The boy appears to be twitching, has wide eyes, and is covered in ash and debris. As a doctor hugs him, the boy, whose name is Muhammed Abu Louli and who has just survived an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip, contorts his frightened face and lets out a long scream.
On another evening in the besieged area, veteran Al Jazeera journalist Wael Dahdouh is live on air when he receives the news: An Israeli attack has wiped out his family, including his wife, son, daughter and grandchild.
Across Gaza, doctors are working to the bone in the blockaded enclave’s dilapidated hospitals, fainting in shock as they see their own mutilated, bloodied family members among the dead.
And tents have popped up in the southern part of the strip, shelters for those fleeing Israel’s indiscriminate bombings. Palestinians say the sight is eerie and reminiscent of the Nakba in 1948, when many were forced to leave their homes during the founding of Israel.
These have been the scenes in Gaza for weeks, as Israel’s retaliatory campaign following Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israeli soil enters its fourth week.
Losses are increasing, with the death toll in Gaza reaching over 7,000 people, many of them children. Israel has been amassing equipment and forces and carrying out brief incursions to prepare the plan for a major ground offensive against the impoverished enclave.
But is war the only way this can happen? Or are there other options?
The short answer: A longer, more sustained war triggered by a ground invasion is still very likely. There is also the possibility of ending the conflict through diplomacy, albeit with a number of thorny questions surrounding the hegemony of Western power. A third and most extreme scenario would be the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip – or the complete expulsion of Palestinians from the area.
Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh at the funeral of his family members killed in an Israeli attack [Atia Darwish/Al Jazeera]
The “bloodiest form of warfare”
It would be like the battles of Stalingrad, Grozny or Mariupol.
The deadly, protracted sieges in the 1940s Soviet Union, 1990s Chechnya and last year in Ukraine are the best examples of what a ground invasion of Gaza would look like, according to Zoran Kusovac, a strategic analyst and consultant.
That scenario would mean a prolonged war — which some analysts say is exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants.
Netanyahu’s desire for a protracted conflict is to distract from the years of corruption cases he faces and the weekly protests against his government’s reform of Israel’s justice system, said Haim Bresheeth, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies ( SOAS). ) in London and author of An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation.
“He wants it to be very long [so that he doesn’t] Go to prison. And after the war, who will have the energy to put him in prison?” Bresheeth told Al Jazeera that Netanyahu also wants to assert himself as “the hero who destroys Hamas.”
“He is not worried about the people who were killed by the attackers on October 7th. And he’s not worried about the prisoners of war.”
But a prolonged war with a total ground invasion of Gaza would amount to urban warfare, the bloodiest form of warfare, Kusovac said.
“An urban war in Gaza would be terrible in terms of civilian casualties,” he told Al Jazeera.
If such a ground invasion were to occur, it would likely begin at night because Israeli forces have an advantage in night exercises, Kusovac said.
But Gaza is also well defended, with its network of tunnels that Hamas knows inside out and that could be planted with mines should the Israelis try to break into them, he said.
Nevertheless, Israel is equipped with sophisticated technology such as robots that can penetrate these tunnels, Kusovac said. These are not just Hamas outposts, but also how food and other essential goods get into the blockaded area.
The scale of this conflict is already different when compared to previous Israeli attacks on Gaza and the disproportionate scale of military operations against Palestinians, said Loreley Hahn Herrera, a lecturer at the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS.
The response to the Hamas attack was a “real act of revenge by Israel,” she said.
“It really is [an] Offensive based on area bombing in Gaza,” Herrera told Al Jazeera.
Zachary Foster, a Palestine historian and graduate student at Princeton University, said the scale of violence against Palestinians was staggering compared to previous deadly attacks against Gaza in 2008 and 2014.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 1,385 Palestinians were killed in 22 days in 2008, while 2,251 Palestinians were killed in the 50-day bombardment of Israel in 2014.
In the five days after October 7, Israel dropped over 6,000 bombs on the densely populated area, more than in the 50 days in 2014. The death toll in Gaza is as a result many times higher than 20 days after the start of the current conflict in the past.
Previously, Israel targeted specific buildings that left surrounding buildings intact, while now Israel has leveled entire streets and neighborhoods, Foster said.
“[There’s] “No attempt to differentiate between military and civilian personnel,” he told Al Jazeera.
A total siege of Gaza by cutting off food, water and electricity, lasting as long as this conflict, is also fundamentally new, Foster said.
The historian also keeps records of Israeli politicians and pundits who have expressed “genocidal intent” since the events of October 7 – also unprecedented, he said in his list naming 24 people As of October 20th.
A Palestinian carries a wounded baby he recovered from the rubble of a devastated area following Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City [Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE]
Diplomacy: Now or “after another 5,000 dead civilians”?
Still, Foster said that every day that passes that Israel decides against a ground invasion reduces the likelihood of such an invasion.
A protracted war would result in huge losses of Israeli military personnel and could expand the scale of the war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in a much more serious way, something Israel wants to avoid, he said.
Furthermore, Hamas would be prepared to wage a guerrilla war through the use of its “booby-trapped” tunnels, which would be “a nightmare scenario” for Israel, Foster added.
A diplomatic solution is therefore the only way to continue the conflict, he argued.
“I think that’s the only way it’s going to turn out,” he said. “The only question is: is there a diplomatic solution now? Or is it after another 500 or 5,000 dead civilians?”
For both sides to come to the negotiating table, both sides would have to compromise, Foster said.
Israel is likely to demand the release of prisoners taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 and a halt to rocket attacks, while Hamas will push for an easing of the blockade of Gaza and a halt to the bombing of civilian areas, he said.
But the road to diplomacy seems to be long.
The normalization of Arab countries with Israel in recent years has prevented greater condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, complicating a possible diplomatic solution and risking an escalation of the crisis across the region, the analysts said.
Arab leaders should be held accountable for abandoning the Palestinian cause, Herrera said.
There was also limited success at the international level, as the UN Security Council was unable to pass resolutions for a ceasefire due to vetoes.
US President Joe Biden’s militaristic approach to foreign policy and Europe’s lagging behind in the “American agenda” are to blame, argued Bresheeth.
“Biden is a conflicted politician who refuses to discuss anything else [solutions] as military attacks,” he said, adding that the US probably sees this war as a war for profit, an opportunity to sell more weapons.
“The forces that want a peaceful solution are all countries that do not have enough influence in the UN,” Bresheeth added.
Meanwhile, Western leaders have visited Israel and spoken out unequivocally in favor of the country’s “right to self-defense.”
“It is impossible to have a country without a people”
A third possible scenario could change the entire makeup of the Gaza Strip, either through Israel reoccupying the area or through the expulsion of all Palestinians there.
“I think that Israel’s interest in reoccupying the Gaza Strip territory is essentially due to Israel’s goals since the 1940s. [since the] “The creation of the State of Israel, which will have the largest land area with the smallest number of Palestinians,” Herrera said, arguing that it was part of Israel’s mission to “complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
Furthermore, Israel’s evacuation order for Palestinians to move south of the Strip near the border crossing with Egypt, while it continues to bomb the southern sector and the border crossing itself, “really speaks in favor of them driving out the Palestinians once again and taking most of it.” want land,” she added.
But Palestinians resisted the idea of evacuating the Gaza Strip, and families who had headed south also returned to their homes in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, preferring to die in their homes as Israeli bombardments continued unabated stop.
Anis Mohsen, editorial director of the Institute for Palestine Studies’ Arabic-language journal, spoke with a friend in Gaza who is one of many who have returned from southern Gaza.
His friend’s decision to move south changed after strikes there hit refuges such as hospitals and churches, he said.
“It is impossible to have a country without a people, so people should stay in their land,” is the sentiment among Palestinians, Mohsen told Al Jazeera.
A child injured in an Israeli bombardment is brought to the entrance of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, for emergency treatment [Mahmud Hams/AFP]Furthermore, Egypt has rejected the idea of allowing Palestinians to immigrate to its Sinai territory, saying it would lead to their expulsion from Gaza.
According to Kusovac, the complete evacuation of the Gaza Strip is still a right-wing extremist idea in the Israeli public – but one that has gained traction in recent weeks.
And it is consistent with Netanyahu’s thinking: if it were implemented, there would be no more Hamas, no more rockets, while the Israeli prime minister would emerge as the country’s savior, able to use the devastated Gaza Strip as territory for further Israeli settlements to offer, he said explained.
Lessons from history
No matter how the conflict develops, the Palestinians in Gaza will be worse off than ever before, Foster argued.
“The most important lesson to be learned from the last five wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is that it is safe to assume that the innocent people of Gaza will be forgotten,” he said.
The blockade is unlikely to be eased, the vast majority of people will continue to rely on food donations, there will be electricity shortages and people will continue to suffer from multiple public health crises, he said.
“I think history teaches us that the world has basically forgotten the people of Gaza [have deemed] You have to give them a life in an open-air prison,” Foster said.
But a changing public discourse in the West about the plight of Palestinians is also gaining ground, Herrera said, as the daily realities of the war are captured by Palestinians themselves online.
And at the end of the day there will be no real winners, said Bresheeth.
“Nothing good can come from this situation and those responsible are not only the Israelis, but also their paymasters and supporters in the West who are encouraging them to commit this genocide,” he said.