What’s the End Game, Bibi?

So where does it go from here?  Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions – it allowed Hamas to think Israel was on an irreversible path to exiting Gaza altogether and, with its three separate phases, it also allowed Israel to keep its options open.  The failure to specify what future role, if any, Hamas could play both enabled the deal to be signed and doomed it to failure.

Now fighting has resumed.  There are loud threats of all hell breaking loose and gradual annexation of Gazan territory.  Eyal Zamir, the Israeli army’s aggressive new chief of staff, bears an uncanny resemblance to the legendary Roman general Scipio Africanus, who thrashed Carthage in the Second Punic War and later defeated Hannibal.  A wave of airstrikes has killed a number of senior Hamas operatives few have heard of.

IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and Roman General Scipio Africanus.

Hamas, predictably, remains unimpressed.  It had already lost its leadership to combat and assassination without collapsing or even slightly softening its terms for releasing the remaining hostages.   So the question now is the same as it’s been since the ceasefire was signed – what’s the end game?

Hamas is determined to oust Israel from Gaza altogether and permanently so it can re-open its supply lines and refurbish its infrastructure.  Military sources believe most weapons smuggling into Gaza occurred above-ground, in traffic through the Rafah crossing, rather than through tunnels.  Judge for yourself whether Egypt was complicit or merely indifferent; either way, it is as eager as Hamas to restore the status quo ante, which would enable Hamas to re-arm and complicit Egyptians to re-line their pockets.

For its part, Israel refuses to retreat from its demand for the complete destruction of Hamas’s military and political capabilities.  Logically, then, there are only two realistic trajectories.  In one, Zamir is unleashed to go full Scipio on Hamas until they are thoroughly destroyed and disarmed, and Israel retains a continued IDF deployment across Gaza to keep it so.  In the other, Israel ends the war on terms its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, can live with politically.

The first option ensures that the living hostages will survive through rescue or not at all.  There is no option that disinfects Gaza from Hamas and preserves the hostages’ safety.  Israel has already accepted great risks in its release of hundreds of convicted murderers during the current ceasefire.  The price it will pay just in trading dangerous prisoners for the remaining hostages will be still higher.  And the overall price – that is, the final tally of risks to Israel – will be enormous because it will mean the survival of Hamas.

Netanyahu knows that the second option means early elections and the end of his political career.  Voters who prioritize Hamas’s defeat will be angry at its survival and voters who have demanded the hostages’ return will be angry that Netanyahu waited so long.  His political opponents, with an assist from Qatar, will argue that any arrangement acceptable to Hamas today would have been acceptable many months ago, when more hostages were alive and fewer Israeli soldiers had been killed in action.  Netanyahu’s tenure, indelibly stamped with the catastrophic failures of October 7, will be further tainted by broken promises of “total victory.”

So for the moment, at least, he seems to have chosen a middle path, which is to say, “none of the above.”  He has authorized enough fighting to bring Otzma Yehudit back into the government and thereby ensure timely passage of the 2025 budget, staving off elections for now.  There is sufficient empty talk of pressuring Hamas into a hostage release for Netanyahu to proclaim his fealty to their return.  Air strikes and limited ground maneuvers will minimize danger to the hostages and the risk of significant IDF casualties.

Netanyahu certainly knows that escalating military action will have no effect on Hamas’s demands – i.e., its determination to survive.  Consequently, the objectives of his current non-strategy are political rather than strategic.  Hamas is less of an army than an infection:  it cannot be conventionally defeated and, unless eradicated, will resurge as a mortal threat.  Its ability to control Gaza’s population and build an underground military-industrial complex has allowed Hamas to shrug off periodic air strikes and limited ground incursions, as it is doing now.

Hamas agreed to the recent ceasefire because its sequence of phases, if carried out, would culminate in the war’s end on Hamas’s terms.  Hamas isn’t too upset at the premature end, however, because it has profited handsomely from aid thus far delivered, it has recruited successfully, it’s had weeks to train and deploy new conscripts, and it can boast (and make use) of some of those released murderers.  True, it has fewer hostages, but it knows that in 2014 even a single one was enough to win the release of over 1000 prisoners, including the architects of October 7.  Hamas will not again agree to release more hostages in return for ambiguous promises.

Israel’s ongoing bluster about Hamas’s imminent annihilation and Hamas’s unfazed repetition of its maximalist demands suggests that things can continue like this for some time – at least, that is, for as long as Netanyahu considers it politically expedient.  His government holds together as he demands concessions from Hamas that won’t arrive and gratifies the hawks with military operations that produce visible but strategically meaningless results.  How long this can go on, and to what ultimate end, we can only guess.