The war in Gaza, six months later
Sunday marks six months since the October 7 attacks that launched Israel’s war against Hamas. More than 32,000 Palestinians have died, people are desperate for help and dozens of Israeli hostages are still being held in Gaza.
I spoke with Patrick Kingsley, the head of our office in Jerusalem, to understand the state of the war.
How close are we to an agreement or a meaningful pause in the fighting?
We are at an impasse.
Ceasefire negotiations have stalled for a number of reasons, but largely because Israel wants to limit the ways in which Hamas could regroup during a temporary truce, while Hamas wants the kind of truce that would allow it to reorganize itself on the spot.
While these talks falter, Gaza is at an impasse. Israel plans to storm Rafah, Hamas’s last major stronghold, but has delayed it while trying to garner international support for the operation.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Hamas is largely defeated. But there is a chaotic power vacuum because Israel has withdrawn from some areas without transferring power there to other Palestinian groups, amid disputes in Israel over who should run post-war Gaza.
The result is that the war has slowed down since the beginning of the year. But it continues to kill, and has left the region on the brink of what experts say is an imminent famine.
What do both sides want?
To achieve the goals Israel set for itself at the start of the war, Hamas needs to be completely driven from the strip.
But Hamas only needs to survive to claim some kind of success. Although he suffered massive losses on the battlefield, the fact that he remains standing means he could still claim some sort of Pyrrhic victory.
In order to free all hostages remaining in Gaza, Israel may have to agree to a permanent ceasefire. If Hamas were to release all the hostages without a long-term ceasefire, it would jeopardize its long-term presence in Gaza, a risk its leaders are unlikely to take.
Israel and Hamas have fought in the past. Why is this war more destructive than others?
For the Palestinians and their supporters, it is the result of Israel’s callous disregard for civilian life and its willingness to prioritize the elimination of Hamas over the potential collateral cost in civilian life and property.
For Israel and its supporters, the damage and death toll is the result of Hamas engaging civilian areas, in homes and under homes in their underground network of tunnels.
We have seen these completely divergent interpretations in previous Gaza wars. What makes this conflict different is that Israel, deeply scarred by the October 7 attack by Hamas, is now seeking to destroy Hamas instead of delaying it for a few months, as it has tried to do in previous conflicts.
This maximalist goal led to a longer and far more destructive war.
What do the next six months look like?
A few months ago I felt like we could see some kind of grand deal to end this war and maybe even see some progress in the broader efforts to end the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Now, it seems the most likely short-term outcome is just the same. Negotiations will continue to stutter. Israel will continue to stall either the invasion of Rafah or the transition of power in the rest of Gaza. Hamas will continue to hold out in Rafah and try to regroup elsewhere, which will lead to Israel re-entering areas it has already evacuated.
All of this can create a sort of slow dead end. It wouldn’t surprise me if we were still stuck in this strange, deadly attitude even on the one-year anniversary of the war.
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