For Israel, the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, changed many things. But perhaps the most striking result has been a new definition of border security.
Israel has long regarded preemption and prevention as part of defending its borders. But for this Israeli government, the line between defense and offense is now blurred in a way that it’s never been before. The Israel-Hamas cease-fire didn’t just come to an end; Israel ended it. Driving this new approach is Israel’s determination to act unilaterally; an aversion to security arrangements that inhibit that right; an emphasis on the importance of retaining buffers and strategic points in places such as Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria; and the expectation that the United States will enable—if not support—this new approach.
The paradox of the situation is stunningly obvious. In the past year and half, Israel has managed to achieve a level of escalation dominance over Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran, creating a scenario where it can choose to escalate in ways that its adversaries will find difficult if not impossible to counter.
And yet despite its dominance, converting that advantage into durable political arrangements, or even peace agreements, will not come easily. Under the right circumstances, Israel could clearly benefit from security arrangements that are bilateral or even multilateral instead of unilateral in character. But a withholding prime minister determined to maintain himself in power, problematic Arab adversaries and partners, and the long dark shadow of Oct. 7 are certain to make Israel a risk-averse peace partner.
Nowhere is Israel’s more aggressive approach to borders more starkly reflected than in its policy toward Gaza. The Oct. 7 Hamas invasion not only led to the worst intelligence and operational failure in Israel’s history, but also called into question several of Israel’s basic security concepts: Deterrence proved ineffective, early warning systems failed, and an inadequate and poorly prepared ground defense collapsed. Tying all of these failures together was an even more catastrophic one—a failure at the highest levels of the military and intelligence establishment to imagine that Hamas had the capacity to carry out such a well-coordinated operation.
In a galaxy far, far away, the answer to Israel’s security challenges might look different: the end of Hamas’s rule in Gaza, its replacement with credible Palestinian governance, and Arab state buy-in with money for reconstruction, all wrapped together with an Israeli-Saudi regional peace agreement that includes a pathway to Palestinian statehood.
For any number of reasons, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s concern that such arrangements would push his extreme right-wing partners out of the governing coalition, these plans have remained thought experiments.
Meanwhile, Israel is making unilateral adjustments more suited to the realities that it confronts back here on earth. The Israeli-Hamas cease-fire agreement didn’t just end last week; it was ended by Israel.
Gone are the Netanyahu’s disastrous illusions about containing Hamas with Qatar’s money, keeping it focused on governing Gaza, and whacking it militarily from time to time. Even if the current Israeli military campaign results in Hamas accepting another limited hostage-for-prisoner exchange, Israel is bent not only on destroying Hamas as an organized military force, but also on ending its capacity to govern and retain political influence in the enclave.
These ambitions may prove to be otherworldly; but regardless, Israel is taking concrete steps to reduce the vulnerabilities of the villages and kibbutzim along the border with the Gaza Strip through expanding a significant buffer zone inside the enclave, deploying significant numbers of ground troops, and operating inside Gaza to preempt and prevent future attacks. Netanyahu has asserted that the day after the war ends, Israeli forces will remain in Gaza.
But the politically inconvenient reality for Israel is that Hamas is more than likely to survive, perhaps as an insurgency with the capacity to play significant role in post-conflict Gaza. And that means that while Israel may not want to reoccupy the enclave, it’s going to adopt an expansive view of its security role there, putting a premium on retaining buffer zones and acting unilaterally to protect its interests.
Israel’s new definition of border security is also playing out in its approach to Lebanon. Its military campaign against Hezbollah has hollowed out the organization, killing and wounding thousands of its fighters, taking out its senior leadership, and destroying perhaps 80 percent of its arsenal, according to the Israeli military’s estimates. But unlike in Gaza, Israel has turned its military dominance into political and security arrangements that hold real possibilities for improved security on its northern border.
With Hezbollah sidelined, the Lebanese government broke through a long-standing political impasse, forming a new government and agreeing to multilateral cease-fire arrangement with Israel, the United States, France, and the United Nations, intending to push Hezbollah fighters and weaponry north of the Litani River.
Indeed, in Lebanon, Israel is relying on both unilateral actions and bilateral cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to lay the basis for perhaps the best approach to securing the northern Israeli border in decades. Israelis and Lebanese are in the process of negotiating disputed points in their land border, the companion piece to a U.S.-brokered maritime border agreement established in 2022.
At the same time, Israel has maintained the right to act unilaterally against Hezbollah and has done so repeatedly since the cease-fire accord was signed in November. Israel has retained five strategic points along the border, and according to Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, will remain there “indefinitely” regardless of any future negotiations.
And, as in Gaza, the Trump administration is fully supportive of Israeli actions, acceding to Israel’s requests for two extensions on the agreed timetable to withdraw its forces. Israel is in daily contact with the U.S. general who is managing the cease-fire’s monitoring mechanism, and confidence in the LAF is growing. Talk of Israeli-Lebanese normalization is premature—but given where Israeli-Lebanese relations were as recently as last fall, the change has been nothing short of dramatic.
For more than a decade, Israel had been striking Iranian and Syrian military assets deep in Syria to interrupt the flow of Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah. These strikes included ground and air operations against facilities believed to be producing precision-guided missiles.
The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 dramatically demonstrated Israel’s new hypersensitivity to securing its borders. In the days following the regime’s collapse, Israel launched hundreds of strikes against the former regime’s military air, naval, ground assets and moved its forces into the roughly 150 square mile disengagement zone that has been monitored by the U.N. since the U.S.-brokered agreement between Israel and Syria in June 1974, which followed the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
Within weeks, Israel had established nine military posts lining the mountain ridges, including taking control of the summit of Mt. Hermon, giving the Israelis vantage points into Syria and Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The forces that the Israelis have deployed in those areas, according to Katz, will remain in Syria for an “unlimited amount of time.” What is temporary in the Middle East often has an odd way of becoming permanent.
Indeed, it seemed that Israel was hoping to create a large, demilitarized buffer zone south of Damascus; last month, Netanyahu warned that Israel would not allow any military forces south of the Syrian capital. Worried about the prospects of a fragmented Syria, parts of which might fall under jihadi Islamist control, Israel is reaching out to a variety of minority groups within the country, particularly the Druze. Earlier this month, Netanyahu warned that Israel would not allow the “radical Islamist regime in Syria to harm the Druze.” And there’s been speculation that Israel would like to see a Druze-controlled autonomous zone south of Damascus to create an additional buffer for Israel.
Israel might be better served by looking at Syria as an opportunity rather than as a threat, avoiding actions that may keep the latter country fragmented. But in the wake of Oct. 7, and given the current mindset in the country, it seems unlikely Israel will take the enlightened view. There are too many uncertainties—a former member of an al-Qaeda affiliate as Syria’s new president; a recent wave of sectarian killings; the rise of Turkey as the country’s key power broker (which comes as relations between Turkey and Israel are at a low point)—which will all likely compel Israel to rely on its own actions to ensure its security.
Israel has also intensified its military operations across the West Bank in the wake of Oct. 7, to a level not seen since the Second Intifada. As in other theaters, the Israeli military says that it has acted to preempt the possibility of further Hamas attacks against civilians and to stem the alleged flow of weapons into the West Bank to local Hamas-affiliated groups.
Israel has conducted extensive air and drone strikes in refugee camps and West Bank cities, killing hundreds since Oct. 7. (By comparison, in the 18 years before October 2023, only 14 Palestinians in the West Bank were killed by airstrikes.) And, for the first time since 2000, some of those strikes have been carried out by fighter aircraft. In January, Israel announced “Operation Iron Wall,” which the Israeli Chief of Staff described as necessary to preempt and apprehend “terrorists before they reach our citizens.” In late February, Israel deployed tanks into the West Bank for the first time in two decades. And in March, Netanyahu warned of the possibility of a more powerful Hamas front opening up in the West Bank.
At the same time, Israel has been acting unilaterally to pursue annexationist policies, allowing the establishment of an unprecedented number of outposts, issuing thousands of tenders for housing units across the West Bank and declaring swaths of land “state land” (almost half of all the land declared as such since the early 1990s). Israel’s military campaign has displaced at least 40,000 Palestinians from their homes, the largest displacement of civilians since the Six-Day War in 1967.
As in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, Israel has had a virtual free hand in its security and settlements policies. When asked whether the Trump administration was concerned asked about rising violence in the West Bank, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson responded that the United States “stand[s] steadfastly with Israel.”
To be sure, Israel must engage with its neighbors if it wants greater regional integration and a more secure, stable, and economically prosperous Middle East.
One might imagine that Israel’s own checkered experience with unilateral solutions might push its leaders in this direction. Unilateral solutions, whether imposed by force or political circumstance, rarely have happy endings. Israel’s 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza created the circumstances leading directly to Hamas control and militarization of the Gaza Strip. Then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s decision to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 without an agreement didn’t enhance Israel’s balance of power with Hezbollah. Within six years, Israel was fighting a costly war with Hezbollah that concluded without a decisive victory, ushering in more than a decade and a half of relative quiet in which Hezbollah rearmed and emerged as the most lethal nonstate actor in the world.
But right now, the prospects for bilateral and multilateral solutions, let alone regional integration, don’t look especially promising. Netanyahu, presiding over the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, cannot make concessions to Palestinians, lest his coalition partners bolt the government and leave him facing a conviction in his ongoing trial.
Nor does Netanyahu see himself as the midwife of a Palestinian state and divider of Jerusalem. It’s hard to see how even a more centrist government, facing an unresolved Iranian nuclear program and the progressing annexation of the West Bank, could make concessions on a Palestinian state in the face of a fearful Israeli public.
One only has to look at the state of the Palestinian national movement—split between a hollowed-out yet still insurgent Hamas and an aging, weak Mahmoud Abbas on the other—to conclude that Israel’s Palestinian partners are either unwilling or unable to rise to the occasion.
A bold Saudi move on normalization and a regional peace might help scramble the Israeli deck and create an opening. But is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ready to take such a step in the face of so many uncertainties in Gaza and the West Bank? And even if he did, it’s far from certain that there’s a sustained pathway on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking that would credibly satisfy Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli needs and requirements.
As for the Trump administration, the president seems more focused on a negotiating cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine than maintaining one in Gaza. Should Trump decide one day that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize and that Israeli-Saudi normalization is the way to get it, then he might come looking for concessions from Netanyahu. But until that day comes, the Trump administration seems perfectly content with Israel’s approach of taking care of its business on its own. And Israel, with Netanyahu in charge, is more than happy to oblige.
The post How Oct. 7 Changed Israel’s Security Doctrine appeared first on Foreign Policy.
