Israel’s ‘strategic drift’ darkens national mood

For more than seven months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised Israelis complete victory. Hamas would soon be vanquished in Gaza, Israeli hostages would return home and quiet would be restored on the northern front with Lebanon’s Hizbollah.

Yet those goals are looking steadily more distant. Hamas has surged back in areas seized by Israeli forces, while hostage negotiations have all but collapsed. Hizbollah drones and missiles still rain down on the deserted Israeli villages of the Galilee. Netanyahu is at odds with even Israel’s closest ally, the US, and in public conflict with his own defence establishment.

The public mood has darkened, Some 62 per cent of Israelis now believe “total victory” is no longer possible, against 27 per cent who still think it realistic, according to polling this month that delivered the exact opposite results from a January survey, according to the Midgam Institute.

“There is a complete sense of strategic drift, and no plan for where this is going,” said a former senior Israeli government official. “There is no thought for how this is all supposed to end . . . and no sense about what victory would actually look like.”

The near-complete national unity that followed Hamas’s October 7 attacks is fraying. During muted Independence Day celebrations this week, in which protests interrupted several public events, Israelis circulated a running joke about what would come first: the return of the messiah or the prime minister’s “total victory”?

Apparent signs of progress are being rapidly reversed. Not only has Israel taken high casualties in its latest military operations in parts of Gaza previously “cleared” of Hamas, but the militant group has responded with renewed rocket fire into southern Israeli communities whose residents, at the urging of the government and military, had only in recent months returned home.

One turning point was Israel’s move this month to launch a long-threatened offensive into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, which had become the last available refuge for more than 1mn Palestinians as much of the territory was pounded into rubble. Netanyahu’s goal is to eliminate the final Hamas battalions there — but Israel’s allies strongly oppose the offensive.

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At the same time, US entreaties for a “credible” plan for the evacuation of the civilian population from the city has failed to materialise, said two people familiar with Gaza diplomacy.

“There is a plan. But it’s not doable,” one of the people said. “There isn’t enough space [in the designated humanitarian safe zones] to move 1mn people, and there’s not enough supply either. You can’t ask them to move if you can’t take care of them properly.”

Behind much of the anger directed at Netanyahu is an even bigger gap: his lack of a plan for postwar Gaza. A person familiar with Israel’s war strategy said: “There is no ‘day after’ plan. There’s nothing.”

Yoav Gallant, defence minister, a member of Netanyahu’s party, this week gave voice to growing frustrations within the security establishment on the issue. He argued victory could not be achieved through force of arms alone, but required an alternative governing structure for the strip.

The lack of postwar planning had led to the erosion of Israel’s military gains within the Palestinian enclave, Gallant said.

“I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a decision and declare that Israel will not establish civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that Israel will not establish military governance in the Gaza Strip and that a governing alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be advanced immediately,” he said.

The person familiar with postwar planning said the only option other than Hamas’s rule — or complete anarchy — was an arrangement with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. The PA, led by the secular nationalist Fatah movement, lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007.

But the person said the Israeli government could not accept PA leadership in Gaza “because of cynical political calculations”, as the prime minister relies on far-right coalition allies such as ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and by extension Netanyahu, have been “fanning the public mood after October 7 that there is no difference between Hamas and the PA”, the person added.

Israel’s options for the future have been further diminished by the growing gap that the government’s approach has created with even the country’s closest allies. US President Joe Biden, in exasperation over Netanyahu’s Rafah strategy, delayed a weapons shipment to Israel this month.

Other previously supportive governments such as the UK, France and Egypt have been increasingly critical, while the threat looms of further action against Israel by international tribunals in The Hague over alleged violations of international law.

Ultranationalist officials have begun to incite violence against the UN, while gangs of far-right activists have increasingly attacked Gazan aid convoys transiting through Israel, with little consequence.

“It’s becoming very difficult, if near impossible, even for friends of Israel to keep defending it these days,” said the first person familiar with Gaza diplomacy.

Netanyahu, ever defiant, has vowed the Jewish state would “stand alone” if necessary and “fight with our fingernails”.

On another front, in northern Israel, 60,000 people have been evacuated since the start of the conflict because of Hizbollah cross-border fire. The powerful Lebanese militant group has vowed to continue missile and drone attacks until hostilities cease in Gaza. Some local residents have begun to give up hope of returning home in the near future.

“Families . . . are talking about what will happen [in the fall] to decide whether to stay in the north or not,” said Efrat Eldan Schechter, a local resident and activist. “Many families are leaving the north. Families are being destroyed, businesses are being destroyed.”

Local leaders and opposition politicians have criticised the government for creating, for the first time in the country’s history, a “security zone” inside Israeli territory. Many local residents and officials spent their Independence Day blocking junctions in the region in protest against the government’s lack of action after seven months of attritional war.

The sense of drift within Israel has been captured by a group who, following the devastation of October 7, has taken on significant weight in the national consciousness: the families of hostages grabbed during the attack that triggered the war. This year on Independence Day the yellow ribbon, a symbol of the hostage movement, was etched on most of the blue-and-white Israeli flags on official display.

Yet near-daily protests by the families have failed to sway the Netanyahu government to do more to secure the hostages’ safe return, even at the price of ending the war — as Hamas has demanded and as Netanyahu has consistently rejected.

The long-serving leader, however, no longer promises the nation that victory over Hamas is “only a step away”. Instead he has been counselling patience while evoking what he says is existential peril to the country if “total victory” is not achieved.

Yet the families of the hostages warn the captives are running out of time.

“I hear Liri screaming. ‘Mom! Save me! Mom! He’s hurting me!” said Shira Elbag in a recent speech about her 19-year old daughter who is still being held hostage. “Israeli society needs a victory . . . For our people to begin this healing, we must get back those who were brutally kidnapped from us.”