U.S. officials: Israel’s military has reached the end of the line in Gaza

WASHINGTON – Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in the Gaza Strip, according to senior U.S. officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished.

With the Biden administration racing to get cease-fire negotiations back on track, a growing number of national security officials across the government said that the Israeli military had severely set back Hamas but would never be able to completely eliminate the group.

In many respects, Israel’s military operation has done far more damage against Hamas than U.S. officials had predicted when the war began in October.

Israeli forces can now move freely throughout Gaza, the officials said, and Hamas is bloodied and damaged. Israel has destroyed or seized crucial supply routes from Egypt into Gaza.

About 14,000 combatants 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 precise number remains classified.)

The Israeli military also asserted that it had eliminated half 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 roughly 115 living and dead hostages still held in Gaza after being seized in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks – cannot be achieved militarily, according to current and former U.S. and Israeli officials.

Over the past 10 months, “Israel has been able to disrupt Hamas, kill a number of their leaders and largely reduce the threat to Israel that existed before Oct. 7,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the former head of U.S. Central Command. Hamas is now “a diminished” organization, he added. But he said the release of the hostages could be secured only through negotiations.

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesperson 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 home our hostages, and will continue to operate with determination to achieve them.”

The latest U.S. assessment comes as an array of administration officials are fanning out across the region to try to nail down a Gaza cease-fire deal and possibly avert a retaliatory attack by Iran and its allies in response to the recent Israeli assassinations of senior Iranian-backed proxy leaders, U.S. officials said.

William Burns, the CIA director, is due in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to deliver is that there is little more Israel can accomplish 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 exploded into public view again this week after the news media reported that Gallant had questioned the prime minister’s goal of a “total victory” over Hamas in a closed-door meeting.

Austin and other officials in the Biden administration share Gallant’s view that a cease-fire agreement that returns the hostages is in Israel’s best interest.

Israel’s most recent military operations have been something of a Whac-a-Mole strategy in the eyes of American analysts. As Israel develops intelligence about a potential regrouping of Hamas fighters, the Israeli military has moved to go in after them.

But U.S. officials are skeptical that approach will yield decisive results. To prevent its fighters from being targeted, Hamas has urged them to hide in its vast tunnel network under Gaza or among civilians. From the beginning of the war, Hamas’ 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 notion that Israel had nothing more to gain in Gaza through force.

“Israel’s achievements in Gaza are impressive, but they’re far from what should be achieved,” said Amidror, who is now a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “If Israel evacuates its forces now, within a year, Hamas will be strong again.”

He emphasized that stopping the war now would be a “disaster” for Israel.

Two to three more months of high-intensity fighting in central and southern Gaza are needed, he added. After that phase, Israel could transition to conducting intelligence-based raids and strikes for around a year to take out remaining Hamas fighters and weapons infrastructure before allowing another party to take over the administration of Gaza, 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 inoperable. But the network has proved much larger than Israel anticipated, and it remains an effective way for Hamas to hide its leaders and move around fighters.

And even as the Israeli military has seized territory and killed Hamas fighters from north to south of the territory, it has repeatedly had to go back in as Hamas fighters regrouped. For example, Israel weakened Hamas’ grip in the Jabalia camp, in northern Gaza, but had to return to the area in May after the group reconstituted in the power vacuum.

Current and former Pentagon officials complain that Israel has not yet demonstrated that it can secure all of the areas in Gaza that it has seized, particularly after its forces pull back. And even when Israel uses 250-pound small-diameter bombs to destroy pockets of resistance, as U.S. officials have urged it to do, its military still ends up killing civilians, as it did last weekend when a school compound sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza was hit in an airstrike.

“Hamas is a terrorist organization – for them, just surviving is victory,” said Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East policy official who is now a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They will continue to reconstitute and pop up after the IDF says they have cleared an area without follow-on plans for security and governance in Gaza.”

For all the damage rained down on the enclave from Israeli bombs, and all the Palestinian fighters killed, Hamas retains some military strength.

“Hamas is largely depleted but not wiped out, and the Israelis may never achieve the total annihilation of Hamas,” said Ralph Goff, a former senior CIA official who served in the Middle East.

But U.S. officials believe that Israel has achieved a meaningful military victory. Hamas is no longer capable of planning or executing an attack on the scale of Oct. 7, and its ability to launch smaller terrorist attacks on Israel is in doubt, they say.

Hamas has been so damaged in the war that its officials have told international negotiators it is willing to give up civilian control of Gaza to an independent group after a cease-fire is in place. How long Hamas will be willing to give up a measure of its power will depend on what happens after a cease-fire, and what concessions Israel is prepared to make, U.S. officials said.

Hamas suffered a significant blow in May, according to U.S. officials, when Israel’s military invaded Rafah in southern Gaza. Officials in Washington had warned against the operation because they feared the deep humanitarian costs. But Israel used its occupation of Rafah to cut off tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, a critical weapons supply route for Hamas.

Israel’s seizure, also in May, of a strip of land that runs along Gaza’s southern border fulfilled another goal of the invasion, although it portends further isolation for Palestinians.

The strip, called the Philadelphi corridor by Israel and Salah al-Din by Egypt, is around 300 feet wide and runs roughly 8 miles from Israel’s border to the Mediterranean. To the northeast is Gaza, while Egypt lies to the southwest. Egyptian border guards have been policing the land under an agreement made with Israel in 2005 when Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza back then.

Israel accused Hamas of using tunnels beneath 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 seizure of the strip has further isolated the territory, which was already facing a widespread hunger crisis.

While Israel has rescued some hostages held above ground in elaborate operations, many of the hostages are hidden in the tunnel network.

Biden administration officials say diplomacy is the only way that Israel can achieve possibly its biggest goal – getting its hostages back.

For Hamas to agree to release the hostages, U.S. officials say it is critical to have incentives for the group to remain on the sidelines after a cease-fire deal is struck. The biggest incentive, U.S. officials said, is a meaningful pathway to an independent Palestinian state.

If a cease-fire does come, Hamas will struggle to regain its strength. It will have to rearm with a diminished 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 unknown for both Israel and the Palestinians is who, or what, comes after Hamas, U.S. and other Western officials say.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.