transition to a more moderate “Phase C” of its conflict in Gaza.

Israeli military radio therefore reported that as soon as the army completely defeats Hamas’ Rafah Brigade, Hamas units fighting in the southernmost city of Gaza, where Israel has targeted its fighting for weeks, will launch separate raids. Will move in the direction of.

Negotiations became more complicated when IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that “Anyone who thinks we will eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

Hagari and other government officials briefly restated those comments, pointing out that they referred to Hamas’s ingrained ideology rather than its fighting characteristics.

However, Hamas leaders balked at the response.

Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official based in neighboring Lebanon, told this to Al Jazeera on Wednesday. They amounted to a “clear admission” that could “give confidence to the international community that the Hamas movement will remain in the political landscape, and will be a permanent part of the social fabric and fabric of resistance.”

But the untouched “phase” or “phases” within the battle may have been part of the original Israeli war plans, and changes to the untouched section had already been introduced.

IDF spokesman Hagari announced a similar change in the northern part of the Gaza Strip in January. However Israeli airstrikes and fighting through the coastal area continue.

In a possible preview of the next “phase”, the IDF said in a statement on Friday that it had engaged in airstrikes and “targeted activity” within the Shujaiya grouping in Gaza City, north of the Strip. Palestinian state officials said at least five civilians were killed.

In practice, the war of attrition may display a strong resemblance to a war with more general reach: operations in the Israeli-occupied West Indies, a Palestinian enclave off Gaza that Israel seized from its Arab neighbors in 1967. In a six-speed battle against.

There, the IDF maintains a constant and consistent military presence, carrying out isolated and increasingly lethal raids on specific targets. Even before Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks began an unprecedented phase of fighting in Gaza, the United Nations said Israeli forces will kill more Palestinians in Gaza in 2023 than at any previous pace since data began. killed. The number has since risen even higher: since October 7, Israelis have killed more than 500 Palestinians in the West Indies.

However, the insurgency in the I’m Busy Waste Locker has remained largely the same since the second intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s – a period that took thousands of lives.

More than twenty years later, there is no longer any discernible “transition” between other “phases” in that style of warfare, whether for better or for worse. It stubbornly persists and does not use visualization to see.