CNN –
Three months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a promise in a speech to citizens reeling from a horrific day of Hamas attacks.
“The IDF will immediately use its full force to destroy Hamas’ capabilities,” Netanyahu said. “We will destroy them.”
Now the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is moving into a new phase of its war against Hamas in Gaza – and there are signs that its goals are changing too.
“The record is not very kind to military campaigns aimed at rooting out entrenched political military movements,” Bilal Y. Saab, associate fellow for the Middle East and North Africa at Chatham House, told CNN.
“The IDF leadership understands very well that the most they can do is significantly weaken Hamas’s military capabilities,” Saab said.
Israel has achieved some success in this regard; Its forces claim to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, including some senior members, and demolished some parts of the group's vast network of tunnels beneath the enclave.
But the challenges remain and an endgame is far from being in sight. Only a few countries at war set deadlines. Israeli officials have warned of a protracted war that could stretch throughout 2024 and beyond.
AFP/Getty Images
Smoke rose over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombings on Friday.
It will play out before the eyes of an international community increasingly horrified by the extraordinary humanitarian crisis and rising civilian deaths in Gaza.
And as international pressure mounts, so too could domestic unease toward Netanyahu, an embattled prime minister eager to point to tangible victories.
“There is a race against time,” Saab said, outlining the key issues facing Israel’s leadership. “What will be the price of this tactical success and how much time do the Israelis have to achieve this tactical success without suffering major international outrage?”
The destruction of Hamas – the goal Netanyahu announced on October 7 – was lofty, elusive and, in the view of many analysts, impossible.
“Such a mission cannot be completed – we have seen it fail many times over the years,” Saab said.
Hamas's influence extends far beyond Gaza, so a total defeat of Hamas is at least very ambitious for Israel, if it can be achieved at all.
In a speech on the anniversary of the attacks, Netanyahu reiterated his goals for the conflict: “Eliminate Hamas, return our hostages and ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel.”
However, it remains unclear whether the IDF leadership makes eliminating Hamas a top priority. Israeli media noted that IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva omitted the destruction of Hamas when listing military targets in a speech on Thursday.
And also on Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant outlined plans for the next phase of the Gaza war, emphasizing a new approach to fighting in the north and a continued focus on fighting Hamas leaders located in the enclave's southern area.
In the third phase, IDF operations in the northern Gaza Strip will include “raids, destruction of terror tunnels, air and ground activities, and special operations,” according to Gallant.
“This phase will be less intense, but it will last longer,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute and a former Knesset member from the Kadima party, told CNN.
While the more realistic goal is a sharp reduction in Hamas' combat capabilities, many analysts say noticeable progress has been made in the last three months.
“The definition of success will not be capturing or killing all Hamas operatives, but rather ensuring that Hamas can no longer effectively rule the Gaza Strip,” Plesner said. “Hamas is organized like an army, with command and control centers, regiments and brigades. This command structure will be seriously questioned and dismantled.”
Addressing reporters in Tel Aviv last week, Netanyahu said the Israeli military was “fighting with force and new systems above and below ground” and claimed to have killed 8,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza, according to Army Radio.
CNN cannot confirm this number. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says nearly 23,000 people have been killed in the territory since the war began. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but both the ministry in Gaza and its counterpart in the occupied West Bank estimate that about 70% of those killed or injured are women and children.
Israel estimated that Hamas had about 30,000 fighters in the Gaza Strip before the war began on October 7, the Israel Defense Forces told CNN in December. The fighters are divided into five brigades, 24 battalions and about 140 companies, the IDF told CNN, each with capabilities including anti-tank missiles, snipers and engineers, as well as rocket and mortar arrays.
Israel has also reported some success in attacking the Hamas tunnel shafts, a complex notoriously difficult for IDF troops to infiltrate. The IDF released a video this week showing the demolition of a tunnel route under Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in Gaza, which it blamed Hamas for excavating.
Last month, additional videos were released that purported to show a network of tunnels leading to the homes and offices of senior Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Deif.
Mahmoud Hams/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a key target of the IDF.
But the larger goal of finding and killing Hamas' key leaders in Gaza has so far eluded Israel.
“Intelligence is king here,” said Saab. Gallant and other officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of their efforts to eliminate senior Hamas commanders, with the defense secretary promising in late December that Sinwar would “soon fall into the barrels of our weapons.”
A longtime figure in the Palestinian Islamist group, Sinwar was responsible for building Hamas's military wing before forging important new relationships with regional Arab powers as the group's civilian and political leader.
“Organizations like this replace commanders quite easily. I don’t think anyone in Hamas is irreplaceable,” Saab said. “But if you take out the symbolic leaders of the organization, who knows whether that could have a trickle-down effect, especially among people who have military responsibilities.”
It seems unlikely that the new phase of Israel's war will bring relief to Palestinians trapped in Gaza, where the humanitarian crisis has reached extraordinary proportions.
But Netanyahu is more likely to bow in the face of domestic pressure, which has increased particularly due to Hamas' ongoing capture of more than 100 hostages on October 7.
Israel believes 25 hostages are dead and still being held in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office told CNN on Friday. It is believed that 107 hostages from last year's Hamas attack are still alive.
The return of these hostages remains a goal in the new phase of the war, but failure would intensify political pressure on a crucial leader whose popularity among Israelis has only fallen since October 7.
“From day one there has been a clear disparity – there is support for the war aims and for the IDF, (but) trust in the Israeli government is at an all-time low,” Plesner said. “There is a huge gap.” ”