The IDF’s invasion of Gaza unlikely to achieve war goals, return hostages

Without honing in on the hostages and on Hamas’s hidden fighters in Gaza City, the IDF controlling more land is unlikely to achieve strategic goals.

There is a built-in dilemma that seems to be hampering the current Gaza City invasion, just as it circumscribed the impact of prior invasions.

In March, Israel hoped that a new strategy of conquering territory in Gaza would cause stress to Hamas more than “only” having beaten its 24 battalions with the penetrate-and-withdraw strategy it had used during the war up to that point.

Also, Israel hoped more of Hamas’s top leaders who weren’t yet dead – not many are left – would want to live more than their predecessors, which is what happened with Hezbollah.

It has not worked out that way, and the same problems Israel has encountered since March are likely to plague the latest Gaza City invasion, which started last week.

It turned out that even once Israel started to take over much of Gaza’s territory – which emasculated Hamas in many ways to the extent it wanted to present itself as ruling the Strip – Hamas’s leaders knew that as long as Israel wouldn’t endanger the 20 living hostages, they retained their leverage.

What does Hamas face in the Gaza offensive?

In other words, losing territory did hurt their political control over Gazans to some extent, but it was not decisive. Only holding the hostages was decisive. So, Hamas could stick to its same demands regarding terms for ending the war regardless of its loss of territory.

Meanwhile, its few remaining leaders, and any new younger leaders who used to be middle management, still don’t seem to care about dying as long as “the cause” lives on and they keep the hostages.

If Israel hoped that the harrowing picture of blowing up a few enormous Gaza City buildings would bring Hamas to its senses and recognize that this is a fight it cannot win, weeks have gone by since that started with no change in Hamas’s position.

If Hamas was not ready to give up its hostages’ leverage to avoid losing three buildings or six buildings, why would it give up that leverage for dozens of buildings?

Hamas also is extremely stressed by the Gazan civilian population being forced out of Gaza City.

It worries about having to work harder to keep the population in line and being blamed for this latest loss of one of the few remaining parts of prewar Gaza that is still standing.

But Hamas has managed it over and over again.

At the end of the day, to keep control in the Strip, it does not need to keep the Gazan population happy; it just needs to keep enough guns to keep them too scared to rise up to topple it.

It helps that about 700,000 of the two million Gazans are very ideologically associated with Hamas, even if only a fraction of those participate in fighting.

There could be another stress point from the Gaza City invasion.

The IDF could finally locate the remaining 2,000-2,500 hard-core Hamas fighters and maybe some of the other larger group of less-committed Hamas terrorists and kill or arrest them.

But this is unlikely to happen, because the IDF is not checking Gazans as they flee Gaza City.

With about 500,000 Gazans having left over the past couple weeks, most of the Hamas fighters have likely already fled.

On a daily basis, the IDF provides detailed updates in Gaza City.

But if from late 2023 until summer 2024 such updates could talk about killing hundreds or dozens of Hamas terrorists in a day, for all of 2025, the IDF messages often talk about killing a few terrorists at a time or seizing weapons caches without even killing terrorists.

That is not really going to further decimate or defeat Hamas’s remaining forces, who decided more than a year ago to bide their time by hiding and only venturing out when it was safe – when the IDF forces are taking a break – to carry out guerrilla-style warfare.

For some time, it has seemed to be clear that the hostages could be freed with a deal, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejecting the return of 10 hostages for a 60-day pause in the war last month. Or the IDF could send in special forces to all known hostage locations simultaneously and hope for some lucky rescues, but be prepared for the worst.

Those seem to be the two ways to end the hostage standoff. If Israel is not willing to choose one of those two choices, Hamas will retain its hostages’ leverage.

In terms of defeating Hamas, Israel can either painstakingly vet and process the entire civilian population in an effort to sniff out the remaining Hamas terrorists, or it can end the war but keep enough soldiers regularly raiding Gaza for a period of years to try to eliminate Hamas’s military support over time.

Neither is guaranteed to work, and both are extremely difficult to implement.

In the absence of such strategies, Israel is unlikely to achieve its strategic objectives just by taking over Gaza City.