Pledging to defeat Hamas once and for all, the Israeli government Friday announced plans to launch a military assault on Gaza City, the strip’s largest population center. This expansion of Israel’s 22 month war has met with opposition from the Army’s top brass and from many citizens who fear it will endanger the lives of Israeli hostages.
After a ten hour gathering of his security cabinet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that Israel “will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones.”
The decision, ending a meeting that stretched almost until dawn, is likely to spark strong international and domestic backlash, amid widespread calls in both arenas for a speedy end to the war in Gaza.
Why We Wrote This
After 22 months of fighting in Gaza which has not defeated Hamas, the Israeli Security Cabinet voted Friday at dawn to widen the war. Hard right wing ministers overruled top military brass and Israeli public opinion.
The ministers also released what they called five principles to be met by war’s end: Hamas’s disarmament, the return of all hostages, Gaza’s demilitarization, ongoing Israeli security control of Gaza, and a post-war civilian government that excludes both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“It is a disaster that will lead to many more disasters,” Yair Lapid, head of the parliamentary opposition said. The most radical members of the cabinet had “dragged Netanyahu into a move that will take months, lead to the deaths of the hostages and the killing of many soldiers, and a diplomatic breakdown,” he added.
“This is exactly the result Hamas wanted: an occupation without a goal and without a plan for the day after,” he worried.
Where will Gaza City residents go?
In an apparent response to mounting public pressure, the new plan stopped short of the broader operation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had advocated, which would have seen Israel take full control of the entire Gaza Strip.
The embattled coastal enclave already lies largely in ruins, the majority of its people repeatedly displaced by the fighting, and in the midst of a hunger crisis and humanitarian disaster that could be exacerbated by expanded fighting.
Israel already controls around 75% of the Gaza Strip, but it has yet to launch a full ground operation in Gaza City, currently home to an estimated 800,000 people.
According to Israeli media reports the new plan would require an evacuation of this population to the south of the city, but with tent camps for the displaced already overcrowded it is unclear how practical the plan is.
Some analysts have suggested the looming operation is meant as warning to Hamas to capitulate in currently stalled ceasefire negotiations. Others point to longstanding statements by far-right members of the Cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Both leading members of the Jewish settler movement, they are key to Mr. Netanyahu’s parliamentary majority. They have been pressing for full occupation of the Gaza Strip since shortly after the war began after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Hamas has been greatly diminished as a fighting force in the 22 months of war, but the Israeli military believes that the radical Islamic group still has some 20,000 militants operational, most of them hiding within the population in Gaza City and other parts of Gaza not yet held by Israeli troops. Those are also the areas where the surviving Israeli hostages are believed to still be in captivity.
In the past, when Hamas captors have heard Israeli troops approaching they have executed hostages.
Israeli army worries
One of the military’s major concerns, says a senior Israeli army officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that both its enlisted and reserve soldiers are exhausted after fighting in what has been Israel’s longest active war to date, one that has become a war of attrition.
“We are not Russia, we are not the United States. We are a small country with a lack of resources, most importantly human resources,” he says. “With our soldiers exhausted we can make mistakes both in battle and in terms of decisions made by our commanders. This has an impact on morale and the desire to keep fighting or not and army leaders fear it could lead to a major rupture in the army.”
On the political front, the new move is “part of plan to completely occupy Gaza and lay the groundwork for Jewish settlement there,” suggests Dahlia Scheindlin, a political strategist and public opinion expert who lives in Tel Aviv.
74% of Israelis want the war to end immediately with a release of all hostages, a Channel 12 poll found last month.
Among those protesting in the streets Thursday night against broadening the war was Gili Roman, whose relative, Carmel Gat, was among six hostages executed by Hamas in an underground tunnel last year when they heard Israeli army forces approaching.
Like others protesting, he fears more fighting in the very areas where hostages are being held, such as Gaza City, could spell their death sentences.
“The Netanyahu government always says ‘Let’s just do this one more step and we will reach our goals’,” he says. “At some stage you have to be honest with your people and say it does not work.”
