Israel should not resume the war in Gaza – opinion

Israel has a new IDF chief of staff. From his first day on the job, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir has been threatening to resume a full-scale war against Hamas in Gaza. He is clear about his goal—to wipe out Hamas once and for all.

That’s a mistake.

In parallel, Israel has rejected the Egyptian plan for Gaza after the war, because it leaves Hamas more or less intact.

That’s a mistake, too.

The situation today is as follows: Phase one of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is over. Several dozen Israeli hostages have been released, along with the bodies of others murdered in captivity—including the red-headed Bibas children and their mother.

That horror is behind us, but the way forward is unclear. There has been no agreement about phase two of the ceasefire, including an Israeli withdrawal from strategic points in Gaza, and it’s not at all certain that there will be one. Zamir clearly doesn’t want another phase, and apparently, neither does his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu invented the concept of wiping all traces of Hamas off the map. It sounded right just after the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas terrorists stormed across the border and attacked Israeli villages and a music festival, killing 1,200 and hauling 240 others off into captivity in Gaza tunnels.

Those atrocities would have justified practically any Israeli response. What Israel did was attack Gaza from the air and the ground, blowing up tunnels, battling and killing thousands of terrorists, and destroying buildings and neighborhoods, while doing its best to minimize casualties among Gaza civilians.

That last point is complicated, because Hamas bases its terrorists among civilians, fires rockets from schools and mosques, and digs tunnels under hospitals and neighborhoods. Despite its efforts, Israel has taken an international beating over civilian deaths in Gaza, though the actual numbers show that Israel is doing a much better job of protecting civilians than, say, American forces did in Iraq not so many years ago.

The intensive counterattack against Hamas was justified—but now it has played itself out. It’s time for Israel’s leaders, political and military, to accept the basics:

• Hamas was formed as a terrorist organization. Its victories are counted in Israeli civilian deaths and damage to Israel’s cities and towns.
• Partly because of misguided Israeli encouragement, Hamas transformed its structure from terrorist cells into military formations over the past decade.
• Israel has destroyed most of those military formations.
• Few hostages were freed through Israeli military action. Agreements have led to exchanges of captured terrorists for more than 150 hostages. There are still 59 hostages in Hamas captivity.

Now that Hamas is back to operating as a terrorist group, further large-scale Israeli military operations won’t eliminate Hamas or free more hostages. Instead, Israel will find that over the six weeks of the first phase of the ceasefire, Hamas has booby-trapped what’s left of Gaza, ready for the next Israeli incursion. Of course, Israeli soldiers could kill some more Hamas terrorists, but the cost in soldiers’ lives would be prohibitive, and Hamas, as a terrorist entity, would emerge intact.

Here’s the issue: “Victory” does not mean the same thing for armies and terrorists. A victory for an army means defeating the enemy. A victory for terrorists can be a single attack on a civilian target. Oct. 7 was the ultimate terrorist victory, on the scale of al-Qaida’s 9/11 attack on the United States in 2001.

The bottom line: terrorist groups cannot be eliminated by military means alone.

‘Israel cannot solve the Hamas alone’

In the case of the Middle East, that means two things: Israel cannot solve the Hamas problem by itself, and moderate Arab nations that have more important issues to deal with, like the Iran issue, can and must contribute to the Gaza solution.

Shocked by the fantastical “Palestinian-free American Gaza Riviera” proposal floated by US President Donald Trump, Arab nations sprang into action, starting with Egypt—the nation with the most to lose from the Trump plan, which envisions moving Palestinians out of Gaza to, wait for it, Egypt.

In general terms, Egypt’s proposal, adopted by the Arab League and endorsed by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, envisions a government of non-Hamas Palestinian technocrats supervised by Arab nations. Hamas would remain in place with its weapons, but they would be under the eyes of the Arab forces. A multibillion-dollar reconstruction project would restore housing in Gaza.

Obviously, there are flaws here. Can Arab nations be trusted to keep Hamas under control? Is it even possible that Hamas, today one of the main employers in Gaza (especially when you add in the UN, which is basically the same thing), can be kept on the sidelines? Can Gaza be rebuilt the way it was, with its neighborhoods a stone’s throw (literally) from Israeli villages across the border, without endangering Israel?

So, understandably, Israel rejected the Egyptian plan, charging that it “fails to address the realities of the situation” after the Hamas pogrom.

That’s a mistake.

Israel’s blanket rejection removes it from the process of developing the Egyptian-Arab League plan into something that might actually work. If there is to be a solution to the Hamas threat, it has to come with the cooperation of the Arab world, and Israel must take part in that.

It’s possible that the new IDF chief of staff is blowing off steam or trying to improve Israel’s bargaining position with his threats of the annihilation of Hamas. Possible, but not likely, since “total victory” has been the mantra of the Netanyahu government since the day after the Oct. 7 pogrom.

That’s a mistake.

Mark Lavie has been covering the Middle East for major news outlets since 1972. His second book, Why Are We Still Afraid?, which follows his five-decade career and comes to a surprising conclusion, is available on Amazon.