Gaza dominated global headlines

For most of the past year, the war in Gaza dominated global headlines, while the growing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah along the country’s northern border was just below the surface, threatening to boil over.

Today, on the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, the situation is roughly reversed: the Israeli government and the international community are focused on the spiraling violence in Lebanon and escalation with Iran, while Gaza has fallen off the front pages.

It’s not that the combat in Gaza has ended. Just last week, nearly 100 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations in Gaza. But Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troop levels in Gaza are down as much as 90 percent from the high point of the operation, as Israel has shifted resources toward the fighting in the north.

Yet even as the military operation Israel calls “Swords of Iron” has receded, there are no signs that it is ending any time soon. Instead, the conflict seems to be transforming into the sort of “forever war” that both Israel and the US have become all too acquainted with in recent decades.

Instead of the “day after” that has been talked about since the invasion began nearly a year ago, Gaza is trapped in a perpetual present of conflict, chaos, and civilian death. There are no signs that will change — and that is exceedingly grim news for Gaza’s civilian population.

“With the world’s attention focused on Lebanon, I think the concern for Palestinians is that they’ve now been left to their own devices,” said Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst for the International Crisis Group.

A ceasefire in Gaza remains elusive. Multiple rounds of US-led talks aimed at securing a pause in the fighting and a return of hostages have come to naught, with Netanyahu repeatedly insisting on maintaining an Israeli military presence in Gaza after the war. Meanwhile, after months of public rage following his government’s failures on October 7, Netanyahu’s popularity has rebounded after the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. That means there’s far less internal pressure to bring an end to a war that has sparked domestic protests, brought international opprobrium on Israel, and battered its economy.

That’s not the only thing working against an end to the conflict. With the US election looming, President Joe Biden has effectively become a lame duck with diminishing leverage (that he’s willing to use, at least) over America’s Israeli ally. After months of criticism of Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza, US officials — off the record, at least — have taken a notably more positive tone about its operations targeting Hezbollah and Iran.

Hamas Military Leaders Dead

As for Hamas, while it can still launch periodic attacks — including one that killed four IDF troops in September — and may still be holding as many as 101 Israeli hostages, it has lost more than half its military leaders since the war began, according to Israeli estimates.

Even in its weakened state, though, it is unlikely to agree to any deal that leaves Israeli troops in Gaza. More to the point, after witnessing the fate of Nasrallah, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is likely even less inclined to agree to any sort of deal with an adversary almost certain to kill him at the first opportunity, no matter what he agrees to. (That’s assuming he’s still alive — there has been growing speculation in recent weeks about Sinwar’s whereabouts.)

Add it all up and the situation in Gaza has become something hard to classify but no less grim – not a formal occupation or annexation, but one where the Israeli military effectively controls Gaza without governing it, reserving the right to strike when it desires while doing little to support the territory’s rebuilding. It is one where the possibility of a postwar Gaza seems more remote than ever.

As Shira Efron, analyst with the Israel Policy Forum and outside adviser to the Israeli government, put it, all these developments are leading some Israelis to contemplate the question: “What if this war never ends?”

Israel’s military occupied Gaza from 1967, following the Six Day War, until 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the withdrawal of security forces, along with the forced removal of about 8,500 Israeli settlers. Though the move was widely supported at the time — the occupation viewed by many as a costly quagmire — the withdrawal came to be seen as a mistake by many Israelis, particularly after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007.

What’s happening now in Gaza is different. Though some in Israel’s influential settler movement, including ultranationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have called for rebuilding settlements in Gaza, this is not widely supported in Israel and the government does not appear to be actively contemplating it. And while some like Gen. David Petraeus have urged Israel to pursue an Iraq-style “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency approach, which would combine defeating militants with supporting the civilian population, digging wells and building schools in Gaza does not seem to be on the IDF’s agenda.

“The Israeli plan right now is to move to a sort of a counterterrorism footing in Gaza,” said RAND Corporation military analyst Raphael Cohen. “It’s not going to be withdrawal, but it’s not going to be full-on occupation either.”

This could involve control of the Philadelphi corridor along the border with Egypt and the so-called Netzarim corridor dividing Gaza’s north and south border, along with periodic raids into the center to target the remnants of Hamas, which will likely remain an insurgent force for the indefinite future.

“The real concern is that Gaza gets stuck in a kind of middle state,” says Cohen, meaning the low-intensity fighting continues indefinitely, but with no opportunity for Gaza to rebuild or establish stable governance.

Not everyone has such a light footprint in mind: Retired IDF General Giora Eiland has been on a media blitz in recent weeks promoting what’s been called the “Generals’ Plan” for Gaza. This would involve giving the entire civilian population of northern Gaza (about 250,000 people) a week to evacuate, then declaring it a “closed military zone” with no supplies allowed in; essentially, seeking to starve out any Hamas fighters that remain. Netanyahu is reportedly considering the plan, though it is almost certain to be widely condemned as a war crime.

Israel has set the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities as a core goal of its operation. Given that Hamas can likely continue to operate as an underground insurgency for quite some time, this is a recipe for a very long war.

As for the other core goal, the return of the Hamas-held hostages, Efron notes that Netanyahu “mentions in every speech that he will do everything possible to bring the hostages back home.” But without a negotiated ceasefire, this is becoming increasingly unlikely. “I think we’re all concerned that there is currently no hostage deal on the table,” Efron said.

In any event, Netanyahu has reportedly told legislators that he believes as many as half the remaining hostages may actually be already dead.

Regardless of its military plans, Israel does not appear to have any desire to provide the security or social services for Gaza’s civilian population that its offensive has utterly devastated.

The early weeks of the war saw a flurry of articles and policy papers proposing ideas for the post-war governance of the strip. The US and Western governments coalesced around a few.

The United States pushed ideas involving a “revamped and revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA) — the body that currently governs the West Bank — taking over control of Gaza. Netanyahu refused to consider such plans, saying they would turn Gaza from “Hamastan” to “Fatahstan” (Fatah is the party that dominates the PA). In any case, given how unpopular the PA is in the areas it already controls in the West Bank, it’s not clear how much legitimacy it would have had with Gaza’s population had the party been installed at the point of an Israeli gun.

The Biden administration has also pushed Arab states to take a leading role in Gaza’s postwar reconstruction, but those countries have ruled out committing to that kind of project without a clear pathway toward a Palestinian state.

In any event, Efron says “this has never been a plan that Israel subscribed to.” Netanyahu has called vaguely for a “civilian government,” but Efron says Netanyahu’s government’s vision relies on finding “unicorn Palestinians” qualified to govern the territory but associated with neither Hamas nor Fatah nor any other Palestinian faction with a real constituency. Israel’s government remains opposed to any plan that involves a pathway toward a sovereign Palestinian state.

“There’s no turn-key government that’s going to come in and guarantee [Israel’s] security,” said Aaron David Miller, a Mideast peace negotiator for several US administrations with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

For the moment, even with its senior leadership decimated and its physical infrastructure destroyed, the Hamas-controlled government is still able to provide at least some degree of security and social services in parts of Gaza. But its capacities are limited, and are unlikely to improve while Israel remains bent on the group’s destruction.

Going forward, Miller says, “you’re going to end up with clans and criminal gangs” filling the power vacuum. “Hamas and the Israelis will clearly also be in the mix, and of course the NGOs will be trying between the raindrops to figure out a way to deliver humanitarian assistance.”

That assistance is still badly needed. UN officials describe Gaza’s humanitarian crisis as one of the worst in modern history, with food and health systems in a state of “complete collapse.” More than a million people face extreme malnutrition. The UN estimates that about two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Some estimates have put the cost of reconstruction in Gaza at over $80 billion, which is more than four times the combined GDP of Gaza and the West Bank before the war.

Crisis Group’s Mustafa sees the current trajectory of the conflict as reducing Gaza to a “tent city in ruins” and feels it’s “unlikely that the international community are going to do much to pressure Israel into following through with any other sort of alternative vision for a day after.”

When he visited the country in the days following the October 7 attacks, President Biden expressed sympathy to the Israeli people and backed their right to respond with military force. But he also counseled them to avoid the mistakes the United States made after the 9/11 attacks, when a desire to eliminate security threats led to two decades of costly wars, mission creep, and human rights abuses that damaged the country’s international standing.

In truth, Israel shouldn’t need such a warning — it knows a thing or two about quagmires. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Israel occupied parts of southern Lebanon. It was a mission that began as an effort to wipe out Palestinian militants in the country and then expanded to maintain a “security zone” alongside local Christian militias to prevent attacks on northern Israel.

By 2000, when Brig. Gen. Benny Gantz — later to become an Israeli opposition leader and erstwhile member of Netanyahu’s government — became the last Israeli soldier to withdraw from the country, the conflict had become known as “Israel’s Vietnam,” with hundreds of IDF soldiers and thousands of Lebanese civilians killed.

The future “occupation” of Gaza may end up looking more like Lebanon during this era than the current occupation and settlement of the West Bank or the situation in Gaza prior to 2005.

Time and again, governments caught flat-footed by terrorist attacks have responded with open-ended military campaigns with the aim of completely stamping out the threat, only to learn too late that the costs are higher than they can imagine — for themselves and for the population under their control. It’s likely to be years before the costs of this one are fully tallied.