Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t developed a strategy to prevent the return of Hamas following large-scale military operations in Gaza, according to senior U.S. and Israeli officials.
“Any military operation … has got to be connected to a strategic end game that also answers the question ‘What comes next?’ And that’s something that we’re really bearing in on with the Israeli government,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Monday afternoon. “We want an outcome in which the page gets turned from Hamas’s terroristic reign over Gaza and a better future comes for the Palestinian people and for the security of the state of Israel.”
Sullivan’s appearance in the press briefing room put a spotlight on a dispute that is roiling Israel’s high military counsels in conjunction with a related controversy around President Joe Biden’s opposition to a major Israel Defense Forces operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Netanyahu maintains that an assault there is “a precondition for victory” in the war, even as the reappearance of Hamas formations in northern Gaza feeds skepticism of his theory of the case.
“Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas,” Sullivan said. “If Israel’s military efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back, and Israel will remain under threat. We are seeing this happen in Gaza City.”
Netanyahu rebuffed such criticisms on Sunday, arguing in an interview that Israel is in the first phase of a three-stage process that will see the IDF “destroy” the Hamas battalions in Rafah, then conduct “mop-up” operations targeting the remnants of the fighting forces, and finally coordinate for the administration of Gaza by Palestinian civilians unconnected to Hamas.
“That’s the realistic plan right now,” Netanyahu said on the Call Me Back podcast with Dan Senor. “People say, ‘What are you going to do on the day after? Where’s your plan?’ Well, the first thing is make sure it’s the day after.”
Those general ideas have not only failed to satisfy Biden, but they have drawn sharp and public pushback from senior Israeli officials. Israeli generals are perceived as “openly briefing against Netanyahu,” as one prominent Israeli journalist put it, following a detailed report on a rebuke delivered to the prime minister by Israel’s top general.
“We are now operating once again in Jabaliya. As long as there’s no diplomatic process to develop a governing body in the Strip that isn’t Hamas, we’ll have to launch campaigns again and again in other places to dismantle Hamas’s infrastructure,” IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi told Netanyahu in a recent meeting, according to an Israeli broadcaster. “It will be a Sisyphean task.”
Israeli officials ordered the evacuation of Jabaliya on Saturday. “You are in a dangerous war zone, Hamas is trying to rebuild its strength, and therefore, the army will act forcefully against terrorist organizations in the area,” leaflets dropped to the residents warned. “Anyone who remains there will be in danger.”
Netanyahu, without mentioning Halevi, sidestepped the suggestion that such operations run contrary to his stated theory of victory.
“The important thing to understand is that once you destroy these battalions, you haven’t eliminated all the Hamas fighters,” he told Senor. “They’re still there, but they have a hard time having an organized structure. … Now, sometimes they congregate, as they did in the Shifa hospital. They all congregated because they don’t have a place. … We killed several hundred terrorists, captured another 500. And we did this with a far smaller force and with much less intense fighting because we’ve already destroyed those battalions.”
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Sullivan maintained that Netanyahu should “consider the tactical battlefield situation in Gaza in light of the bigger strategic picture” in Gaza, including a more detailed consideration of the political process that could unfold after the conflict.
“And [we] feel that there needs to be more attention on that piece of it, lest we end up in a circumstance where Israel conducts a military operation, kills a bunch of Hamas guys, also creates some harm to innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, and then terrorists come back,” he said. “As we have seen them come back in Gaza City and Khan Younis and other places.”
