After rejecting a US-initiated Gaza peace and European allies ‘ pleas to avoid a wider Middle East conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has devised his own more provocative strategy to secure Israeli military dominance in the region he believes has lost.
Netanyahu considers Hamas’s martial beat a first step toward closing gaps left over from the assumption of previous wars that, in his mind, guaranteed potential people. The Jewish head vehemently desires only enduring successes.
Beyond the military and political loss of Hamas, Netanyahu’s wider targets are to:
- Eliminate the military criticism in the West Bank and overthrow the Palestinian Authority that controls some of the country.
- Remove the skill of Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim military and political group in Lebanon, to threaten Israel physically.
- Undermine Iran’s command of the anti-Israel” Axis of Resistance,” which includes Houthi rebels in Yemen, Syria, and the Shiite Muslim firm that has been preventing send visitors in the Red Sea that leads to the Suez Canal.
- Put an end to the” two-state answer”, a peace solution long promoted by the United States that do offer Israeli sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Ariel Sharon, an Israeli army general and bellicose one-term prime minister, later set out his goals in the 20th century in the form of Netanyahu’s vision.
Numerous protests have broken out in Israel against Netanyahu’s management of the Gaza war—but only in regard to arranging a ceasefire with Hamas to secure the release of about 100 hostages held in Gaza. His wider goals have attracted a lot of support and little opposition from the outside world.
” Even if an opposition party came to power, Israel’s strategic position is unlikely to be dramatically altered”, said Hugh Lovatt, a senior researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank based in Washington.
No major Israeli Jewish political party is currently in favor of a two-state solution or the end of Israel’s illegal settlement project, despite the possibility of a ceasefire agreement with Gaza and a less confrontational approach to the Palestinian Authority.
Here are the outlines of Netanyahu’s plans:
Keeping watch over Gaza
Hamas initiated the Gaza war when it raided a set of Israeli communities and killed more than 1, 200 civilians. Israel launched massive airstrikes and ground assaults as retaliation. The toll on Palestinian life has been heavy.
Medical personnel in Gaza have identified more than 40, 000 fatalities, including thousands of women and children. Hamas offers no statistics on military casualties.
More than two million people in Gaza have been forced to live in makeshift tent camps. Camps and other refuges have in turn been subject to assaults, forcing the internal refugees to flee again.
At least 70 % of Gaza’s residential housing, as well as a number of schools, businesses, and hospitals, are thought to be severely damaged by international aid organizations.
More than 40 million tons of debris are strewn across the enclave–enough to fill dump trucks lined up from New York City to Singapore, according to Bloomberg, the US-based financial news agency.
Israeli military personnel have won. Hamas can no longer mount” significant resistance”  , to Israeli forces from there, officials said last week. Despite being” a terror group and a guerrilla group,” intelligence officers did issue a caution that armed remnants still operate as “guerrilla groups.”
Efforts to ensure Israel’s permanent physical control of Gaza is underway. Israel is building a limited area of restraint. The project is meant to close loopholes in the efforts by Sharon to subdue Gaza resistance.
Sharon served as prime minister from 2001 to 2006, and in 2005 she decided to leave the coastal community, raze 21, and send 8, 000 Israelis home.  , It was the end of a troublesome occupation that began in 1967 during the Six Day War. He felt that a fence around the land borders and an off-shore naval blockade were sufficient defense.
October 7, 2023, shattered that notion. A pared-down reoccupation has been initiated by Netanyahu. Inside Gaza’s northern and eastern borders with Israel, military engineers have cleared housing and vegetation a half mile deep.
A buffer zone created by the clearance creates a free-fire zone and lessens military surveillance and patrols. Israeli naval vessels will continue to patrol the sea coast.
However, Netanyahu’s plan to militarize the southern border abutting Egypt has a gap. Israeli troops currently patrol the” Philadelphi Corridor” along the frontier, and Netanyahu wants them left there permanently.
Netanyahu rebuffed recent negotiations by alleging that Hamas had smuggled weapons into Gaza from Egypt through underground tunnels. But Egypt objects.
It opposes any modifications to the Palestinians ‘ control-affirming agreement from 2005 with Israel. “Egypt reiterates its position. At a press conference last week in Cairo, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty declared that the country “rejects any military presence along the border crossing.”
The comment was made in the presence of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who did not object.
Israel is constructing an east-west road through central Gaza from Israel to the Mediterranean Sea, cutting the constricting enclave in half to further strengthen control. Passage across it to the north or south is already under the watch of Israeli troops who examine travelers and cargo. Biometric identification cards will be provided to residents to check if they are on “terrorist lists” (terrorist lists ).
The corridor will also be lined with fences and sprinkled with watchtowers to surveil the area – another throwback to Ariel Sharon’s policies. To separate Palestinian areas from Israeli settlements and Israel itself, he constructed such roads and structures throughout the West Bank countryside.
West Bank and Palestinian Authority
Since August 2023, the West Bank has been engaged in persistent low-intensity combat. It will likely intensify. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, called Israel’s military practices in the West Bank “mowing the lawn,” according to this month’s statement.
The phrase refers to the tactic of mounting armed incursions into nominally Palestinian-governed territory. They are intended to lessen armed groups ‘ preemption, either by capturing or killing their members. Gallant played on lawn-care metaphors by describing the increase of West Bank raids as “pulling out the roots”.
According to the Palestinian Authority ( PA ), 716 Palestinians have died as a result of Israeli incursions on October 7. Save the Children, an international child relief organization, says that 158 of the victims have been children.
The PA appears unable to halt armed resistance that encourages Israeli retaliation or to stop Israeli incursions he deems harmful to civilians. His inert response leaves civilians to fend for themselves.
After the police detonated a hidden roadside bomb on a street used by Israeli forces to enter the West Bank town of Jenin last week, fighting broke out between PA police and residents of the town. Pro-Hamas protests in Ramallah, the administrative center of PA rule, have broken out occasionally, prompting PA police to break them up.
The last time PA President Mahmoud Abbas made an official statement about the Gaza conflict was in April, when he threatened to sever ties with the US over its arms supply to Israel. Abbas sees himself as the leader of all Palestinians.
When particularly widespread pro-Hamas demonstrations broke out in July, he appealed to Palestinians” to unite, be patient and steadfast in the face of the Israeli occupation”.
Israeli forces raided and shut down Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based global news network, as a reminder that Abbas ‘ control of Palestinian territory is limited. It is one of the few major broadcasters that reported directly from either PA or Hamas territory. In Gaza, three al-Jazeera journalists were killed during the conflict. They are among 116 reporters and broadcast technicians killed so far during the Gaza war.
After a civil war with Hamas led to the end of PA control of the Gaza Strip, Abbas has been in charge of the West Bank since 2007. However, his failure to block the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, along with charges of corruption and his hazy public stand on the Gaza war, has drastically shrunk his popularity.
Only 9 % of voters would support Abbas if presidential elections were held today, according to a survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. His popularity is a distant second to jailed Palestine Liberation Organization member Marwan Barghouti, with 32 % support, and current Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, at 31 %.
However, the Biden administration has backed a “reformed” PA to handle post-war negotiations. ” The future of the Gaza Strip is firmly linked to the future of the PA and its president Mahmoud Abbas”, wrote Naomi Neumann of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A weak PA will hardly ever be able to fill the leadership void that many people would like to see filled in post-war Gaza.
Lebanon and Hezbollah
The Netanyahu government has moved its war effort to Lebanon in light of the lessening impact of the Gaza war and the West Bank under small-scale raids. The result has been a massive intensification of bombing and a series of remote assassinations.
Israeli forces and Hezbollah have exchanged rockets, artillery, and armed drone fire across Israel’s northern border since October 7. It was kind of a calibrated conflict that produced few casualties.
However, that changed last week. Netanyahu announced the goal of driving Hezbollah away from the northern border in order to permit some 60, 000 Israeli residents who had fled the area since October 7 to return. ” I’ve already said that we will safely return residents of the north to their homes. And that is exactly what we will do”, he announced.
His words came as a result of Israel’s announcement to send two army battalions, totaling about 20 000 soldiers, along with tanks and mobile artillery, to the Lebanese border.
Israel heralded its offensive by detonating remote-controlled explosives embedded in hundreds of small hand-held electronic pagers that killed around 300 Hezbollah operatives and bystanders in Beirut.
The Israelis followed that attack with similar walkie-talkie explosions, which resulted in the deaths of 400 Hezbollah members. Around 2, 000 more were wounded. Then, Israel launched bombing raids against Hezbollah’s rocket launchers.
Hezbollah responded on September 20 with 150 rockets fired into Israel and Israel’s air force attacked again. Hezbollah launched about 200 rockets over the weekend into Israel, about 50 miles away from the port of Haifa. One person was killed and an unknown number of people were injured due to panic car accidents, Israeli media said,
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant deadpanned the idea that violence has entered a “new phase.” ” The center of gravity is shifting to the north through the diversion of forces and resources”, he added.
Netanyahu’s simplest plan is to avert Hezbollah’s army’s withdrawal from the Litani River, where its army had agreed to go under a UN agreement to end a 2006 conflict in Lebanon. Since then, Hezbollah fighters and weaponry had filtered back across the river.
However, Netanyahu wants more, according to Israeli observers. ” The idea that Israel cannot realize its sovereignty over the northern parts of the country is something that cannot be tolerated”, said Kobi Michael, an analyst for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies.
For that, a survey by INSS shows that the general public backs Netanyahu’s project. A poll conducted in August showed 52 % of Israeli Jews supported a wide-scale offensive in Lebanon ( 44 % if Israeli Arabs are included ).
According to Gilbert Achcar, a professor at the London School of Oriental and African Studies,” Netanyahu and the opposition believe that there is no other option on their northern front besides for Hezbollah to accept to withdraw north.”
Achcar judged that Israel’s army and intelligence services would gain prestige by  , launching” a fierce war” that could “reinforce the state’s deterrent capacity, significantly diminished on the Lebanese front since 7 October”.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appears to be thinking about the military reputation of his organization as well.
” What happened could be described as a declaration of war”, he said in a televised appearance. Without a doubt, we have experienced a significant blow, at least in the history of the resistance in Lebanon. As he spoke, Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over Beirut to mock his broadcast.
On paper, Hezbollah appears to have the weapons necessary to avenge an Israeli invasion. Its rocket arsenal poses a threat to Israeli towns. The arsenal, according to Israeli intelligence, includes about 150, 000 rockets, guided missiles, and a few ballistic missiles capable of hitting targets throughout Israel.
The group Hezbollah has approximately 30, 000 active fighters and up to 20, 000 reservists. How many people have died in the pager and telephone bombings and the subsequent bombings in south Lebanon are unknown.
” Eliminating the threat from Hezbollah’s rockets will be extremely difficult. According to a study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies ( CSIS ) think tank in Washington, the rockets can be launched from trucks, increasing their mobility and thus survivability, or from underground bunkers, as was the case during the 2006 war.
” The consequences of a war between Israel and Hezbollah would be catastrophic”, wrote Daniel Elkin, a researcher for the Atlantic Council, another Washington-based think tank. A conflict like this would likely have a far greater impact on American culture.  , This is…a combustible situation that threatens to escalate into what could be characterized as ‘ a forever war on steroids.'”
In any case, Israel has no intention of limiting its attacks to Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon. ” It is important that we be clear—the one responsible for the fire from Lebanon is not only Hezbollah or the terrorist elements that carry it out, but also the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese state that allows the shooting from its territory”, said Benny Gantz, a minister without portfolio in Netanyahu’s cabinet. In the north and north of Lebanon, there is no target or military infrastructure that is not in our sights.
Netanyahu has fingered Iran as the source of instability on its borders. And Iran is either attempting to aid its proxies at the Israeli border or appearing to be a paper tiger.
Iran has taken no steps so far to help Hezbollah, its longtime ally, fend off the Israeli assault. Ismail Haniyeh, the assassin of Hamas leader, was killed by an Israeli missile that entered his room at a Tehran diplomatic guest house, and Iran made a pledge to avenge his death. To date, no revenge action has been taken.
Nonetheless, on September 23, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif said vengeance will come, someday:” We want to move in a more peaceful, more stable world for our citizens and for the citizens of the world. We wo n’t go to war, he declared, but we will fight back.
Biden’s Valedictory
US President Biden expressed concern over the growing Middle East war in an address addressed on September 24 to an annual gathering of the UN General Assembly. He offered a stew of platitudes that neither outlined ways to get a Gaza ceasefire nor truncate the newly intensified war in Lebanon.
” Full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest,” he said. Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible. It is actually the only way to have long-lasting security, according to Biden, while urging world leaders to find diplomatic solutions in both Gaza and Lebanon.
In reference to Lebanon, he added,” Even though the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible. In fact, it is still the only way to ensure long-term security and allows the citizens of both nations to return to their safe homes along the border. And that’s what we are working tirelessly to achieve”.
Biden’s performance exemplifies Washington’s diminished influence in the Middle East rather than a one-time diplomatic failure. The US ‘ inability to forge a Gaza ceasefire, deter Israel from intensifying the war with Hezbollah, and, for that matter, to clear the Red Sea of periodic attacks from Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen all add up to a spectacle of a downgraded superpower.
Netanyahu also objected to the US’s request for a two-state solution, a formula that has been in place for more than 35 years. It was something Boden had n’t promoted before and mentioned for the first time when the war in Gaza began to drag on.
Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College in London, criticized Biden for “performative foreign and security policy” by pouring food aid into Gaza because the country was “besieged by Israel whose war is largely funded by the US.” The act showed” the impotence of US power projection in the region”, Krieg concluded.
Before he was first elected prime minister in 1996, it would be difficult to imagine that Biden, who was a member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his distinguished legislative career, was unaware that Netanyahu had been a staunch proponent of the two-state solution.
Thirteen years earlier, Netanyahu wrote a book that laid out, according to its blurb, how real peace is possible “only if it takes the nature of Middle East politics and the volatile forces within Arab and Islamic society”.
He continued,” One simply cannot talk about peace and security for Israel and in the same breath expect Israel to significantly alter its defense boundaries,” he wrote at a time when Israel was in charge of both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
He promoted a different two-state solution: the creation of” a Jewish state” between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea and another,” the state of Jordan” where” they may exercise Palestinian Arab self-determination”.