100 days of fighting in Gaza with no end in sight

Nathan Brown: Well, that Hamas attacked Israel, that it targeted civilians, that was not unprecedented. That they did so on this scale in this coordinated way, and that they took this large number of hostages and that they killed so many people, that is absolutely unprecedented. There’s been nothing in Israeli history like this.

This is something absolutely sustained, involving not just a wholesale invasion of the Gaza Strip but a relocation of the vast majority of its population and the destruction of houses of all kinds of buildings. And really bringing the Gaza Strip close to uninhabitable. Israel went in with an absolutely massive deployment of force and extremely ambitious war aims that, even if they were to succeed, would take months to complete.

At this point, Israel has achieved none of its goals. It hasn’t freed any hostages. It hasn’t destroyed Hamas. And in fact, there may be signs that Hamas is still, in a sense, governing those areas of the Gaza Strip where there are still Palestinians who are living. It is certainly the case that they’ve killed lots of Hamas fighters, and it’s certainly the case that they rendered Gaza close to ungovernable by anybody, but in terms of securing Israel and Israeli lives, it looks to most people like Israel has not really come close to achieving any of its goals. And it’s not even clear that they will be able to do so.

The limited indications we have is that Israel is preparing to fully press its military campaign, which it began in the north, in the south of the Strip. And the policy pronouncements from the Israeli leadership are about an ongoing Israeli security role, even patrolling the border between Gaza and Egypt, which is not Israeli territory. So, there basically seems to be a way in which the Israeli leadership wants to keep good relations with the United States and won’t confront it publicly on most issues, but really is making its own decisions its own way.

It’s certainly possible. After Oct. 7, an awful lot of the attention was on whether Hezbollah or whether Iran would join in. And there was a great American effort to deter them, to prevent any escalation at Lebanon or with Iran. In a sense, that seems to have worked, but the focus right now is just as much on Israel. There are Israeli officials who basically say, “we learned a lesson on Oct. 7, and that is you can’t deter the other side, you’ve got to go to them directly.” And so, there are voices in Israel that are talking about widening the conflict. And, of course, what’s happened with the Houthis is another source of regionalization, which, when they target shipping, in a sense, almost challenges an American response. They’re really talking about disrupting world trade, bringing other parties like Saudi Arabia, which has been trying to tamp down the conflict in Yemen, back into the conflict. So, that’s another danger point, which people really weren’t alert to at the beginning.

No, that’s very, very clear. This fighting is going to go on for a while. And that’s primarily an Israeli decision that says they’ve got these ambitious war aims that are not close to being achieved. So, the war has to go on. And Israel isn’t close to being exhausted. The only pressure in Israel is actually from the families of the hostages, who are saying, “As long as you press the military campaign this way, you’re not going to get our hostages out.” And in fact, Israel has actually even killed some of the hostages in attempts to rescue them. So, that’s really the only source of pressure on Israel right now. Most people, I think, expect the fighting to continue. The Israelis will basically say this is a matter of months, not of hours or days or even weeks. And so the situation that we’ve seen so far is likely to continue well into this current year.