With no exit strategy in Gaza, ex-IDF officers fear Israel will stay indefinitely

Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland believes Israel faces months of fighting in Gaza unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses the chance offered by the IDF’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to end the war.

Since Sinwar’s death this month, Eiland has been one of a chorus of former senior army officers questioning the government’s strategy in Gaza, where earlier this month troops went back into areas of the north that had already been cleared at least twice before.

For the past three weeks, the IDF has been operating around Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, the third time they have returned to the town and its historic refugee camp since the beginning of the war in October 2023.

Instead of the IDF’s preferred approach of quick decisive actions, many former security officials say the army risks being bogged down in an open-ended campaign requiring a permanent troop presence.

“The Israeli government is acting in total opposition to Israel’s security conception,” Yom-Tov Samia, former head of the military’s Southern Command, told Kan public radio.

Part of the operation has involved evacuating thousands of people from the area in an effort to separate civilians from Hamas operatives.

The military says it has moved around 45,000 civilians from the area around Jabaliya and killed hundreds of gunmen during the operation. But it has been heavily criticized for the large number of civilian casualties also reported, and faced widespread calls to get more aid supplies in to alleviate a humanitarian crisis in the area.

Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, was the lead author of a much-discussed proposal dubbed the “Generals’ Plan” that would see Israel rapidly clear northern Gaza of civilians before starving out surviving Hamas fighters by cutting off their water and food supplies.

Israel’s moves this month have aroused Palestinian accusations that the military has embraced Eiland’s plan, which he envisaged as a short-term measure to take on Hamas in the north but which Palestinians see as aimed at clearing the area permanently to create a buffer zone for the military after the war.

The military has denied it is following any such plan. Netanyahu, in a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, denied Israel was pursuing the “Generals’ Plan,” but refused to make a public declaration to that effect, a US official told The Times of Israel.

Eiland himself believes the strategy adopted by the IDF in Gaza is neither his plan, nor a classical occupation.

“I don’t know exactly what is happening in Jabaliya,” Eiland told Reuters. “But I think that the IDF is doing something which is in between the two alternatives, the ordinary military attack and my plan,” he said.

No plan to stay

From the outset of the war, Netanyahu declared Israel would bring back the hostages and dismantle Hamas as a military and governing force, and did not intend to stay in Gaza.

But his government never articulated a clear policy for the aftermath of the offensive it launched after thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages. The offensive has all but made the enclave into a wasteland that will require billions of dollars in international assistance to rebuild.

For months, there have been open disagreements between Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, reflecting a wider division between the governing coalition and the military, which has long favored reaching a deal to end the fighting and bring the hostages home.

With no agreed strategy, Israel risks being stuck in Gaza for the foreseeable future, said Ofer Shelah, a former lawmaker who directs the Israel National Security Policy research program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

“The situation for Israel is very precarious right now. We are sliding towards a situation where Israel is considered the de facto ruler in Gaza,” he said.

The government did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on suggestions that the military is getting bogged down in Gaza.

Hit-and-run raids

With Israel’s military focus now directed against the Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, the number of army divisions engaged in Gaza is down to two, compared with five at the start of the war. According to estimates from Israeli security sources there are 10,000-15,000 troops in each IDF division.

At the start of the war, Hamas possessed 25 battalions, according to IDF estimates. The army assesses the battalions were destroyed long ago, and half their fighters — some 17,000-18,000 — have been killed. But bands of Hamas operatives remain to conduct hit-and-run raids on IDF troops.

“We don’t engage with tanks on the ground, we choose our targets,” said one Hamas operative, contacted through a chat app. “We are acting in a way that keeps us fighting for the longest time possible.”

Although such tactics will not prevent the army from moving around Gaza as it wants, they still have the potential to impose a significant cost on Israel.

Col. Ehsan Daqsa, the commander of the IDF’s 401st Armored Brigade, was killed in Gaza this week when he got out of his tank to talk to other commanders at an observation point which gunmen had rigged with a booby trap bomb. He was one of the most senior officers killed in Gaza during the war.

On Friday, three soldiers were killed in Jabaliya when a powerful bomb was detonated against the tank they were in. The fourth soldier in the tank was moderately wounded.

‘No logic in remaining’

Calls to wrap up the fighting in Gaza have increased after Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 onslaught, was killed in a chance encounter with troops operating in Rafah.

“With the killing of Sinwar, there is no logic in remaining in Gaza,” said a former top military official with direct experience of the enclave, who asked not to be named.

“Methodical” pinpointed operations going forward should be carried out if Hamas regroups and resumes any war on Israel, but the risk of leaving troops permanently in Gaza was a major danger, the former official said, advocating securing the hostages and getting out.

Netanyahu’s office said on Thursday that Israeli negotiators would fly to Qatar this weekend to join long-stalled talks on a ceasefire deal and the release of hostages. But what Hamas’s position will be, and who Israel will allow to run the enclave when the fighting stops, remains unclear.

Netanyahu has denied any plans to stay on in Gaza or to allow Israeli settlers to return, as many Palestinians fear.

But the hardline pro-settler parties in his coalition — and many in his own Likud party — would like nothing more than to reverse Israel’s unilateral withdrawal, which took place in 2005, under late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the pro-settler Religious Zionism party, said on Thursday — at the close of the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah — that he hoped to celebrate the festival next year in Gush Katif, the old Gaza settlement bloc.

Times of Israel contributed to this report.