WASHINGTON — Israel has achieved all it could militarily in the Gaza Strip, senior U.S. officials say, saying the continued bombardment only increases the risks to civilians while reducing the likelihood of further weakening Hamas.
As the Biden administration scrambles to get ceasefire negotiations back on track, more and more national security officials within the administration are saying that while the Israeli military has dealt Hamas a significant setback, it will never be able to completely eliminate the group.
In many ways, Israel’s military operation has done far more damage to Hamas than US officials predicted when the war began in October.
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Israeli forces can now move freely through Gaza, the officials said, and Hamas is bloodied and damaged. Israel has destroyed or seized crucial supply routes from Egypt to Gaza. About 14,000 fighters in Gaza have been killed or captured, the Israeli military said last month. (U.S. intelligence agencies use different, more conservative methodologies to estimate Hamas casualties, though the exact number remains classified.)
The Israeli military also claimed to have eliminated half of the leadership of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, including top leaders Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa.
But one of Israel’s biggest remaining goals — the return of the approximately 115 living and dead hostages still held in Gaza after they were captured in the October 7 Hamas attacks — cannot be achieved militarily, according to current and former US and Israeli officials.
Over the past 10 months, “Israel has succeeded in disrupting Hamas, killing a number of its leaders and largely reducing the threat to Israel that existed prior to October 7,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the former head of the U.S. Central Command. Hamas is now “a weakened” organization, he added. But he said the hostages’ release could only be secured through negotiations.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said in a telephone interview that “the IDF and its commanders are committed to achieving the goals of the war to dismantle Hamas and bring our hostages home, and will continue to operate with determination to achieve these goals.”
The latest US assessment comes as a range of administration officials are fanning out across the region to try to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and potentially prevent a retaliatory attack by Iran and its allies in response to recent Israeli killings of senior Iranian-backed proxy leaders, US officials said.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, is expected in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has departed for Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, has landed in Lebanon. One message the officials are expected to convey is that there is little Israel can do against Hamas.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as the two prepared for possible retaliatory strikes by Iran or Hezbollah in Israel.
Tensions within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government erupted into public view again this week after news outlets reported that Gallant had questioned the prime minister’s goal of “total victory” over Hamas during a closed-door meeting.
Austin and other officials in the Biden administration share Gallant’s view that a ceasefire that returns the hostages is in Israel’s best interests.
Israel’s most recent military operations have been seen by American analysts as a kind of Whac-a-Mole strategy. While Israel is gathering intelligence on a possible regrouping of Hamas fighters, the Israeli army has closed in on them.
But U.S. officials are skeptical that this approach will yield decisive results. To avoid targeting its fighters, Hamas has called on them to hide in its vast network of tunnels beneath Gaza or among civilians. From the beginning of the war, Hamas’s basic strategy has been survival, and that has not changed, U.S. officials said.
Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Netanyahu’s national security adviser, rejected the idea that Israel had nothing to gain from violence in Gaza.
“Israel’s achievements in Gaza are impressive, but they are far from what needs to be achieved,” said Amidror, who is now a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “If Israel evacuates its troops now, Hamas will be strong again within a year.”
He stressed that stopping the war now would be a “disaster” for Israel.
Two to three more months of intense fighting in central and southern Gaza are needed, he added. After that phase, Israel could transition to conducting intelligence-driven raids and attacks for about a year to eliminate remaining Hamas fighters and weapons infrastructure before another party takes over Gaza’s administration, he said.
While Israel has tried to damage the tunnels, it has failed to destroy them, U.S. officials said. Some of the larger tunnel complexes, which Hamas has used as command posts, have been rendered unusable. But the network has proven far larger than Israel anticipated, and it remains an effective way for Hamas to hide its leaders and move fighters.
And even as the Israeli army seized territory and killed Hamas fighters from north to south, it repeatedly had to retreat as Hamas fighters regrouped. For example, Israel weakened Hamas’s grip on the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza, but had to return to the area in May after the group regrouped in the power vacuum.
Current and former Pentagon officials complain that Israel has yet to demonstrate that it can secure all the areas it has captured in Gaza, especially after its troops withdraw. And even when Israel uses small-diameter, 250-pound bombs to destroy pockets of resistance, as U.S. officials have urged, the military still ends up killing civilians, as happened last weekend when a school complex housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza was hit by an airstrike.
“Hamas is a terrorist organization — for them, just surviving is victory,” said Dana Stroul, a former top Pentagon Middle East policy official who is now a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They will continue to regroup and emerge after the IDF says they have vacated an area with no follow-up plans for security and governance in Gaza.”
Despite all the damage caused by Israeli bombs to the enclave and the number of Palestinian fighters killed, Hamas still retains some military power.
“Hamas is largely depleted but not wiped out, and the Israelis may never be able to completely destroy Hamas,” said Ralph Goff, a former senior CIA official who served in the Middle East.
But U.S. officials believe Israel has achieved a meaningful military victory. Hamas is no longer capable of planning or carrying out an attack on the scale of Oct. 7, and its ability to carry out smaller terrorist attacks on Israel is in doubt, they say.
Hamas has been so damaged by the war that its officials have told international negotiators it is prepared to hand over civilian control of Gaza to an independent group after a cease-fire is in place. How long Hamas is willing to give up some of its power depends on what happens after a cease-fire and what concessions Israel is willing to make, U.S. officials said.
Hamas suffered a major blow in May, U.S. officials said, when the Israeli military entered Rafah in southern Gaza. Officials in Washington had warned against the operation because they feared the high humanitarian costs. But Israel used the Rafah occupation to cut off tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, a key weapons route for Hamas.
Israel’s seizure, also in May, of a strip of land along Gaza’s southern border served another purpose of the invasion, though it also heralded further isolation of the Palestinians.
The strip, called the Philadelphia Corridor by Israel and Salah al-Din by Egypt, is about 300 feet wide and runs for about 8 miles from Israel’s border to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is to the northeast, while Egypt is to the southwest. Egyptian border guards guard the land under an agreement reached with Israel in 2005 when Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza.
Israel has accused Hamas of using tunnels under the Strip to smuggle weapons and personnel. But the tunnels have also been used to bring food and other goods into Gaza.
Military officials say the capture of the strip has further isolated the area, which was already suffering from widespread famine.
Although Israel has freed a number of hostages above ground through extensive operations, many of the hostages are hidden in the tunnel network.
Biden administration officials say diplomacy is the only way Israel can possibly achieve its biggest goal: getting its hostages back.
To get Hamas to agree to release the hostages, U.S. officials say it is crucial to have incentives for the group to stay on the sidelines after a cease-fire is reached. The biggest incentive, U.S. officials said, is a meaningful path toward an independent Palestinian state.
If a ceasefire comes, Hamas will struggle to regain its strength. It will have to rearm with a reduced flow of weapons from Iran, analysts and officials say, and it will have to begin what could be a difficult process of recruiting fighters from a war-weary Palestinian population.
The biggest question for both Israel and the Palestinians is who or what comes after Hamas, US and other Western officials say.
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