Wednesday briefing: Can there be any winners in the Israel-Hamas war?

In today’s newsletter: The Hamas attack on Israel, and the country’s overwhelming armed response, have destabilised the region and caused unfathomable suffering

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Good morning. For more than 80 days, a bloody conflict has been raging in Israel and Gaza. On 7 October Hamas launched thousands of rockets into Israel, and gunmen broke through security barriers in the worst breach of the country’s defences in five decades – 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage. Harrowing reports have emerged of sexual violence against women, of torture and abuse of adults and children.

The response from Israel was swift and brutal, with the government promising a “mighty vengeance” against Hamas, vowing to destroy the militant group altogether. In the months since the attack, the Israeli military has unleashed one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in history, according to one expert. More than 20,400 people have been killed, including nearly 8,000 children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, in the two and a half months since the bombardment began. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced; entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. The UN has described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic” and the World Food Programme has said that there is a “catastrophic hunger crisis”. Safe drinking water is desperately scarce, raising the risk of disease outbreaks.

The number of civilian deaths in this conflict has restarted the global conversation about the route to peace in the region, although to date there has been little consensus. I spoke with Guardian foreign correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison about the situation in Israel and the occupied territories before Hamas’ attacks, the big turning points of the war and the possible next steps. That’s right after the headlines.

In depth: The buildup to a conflict without a solution

Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-term strategy of containing Hamas was seemingly working for him. “Concerns about conditions in Gaza slipped down the international agenda. Even though it endured regular bombings and blockades and was often described as an open-air prison, there was less international focus on the small strip,” Emma Graham-Harrison says, and US-backed efforts to normalise relations with regional powers were enjoying increasing success. Israel thought Hamas had been “slightly defanged” as a threat to their country. “Netanyahu was perhaps too eager to believe his own policies had worked, and Hamas was focused more on the economic side of things, so no longer an existential threat to Israel despite a charter that calls for its destruction.”

This may go some way to explain why the Israeli government ignored significant internal and external intelligence warnings about Hamas’ plans.

Two days after the 7 October attack and Netanyahu’s declaration of all-out war, a complete siege on Gaza began. Water, food or fuel were not allowed into the strip. Within 10 days, various world leaders, including Joe Biden, visited Israel to show their support. It took a month and a half to negotiate a humanitarian pause to allow the exchange of 105 Israeli hostages for more than 240 Palestinians who were being held in Israeli prisons. The ceasefire collapsed however after eight days, and airstrikes recommenced.

Shifting international responses

Initially, some western governments were firm in their support of Israel. The US, Israel’s most important ally, has been steadfast in its support of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, saying it has a right to defend itself against Hamas. However, “the numbers of civilian casualties and the horrific levels of suffering”, Emma says, has changed the tenor of the conversation. When the war started, the population in Gaza had a certain level of resilience – they had their homes and access to food and water. “Now they are fleeing again, but this time people are hungry, massively traumatised and there are high levels of disease,” Emma says. “And I think you see this reality reflected in even Israel’s closest allies”. President Biden has recently begun ratcheting up his criticism of Israel, warning that it was beginning to lose support because of the “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza.

Other allies have tempered their support: Emmanuel Macron has hardened his criticism of Israel’s military strategy, demanding that Israeli authorities “define more precisely” their aims in Gaza. He added that an acceptable response to a terrorist group was not “to bomb the entirety of civilian capabilities”. EU leaders have reportedly rejected requests from Netanyahu to lobby Egypt to open its borders to Palestinian refugees. Despite growing international pressure, Netanyahu recently said that the war “isn’t close to finished”.

What are Israel’s long term plans?

Israel’s military strategy is to demilitarise Hamas by degrading its capabilities so that it cannot attack again. Netanyahu has dismissed the prospect of the Palestinian Authority running Gaza, a suggestion from Biden, and has rejected the idea of foreign peacekeepers brokering a deal, insisting that only the Israeli army could be trusted to make sure that Gaza stays demilitarised. The only stated and clear military goal is to “destroy Hamas”. But this is not “an achievable military goal”, Emma says, because Hamas is an ideological organisation that operates beyond Gaza in practical and political terms.

Netanyahu has said that there is a chance the Israeli military would maintain indefinite security control over Gaza after the war ends, which suggests that the plan is to reintroduce a form of extended Israeli occupation over the strip. Biden has warned Netanyahu against this strongly. “Israeli officials have also discussed the possibility of having a buffer zone in Gaza – as Gaza is really tiny already, taking away more land for this would be massively controversial,” Emma says.

Biden has warned Israel that “vengeance” is not a viable military strategy. He sees the danger in waging a war like this, as he remembers the Bush administration’s war in Afghanistan. “What you had was almost 20 years over which the Taliban grew stronger and stronger and reversed the original American military victory,” Emma says. “Biden clearly sees the danger in something similar happening in this conflict.”

Netanyahu’s precarious position

“Right from the beginning, it was clear that the vast majority of Israeli society held Netanyahu responsible for the attack,” Emma says. Even though Netanyahu, the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history, has a reputation for being the ultimate political survivor, this latest war feels like the beginning of the end for his time in power. Many have said that thoughts of his political future have influenced the way that he has prosecuted the war: “Netanyahu presented himself as the strong man who would keep Israel safe. The question in his mind is: if he managed a war that destroyed Hamas, could he redeem himself to the Israeli public and somehow cling on?”

The humanitarian crisis

The scale of the crisis in Gaza has led to humanitarian organisations and the United Nations to issue unusually explicit statements on the conflict. “The strength of their statements in condemning the situation in Gaza is a reflection of how, even in the context of a world with many very brutal, complex and terrible wars, this is a particularly dire situation in terms of the level of humanitarian suffering,” Emma says.

Inside Israel though, there is little public pressure to curb the attacks on Gaza. Most people see the war as an existential campaign. When Emma asked one reservist about Biden’s warnings, and the military catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, fed in part by civilian casualties from aerial bombing campaigns, he said: “British and American soldiers could go home, we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

As we go into 2024, no end is in sight. This conflict will probably continue, leaving in its wake a trail of unfathomable destruction and death.

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