Announcement comes as US confirms first of its citizens able to leave Gaza via the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

Too much of the commentary on the war in Gaza begins with tactics, which are concerned with achieving small, concrete military objectives, such as taking a hill or launching an ambush. Tactics and operations (the combination of a number of tactical engagements) in turn support strategy, the matching of military and other means to political objectives. It is with strategy that an understanding of this conflict should begin. War is horrifying. But if we wish to understand its likely course, we should not start by focusing on the grimness of urban warfare, the particular hellishness of battles in tunnels, or the difficulties of separating civilians and combatants in an urban setting. Instead, we must ask how both sides conceive their objectives and the broadest ways in which they intend to use force to achieve them.

Both sides are driven by total objectives. For Hamas, this is nothing new: In its 1988 covenant, it committed itself to the annihilation of the state of Israel, and then and since, to the extermination of as many of its citizens as possible. Like most extreme Islamist movements, it distinguishes only loosely, or not at all, between Jews and Israelis. This objective justifies in its view the ultimate in violence, all of which was horrifically on display in the October 7 massacre, accompanied by the murder of children, rape, torture, beheading, and kidnapping. Behind its strategy is a long-term theory of victory: that such attacks, coupled perhaps with strikes by Hezbollah and Iran, or the risings of Palestinians in the West Bank, will cause Israel to collapse. In Hamas’s view, Israeli counterattacks on Gaza, which will inevitably kill many civilians, contribute to its objectives because they undermine support for Israel abroad, and inflame its many enemies.

[Ned Lazarus: I don’t see a better way out]

Hamas is not, like Anwar Sadat’s Egypt in 1973, using war to break a negotiating deadlock. It does not appear to care about the harms inflicted on Palestinian civilians—indeed, it gives every indication that it welcomes them. Its eschatological ambitions mean that any compromise or cease-fire is temporary and purely instrumental. “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people,” its founding charter proclaimed, and only Israel’s utter destruction can meet that challenge. All of this was always the case. One of Israel’s numerous failures ahead of this war was the inability of some Israeli leaders, and the majority of international political leaders, to fully understand Hamas’s worldview and its implications. There is no excuse for anyone to continue to do so.

Until October 7, the objectives of the current Israeli government with regard to Hamas were limited: to contain the movement, deter it from launching major attacks, use it as a foil against the Palestinian Authority, and punish its more egregious behaviors. After October 7, the Israeli objective became—had to become—the destruction of Hamas. With that, Israeli strategy has been transformed, and that is why so many analogies, including the 1982 Israeli attack on the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon and the American invasion of Iraq, miss the point. Everything changes when your strategic purpose, like that of your enemy, is annihilation.

An Israel that tolerated or merely absorbed October 7 could expect more and worse such attacks from other quarters, particularly from the far better armed and trained Hezbollah. Israel’s population, including workers in its most productive and advanced industries, could lose faith in the ability of their country to defend itself and simply leave. A Hamas left intact, moreover, would undoubtedly try to launch equally bloody attacks on civilians again.

The shift in Israeli strategic objectives will shape the military operations now under way. International public opinion has turned on Israel many times in the past, and is doing so again. But given that the issue is now, for Israeli planners, existential, they will care much less than ever before. They will also act with much less restraint than in the past. Israel’s own legal and moral inhibitions, though rarely acknowledged in Western media, have in the past restricted its use of force. Israel, for example, developed the practice of “knocking” on an apartment building with a nonexplosive bomb to get the inhabitants to leave before the real thing hit. Israelis, like their American counterparts in Iraq, would usually wait until an enemy leader was away from women and children before firing a guided missile at them.

During World War II, another existential conflict, the Anglo-American alliance employed a very different set of rules. Britain’s Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Forces alike deliberately targeted enemy civilian infrastructure and population centers. During the planning of air operations in advance of the D-Day landings, Winston Churchill went a step further, approving attacks against French railroad yards that he believed would kill up to 10,000 French civilians. Those are not the examples Israel follows today, and if Israel now exercises less restraint than it once did, it nonetheless remains a long way from these precedents.

The stunning Israeli failures that led up to the October 7 massacre will, in due time, be examined in excruciating detail by an investigative commission like that of the Agranat Commission following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The senior leaders of the national-security establishment will undoubtedly resign or be forced from office after the immediate crisis is over. But the magnitude of their failure should not obscure the fact that the Israel Defense Forces is not merely an extremely large force (its mobilized ground forces today are roughly the same size as the United States Army) but one that is well equipped and in most cases well trained.

Assertions that Israel will find operating above and underground in Gaza impossibly difficult are questionable. Even assuming that those who make them fully understand the IDF’s capabilities (and most do not), the recent record of urban combat, including America’s conquest of Fallujah and the Iraqi retaking of Mosul, suggests otherwise. These battles may be very costly for attacker and defender alike, but one should not assume that Gaza is impregnable. It is not.

Israeli ground incursions into Gaza will work from intelligence about physical structures that has been collected over many years; they will be supported by information from numerous sensors, including new ones brought into the strip by ground forces as well as others activated from the outside. The IDF has the initiative, and Hamas will have to react, which is considerably more difficult than planning even the extremely complex and ambitious attack of October 7. As landlines are severed, Hamas leaders will have to communicate by phone or radio; as prisoners are taken and documents and computers are captured, they will reveal secrets; and there will undoubtedly be Palestinian civilians willing to share information about the terrorists whose raid brought this terror upon them.

Israel may not attempt to annihilate Hamas all at once. A pause may even occur for some kind of prisoners-for-hostages swap, although Israel’s new strategic objective means that if it is forced to choose between the lives of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas, it will, with bitter grief, choose the latter.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

What will ensue will be a set of relentless incremental operations of the kind that, in microcosm, led to the neutralization of Yasser Arafat in 2002–03 in his headquarters, the Mukataa. Again, because the strategy is different, the rules will be different. Henceforth, any Hamas unit training in the open will probably be attacked; so too will Hamas leaders or gatherings, whether or not civilians are present. The campaign will be bloody, and it will go on for a long while—months, possibly years. If there is a plausible alternative, given the strategic realities on both sides, someone should suggest it. No one, including those most deeply anguished by the suffering of Palestinian civilians, yet has.

The IDF’s image has long been shaped by the Six-Day War and daring raids like Entebbe in 1976. But its long-term strategic successes, and most notably the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, were the result of protracted conflict. This war will also last a long time, until the Israelis have satisfied themselves that Hamas is, if not utterly annihilated, reduced to near-complete ineffectiveness. It will be bloody on both sides, and it may eventuate in a larger Middle East conflict. But it is not going to be like Israel’s Lebanon War, or America’s Iraq War. Ameliorating the bitter, generations-long struggle between Arab and Jew for Israel and Palestine remains vital. Every war must end and may even end, after a long time, with some kind of reconciliation—after all, there is an Israeli embassy in Berlin, and a German embassy in Tel Aviv.

First, however, there will be—and alas, there must be—a war of an intensity and violence that we have not seen in a very long time.

The kingdom said it would only return its envoy if Israel ceased the 'humanitarian crisis it has caused'.

What if this war should end, as it must, not by a cease-fire or a truce, like other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the 100-year-old conflict between the Palestinian and Israeli people?

To imagine anything good coming out of such a destructive war is not easy, especially for those of us witnessing its cruel prosecution from Ramallah, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. And yet, as bad as things are, I feel compelled to resist giving in to despair. I may be clutching at straws, but I feel a moral responsibility to seek any grounds for hope.

One hopeful sign I detect is the recurring mention of the Nakba, as Palestinians call their tragedy during the 1948 war, when more than 700,000 people were forced to leave their home and become refugees. Israel has never officially recognized this collective catastrophe—largely because the Zionist movement, from its early days, denied the existence of the Palestinian people and consequently refused to recognize the Nakba.

Admittedly, today’s recognition is at best backhanded and at worst threatening. It points not to restitution but to repetition. On October 8, the Israeli Knesset member Ariel Kallner posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” Violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank distributed pamphlets on October 26, warning of a second Nakba for the Palestinians: “You have a last opportunity to escape to Jordan. Afterward, we’ll drive you away by force from our holy land that God dedicated to us.”

[Graeme Wood: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

I take some cold comfort from the recognition of the Nakba that this ugly rhetoric contains, in spite of itself. For decades, Israeli propaganda justified the exodus of three-quarters of the Palestinian population in 1948 with various claims; one—the contention that Palestinians left primarily because Arab leaders called on them to do so, rather than because of Jewish terrorism and systematic ethnic cleansing—has been rebutted by several generations of scholars.

Another persistent Israeli line held that the Palestinian Arabs had 21 Arab states to go to, while Israeli Jews had only one state. David Ben-Gurion, a 1948 war leader and Israel’s first prime minister, believed that after a few generations Palestinians would have integrated into new host countries and forgotten about Palestine. But 75 years after the Palestinians were pushed out of their home in Palestine, they continue to believe in the possibility of return, and many remain in the refugee camps where they were settled after the Nakba in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza.

Before 1948, many Palestinians saw the Jews as a tiny minority who would never be able to establish a state in Palestine. The famous Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini, who worked as an educational inspector under the British Mandate, describes in a 1934 diary entry a trip he took throughout the country. He wrote: “If the Jews have a few impoverished colonies, the Arabs have thousands of villages … What is owned by the Jews compares as nothing to what is owned by the Arabs in Palestine.” The Palestinians also believed that they had the backing of the Arab states, which would help them quash the Jewish dream of establishing a state in Palestine.

Before the 1948 war, few Palestinians were aware of the extent of European Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust, or of how that experience affected the survivors who immigrated to Palestine—the insecurity and dread that blunted them to the feelings of Palestinians and engendered extreme determination to succeed in their nation-building project. Likewise, after 1948, the Israelis failed to understand the enduring meaning of the Nakba for the Palestinians.

Despite this history, and in addition to the almost inadvertent recent recognition of the Nakba, I see a second, slender ground for optimism arising out of the terrible violence.

“When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next … There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6,” President Joe Biden told reporters. The White House said that Biden conveyed the same message directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a telephone call.

We Palestinians have heard such invocations before, and they have proved empty promises. Even now, the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, continues to block the UN Security Council from calling for a humanitarian cease-fire. But maybe, just maybe, after this latest horrific cycle of violence, the United States and the rest of the international community will follow through.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 are often viewed as a development that could have brought real peace, if not for the assassination of then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli fanatic. Yet Oslo was largely a false beginning. From the start, Israeli extremists denounced the agreement because it would force them to relinquish parts of “Greater Israel,” which they considered to be their God-given land. After the accords were signed, they built settlements on occupied Palestinian land at a faster pace than ever before. Some on the Israeli left opposed this policy, but to little avail.

In the aftermath of what was supposed to be a historic peace accord, therefore, Palestinians witnessed the loss of ever more land to Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They saw Israel withdraw from Gaza, only to impose a tight blockade restricting the movement of people and goods and affecting every aspect of life in the strip. These developments together gave credence to the argument, propounded by Hamas, that only through armed struggle would Palestinian rights be restored.

The mirror image of this view is the prevailing Israeli belief that only military action can defeat Hamas. To destroy Hamas will be impossible without ending the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza. Israel should know this from long experience, but instead persists in the delusion that Hamas’s appeal can be reversed without offering an alternative vision for a path to Palestinian freedom.

[Hussein Ibish: Israel’s dangerous delusion]

The Oslo Agreement established the Palestinian Authority, whose moderate head, Mahmoud Abbas, espoused nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation and to denounce violence. He was willing to settle for a smaller state and to struggle through peaceful and legal means to achieve it. Yet Netanyahu cynically supported Hamas in Gaza to make sure that the PA would not succeed. The PA, for its part, became unpopular because of its corruption, its security cooperation with Israel, and its failure to protect the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Now Israel is waging a destructive war against Hamas in Gaza that will carry a high economic cost, as well as a high reputational cost around the globe. Although Western governments proclaimed their solidarity with Israel after the October 7 horror, many are urging Israel to exercise restraint, and to cooperate with the provision of humanitarian aid. If the United States continues opposing calls for a cease-fire as the war goes on, it may find itself isolated even among its Western allies.

Israel/Palestine is a small, precious land with lovely beaches in Gaza; soft, attractive hills in the West Bank; and sites of exquisite beauty in Israel. But its people, rather than enjoying their mutual land for its bounty, are tormented by exclusivist attitudes and policies that stretch the limit of their endurance. The vision that peace could follow the eviction or destruction of one people, whether through a second Nakba or through bombing, is cruel and false.

Unfortunately, the United States’ policy is one of blind support for Israel. Over the years, Washington has failed to convince its ally that choosing the path of peace with the Palestinians through recognition of their rights is best for the future of all—for ending the violence, and for the possibility that one day, the two nations of Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace and security.