Will the Cease-Fire Change Israel’s Strategy?

Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, now a month old, has been on hold this week for a humanitarian pause that was extended another day on Thursday. But the pause won’t likely be permanent, and Israeli goals—which include the destruction of Hamas in Gaza by chasing it into the south—haven’t changed. And that is problematic, because most of Gaza’s population that has fled the besieged urban north is now in tents in the south, and in cities like Khan Yunis and Rafah, with Hamas fighters mixed in. 

Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip has come at the cost of 77 Israeli troops (on top of the roughly 1,200 Israelis killed during the initial Hamas onslaught) and an estimated 15,000 Palestinians. Top officials within the Biden administration, who have faced in-house criticism about Israel’s heavy-handed tactics, including special forces raids and airstrikes in packed urban terrain, have told Israeli officials, all the way up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the southward advance should not be carried out in the same way that the fighting in the north has taken place. 

“They got an earful in Congress,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and a retired CIA paramilitary officer. “This is not something the White House would want to see continued.” But, he said, Israel “would weather any international outrage to be more comfortable with their security situation.”

Even with fighting mostly at a standstill this week, Israeli troops are still raring to go. “This is a pause and it’s not a second phase that will come after,” said Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, the Israel Defense Forces’ international spokesperson. “It’s a continuous phase of what our goals are and have been clear from the beginning.”

By some estimates, 50 percent of the buildings in northern Gaza were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Israel insists it has mitigated the damage by using more accurate munitions, trying to conduct below-ground explosions to burn up the so-called Hamas Metro, the group’s sprawling network of tunnels, and warning Gaza residents about coming strikes with text messages, phone calls, leaflets, door knocks, and “roof knocks,” using non-explosive rounds on the tops of buildings to warn residents that a strike is coming. 

But some investigations suggest that Israeli strikes, enabled in part by artificial intelligence, have aggressively targeted even non-military targets. The tactics Israel has used so far, including a deliberate effort to dismantle Hamas’s underground infrastructure, could create further problems even after the fighting stops. 

“If tunnel infrastructure is destroyed, that’s going to cause damage to the surface,” said Jonathan Lord, a senior fellow and the director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. “By and large, hundreds of miles of tunnel system continue to exist. It seems unlikely to me that the Israelis will leave Gaza before they have destroyed the tunnel system.”

“If there are places that are now potentially inhabitable—and there’s an asterisk on that—they may not be once Israel destroys the tunnel system,” Lord said. 

The difficulty of the fighting hasn’t stopped a Western push on Israel to be more careful in striking the densely packed strip. A senior U.S. administration official told reporters on Tuesday that Israel’s southern Gaza campaign should avoid significant further displacement of Palestinian civilians and casualties. Parts of southern Gaza have been designated as safe areas from military strikes, but Israeli warplanes firing long-range weapons—sometimes up to several miles away from their intended targets—have still hit them.

Israel says that its strikes are intended to dismantle Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which is often embedded among civilian buildings. Israeli officials claimed that they found 400 shafts into Hamas tunnels, many of which were booby-trapped. 

“How does one deal with a hospital that is a terror infrastructure? How do you deal with an underground infrastructure that is underneath the hospital? How do you deal with that?” Shefler said. “You sadly need to strike them and to dismantle them.”

Though the humanitarian pause in fighting has enabled more than 700 aid trucks to pass over the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and into Gaza each day for the past week, the bulk of the 1.8 million people in Gaza estimated to be displaced by the month of fighting are now sheltering in the south. And even beyond the resumption of the military campaign, there remain questions about what comes next for Gaza, which has been governed by Hamas since 2006. 

“You can’t kill 30,000 Hamas militants and then move on to the next stage,” Lord said. “Whether this next generation of fighters are card-carrying Hamas members, they will simply pick up the gun and subscribe to the general resistance of Israelis. The fighting will not cease.”

In Washington, small gaggles of protesters with shrouded effigies of slain Palestinian children, representing the 15,000-plus dead since Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, have become a daily staple outside of the White House and the Israeli Embassy. And Israeli officials talking to U.S. lawmakers behind the scenes about the southern campaign weren’t met with smiles this week. 

But Western officials still have questions about what a more comfortable security picture for the Israelis would look like after the war in Gaza is finished—and at what cost. Israeli officials have consulted their American counterparts extensively but haven’t said how they will determine—or if they even have a measuring stick—for when Hamas will be defeated. 

“There are a lot of different parameters that are considered when we reach that goal,” Shefler said. “I cannot go into more specifics.”

Correction, Dec. 1, 2023: The previous version of this article contained two transcription errors.