The American media is largely happy to repeat the fictional narrative of the Biden Administration and Bibi. Israel's press prints the real deal.
The first story below is NY Times, the next is Haaretz.
So the truth? Israel isn't annihilating Hamas but they are developing a whole new generation of Jihadists (i.e. innocent Palestinians who might like to return the favor someday).
Israel says the Hamas fighters left in northern Gaza are less organized.
By Andres Martinez, NY Times
Jan 7, 2023
Israel’s military said it had dismantled Hamas’s military capabilities in northern Gaza, and was now focusing on doing the same in the central and southern parts of the enclave, where it said it plans to take a different approach to destroying Hamas.
There were still some Hamas fighters in northern Gaza, but they no longer worked under an organized military command, and were limited in how much damage they could inflict, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesman, said late Saturday in his daily news conference. Admiral Hagari didn’t provide details about control in the north, nor specify how the military’s operation farther south would be different.
For three months, since a deadly ambush on Oct. 7, Israel has been bombarding Gaza, killing more than 20,000 people, according to Gazan health authorities, and displacing a majority of the enclave’s residents. Nearly half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are now crammed into an area near the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. A top United Nations official said on Friday that the enclave had become “uninhabitable” because of the dwindling supply of food, fuel and medicine.
There is no clear end in sight for the war, despite signs of discontent at home with how it has been handled. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas as retaliation for the attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which about 1,200 people, both civilians and soldiers, were killed and about 240 people abducted, according to Israeli officials. About 100 people are still being held hostage in Gaza by Hamas and other militant groups.
An initial sign of Israel’s plans for the end of the war appeared last week, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant floating a proposal to Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet. The plan calls for Israel to maintain military control of Gaza’s borders and a “multinational task force” to oversee reconstruction and economic development in the territory. While its unclear how much support it has, the plan seems to straddle the demands of the far more conservative members of the government and those of key allies, like the United States.
With the campaign in Gaza far from over, the prospect of a wider war hung over the region in the past week. A senior Hamas official was assassinated in Beirut, in a strike that U.S. and other officials have said was carried out by Israel. The Israeli government has not taken responsibility for the Hamas leader’s killing.
So far, Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that supports Hamas, has held back from escalating the fighting with Israel. They have launched missile and rocket attacks at Israel, but these have been contained to areas near the border.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who spent much of the early days of the war crisscrossing the region, is back in the Middle East for a days-long tour. He traveled to Jordan on Sunday for meetings with King Abdullah II, the ruler of Jordan, and its foreign minister, and visited a warehouse with boxes of canned food that were intended to be brought into Gaza.
Mr. Blinken already met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and has other meetings planned. While the United States continues to support Israel, Mr. Blinken and others have called the deaths of civilians, especially children, unacceptable, and urged Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
— Andrés R. Martínez
Opinion | Why Israel Can't Bomb Hamas Into Submission
Netanyahu made a stir in 2016 when, in the Knesset chamber, he read a book that argued that decisive wars are won through overwhelming violence. But factors unique to Hamas and Gaza, as well as the threat of regional escalation, mean Israel can't use the 'surrender or die' ultimatum
Anders Persson, Haaretz
Jan 7, 2024 3:53 pm IST
Seven years ago, in December 2016, Benjamin Netanyahu was seen in the Knesset chamber with a book in his hand. Israeli journalists curiously inquired what their prime minister was reading.
The book turned out to be Nothing less than victory: Decisive wars and the lessons of history by historian John David Lewis. The main argument of the book is that it is possible to break an enemy's will to fight through overwhelming violence, that in decisive wars, the enemy is given two possibilities: surrender or die.
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At the time Haaretz noted that "Time may tell whether Lewis' book influences the prime minister's future military thinking."
Now that time has arrived. Israel is facing the most difficult counterinsurgency operation in modern times, perhaps ever in military history. The challenge Israel is facing is much more complicated than what America faced in places like Falluja and Mosul.
Netanyahu appears to be looking to the examples cited in Lewis' book as a playbook. The problem is the war in Gaza may very well have no precedent and Hamas is proving itself to be an especially formidable foe.
In his book Lewis showed with six case studies from antiquity to World War II that overwhelming victories in wars can lead to peace agreements that are not just stable and lasting, but also moral.
His chapters about Nazi Germany and Japan show that it is indeed possible to force great powers to surrender, crush ideologies and bomb away ideas that were arguably more powerful than Hamas and its militant Islamism are today in Gaza.
Regarding Nazi Germany and Japan, Lewis wrote that it was not enough to defeat them on the battlefield, but total and permanent destruction of both these countries' military capacity and their will to fight. In short: "unconditional surrender."
Their unconditional surrenders meant that millions of Germans and Japanese were saved from certain death and given their lives back. In both countries peace replaced war as a national policy.
It's not controversial in academic war studies to find the argument that the aim of a war is to defeat the enemy's will to fight, or that decisive victories lead to more stable peace.
Studies have noted a trend over the past 15 years toward military victories in favor over negotiated peace agreements, beginning in 2009 when the Sri Lankan government decisively defeated the Tamil Tigers, which had once been regarded as one of the world's strongest terror organizations. Another example is Russia ending its "anti-terror operation" in Chechnya after brutally crushing an Islamist guerilla there, proving it's possible to bomb even militant Islamists into submission.
But the conditions in Gaza are very different to other recent or past conflicts. It's unique because the territory is one of the most densely populated in the world. Hamas has also governed Gaza for almost two decades, which is unique as well among Islamist terror organizations, which typically only govern for a few years before they are overthrown.
According to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, his organization had built over 500 kilometers of tunnels underneath Gaza, the so-called "Gaza metro".
Unlike the U.S. and Russia in Iraq and Syria, Israel does not have any local Gaza allies to help fight. The IDF is also active in both the West Bank and along the Lebanon border, which means a significant part of the Israeli military is engaged elsewhere.
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With possible exceptions for the 1948 war, which led to a mass Palestinian exodus, and the 1982 Lebanon War, which sought to crush the PLO, Israel has never fought to break its enemies' will to fight.
In all its other wars including the two Palestinians intifadas (uprisings) – Israel contended with formal or informal ceasefires when they ended, often under American pressure.
The big question now is whether Israel will act differently in this war. Israel has without a doubt the military capacity to defeat Hamas and its ideology in Gaza.
Alternatively, Israel has the capability to forcibly drive the Palestinians, including Hamas, out of Gaza through bombings, sieges, starvation, and other means of coercion. However, it's doubtful Israel has the will to do any of this, despite Netanyahu's repeated promises that he is committed to crush Hamas, kill its leaders and all of its 30,000 of its combatants.
Despite the brutality of its bombing campaign in Gaza, Israel has so far only managed to kill around 8,000 Hamas members, according to the IDF's spokesperson, which would be 30 percent of its force. Likewise, most of Hamas's top political and military leadership, in Gaza and abroad, are still alive, and much of its infrastructure in the southern part of Gaza seems intact as well.
Palestinians search for bodies and survivors in the rubble of a house destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on Sunday.Credit: Fatima Shbair /AP
The fact that Hamas has managed repeated exchanges of hostages for prisoners during the war proves it's still functioning and in control over large parts of Gaza, and over other militant organizations keeping hostages captured in the strip.
It's increasingly clear that Israel lacks U.S. support for doing what it takes to militarily defeat Hamas and crush its ideology and ideas. If Israel attacks Gaza even harder than it has, it risks not just a wider regional war and the collapse of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, but also weakening the whole American security architecture in the region.
It's also increasingly clear that this war is a political disaster for U.S. President Joe Biden, who had hoped to start off his election campaign with an Israeli-Saudi peace treaty. Instead, Biden enters this election campaign with dismal polling numbers and betting data clearly against him.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has received a major boost from it.
It's difficult today to see a clear path to a decisive military victory for Israel Likewise, the path to a permanent ceasefire also seems distant, especially with most Hamas leaders still alive, the organization somewhat intact and over half of the some 250 Israeli hostages still in captivity in Gaza three months after the war began – an agonizing blow to the morale of the country.
At the same time, many things could happen in the war which could alter the political and military calculations on all sides: epidemics could break out, the population could rise up against Hamas, Palestinians could flee or be forced out of Gaza threatening regional stability, Biden could force Israel to accept a ceasefire, the Israeli government could fall.
Most harrowing of all, the situation could still escalate into regional war. Then again powerful Saudi Arabia might be able to help de-escalate tensions, and so on. But no matter which way things go, a decisive, crushing of not just Hamas but its ideology, remains elusive three months into the war.
If a decisive military victory is not possible in Gaza, Israel may again have to contend with a formal or informal ceasefire, as it has done in all previous wars since 1948. This would likely mean that Israeli politicians, led by former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, were wrong when they promised over and over again after the 2014 war that the next war in Gaza would be the last.
Anders Persson is a political scientist at Linnaeus University, Sweden, specializing in EU-Israel/Palestine relations. His latest book, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967–2019," was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020. On X (formerly Twitter): @82AndersPersson
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