With no exit strategy for Israel in Gaza, critics fear an open-ended stay

Retired Israeli general Giora Eiland believes Israel faces months of fighting in Gaza unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses the chance offered by the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to end the war.

Since Sinwar's death this month, Eiland has been one of a chorus of former senior army officers questioning the government's strategy in Gaza, where earlier this month troops went back into areas of the north that had already been cleared at least twice before.

For the past three weeks, Israeli troops have been operating around Jabalia, in northern Gaza, the third time they have returned to the town and its historic refugee camp since the beginning of the war in October 2023.

Instead of the Israeli military's preferred approach of quick decisive actions, many former security officials say the army risks being bogged down in an open-ended campaign requiring a permanent troop presence.

"The Israeli government is acting in total opposition to Israel's security concept," Yom-Tov Samia, former head of the military's Southern Command, told Kan public radio.

Part of the operation has involved evacuating thousands of people from the area in an effort to separate civilians from Hamas fighters. The military says it has moved around 45,000 civilians from the area around Jabalia and killed hundreds of fighters during the operation. But it has been heavily criticised for the large number of civilian casualties also reported, and faced widespread calls to get more aid supplies in to alleviate a humanitarian crisis in the area. Eiland, a former head of Israel's National Security Council, was the lead author of a much-discussed proposal dubbed "the generals' plan" that would see Israel rapidly clear northern Gaza of civilians before starving out surviving Hamas fighters by cutting off their water and food supplies.

The Israeli moves this month have aroused Palestinian accusations that the military has embraced Eiland's plan, which he envisaged as a short-term measure to take on Hamas in the north but which Palestinians see as aimed at clearing the area permanently to create a buffer zone for the military after the war.

The military has denied it is following any such plan and Eiland himself believes the strategy adopted is neither his plan, nor a classical occupation.

"I don't know exactly what is happening in Jabalia," Eiland told Reuters. "But I think that the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) is doing something which is in between the two alternatives, the ordinary military attack and my plan," he said.

NO PLAN TO STAY

From the outset of the war, Netanyahu declared Israel would get hostages home and dismantle Hamas as a military and governing force, and did not intend to stay in Gaza.

But his government never articulated a clear policy for the aftermath of the campaign, launched following the attack on Oct. 7, 2023 on southern Israeli communities by Hamas gunmen who killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

The Israeli onslaught has killed nearly 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and the enclave has been largely reduced to a wasteland that will require billions of dollars in international assistance to rebuild. For months there have been open disagreements between Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant that reflect a wider division between the governing coalition and the military, which has long favoured reaching a deal to end the fighting and bring the hostages home.

With no agreed strategy, Israel risks being stuck in Gaza for the foreseeable future, said Ofer Shelah, director of the Israel National Security Policy research program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

"The situation for Israel is very precarious right now. We are sliding towards a situation where Israel is considered the de facto ruler in Gaza," he said.

The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on suggestions that the military is getting bogged down in Gaza.

HIT AND RUN RAIDS

With Israel's military focus now directed against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, the number of army divisions engaged in Gaza is down to two, compared with five at the start of the war. According to estimates from Israeli security sources there are 10,000-15,000 troops in each IDF division.

The Israeli military estimates that the 25 Hamas battalions it assessed Hamas possessed at the start of the war have been destroyed long ago, and around half the force, or some 17,000-18,000 fighters have been killed. But bands of fighters remain to conduct hit and run raids on Israeli troops.

"We don't engage with tanks on the ground, we choose our targets," said one Hamas fighter, contacted through a chat app. "We are acting in a way that keeps us fighting for the longest time possible."

Although such tactics will not prevent Israel's military from moving around Gaza as it wants, they still have the potential to impose a significant cost on Israel. The commander of Israel's 401st Armoured Brigade was killed in Gaza this week when he got out of his tank to talk to other commanders at an observation point where militants had rigged up a booby trap bomb. He was one of the most senior officers killed in Gaza during the war. Three soldiers were killed on Friday.

"With the killing of Sinwar, there is no logic in remaining in Gaza," said a former top military official with direct experience of the enclave, who asked not to be named. "Methodical" pinpointed operations going forward should be carried out if Hamas regroups and resumes any war on Israel, but the risk of leaving troops permanently in Gaza was a major danger, the former official said, advocating securing the hostages and getting out.

Netanyahu's office said on Thursday that Israeli negotiators would fly to Qatar this weekend to join long-stalled talks on a ceasefire deal and the release of hostages. But what Hamas' position will be and who Israel will allow to run the enclave when the fighting stops remains unclear.

Netanyahu has denied any plans to stay on in Gaza or to allow Israeli settlers to return, as many Palestinians fear.

But the hardline pro-settler parties in his coalition and many in his own Likud party would like nothing more than to reverse the 2005 unilateral removal of Israeli settlers by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads one of the pro-settler parties, said on Thursday - at the close of the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah - that he hoped to celebrate the festival next year in the old Gaza settlement bloc of Gush Katif.