Throughout the war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly said that he just needs one more military maneuver to finally defeat Hamas.
In April last year, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel was merely “a step from victory” — as long as it captured Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. This March, with Rafah long decimated and Hamas still refusing to surrender, Mr. Netanyahu started a campaign that he promised would finally give Israel victory. When it did not, he launched an even broader operation in May that, three months later, has failed to dislodge Hamas’s battered remnants, while leaving many Palestinian civilians on the brink of starvation.
Now, Mr. Netanyahu is planning another major push after his cabinet voted on Friday to prepare to capture Gaza City, the main city in the enclave. That followed his announcement on Thursday that Israel would finally defeat Hamas by occupying all of Gaza and then handing it to “Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us.”
This latest endeavor, which may take weeks to begin, risks ending the same way as all his previous efforts: in a strategic dead-end, with Hamas still holding on by its fingertips, Israeli hostages still in Hamas’s grip, and Palestinian civilians trapped in a dystopian nightmare. Israel captured much of Gaza City in the first months of war, seizing some areas more than once, before relinquishing it all on the false assumption that Hamas had been defeated.
Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to expand the campaign yet again, despite intense international pressure to end the war, is even at odds with the views of Israel’s military leadership. The army is depleted after fighting what is already the longest high-intensity war in the country’s history. Fewer reservists, who form the bulk of Israel’s fighting force, are showing up for duty. The military’s stocks of munitions and spare parts are running down, officials say. And there has been a rise in deaths by suicide among discharged soldiers.
Once again, Mr. Netanyahu has prioritized his political needs by choosing to extend the war. Overriding top generals, some of whom say that Hamas has been damaged enough, the Israeli prime minister has given precedence to his far-right coalition allies, who say the war must continue until Hamas’s total destruction.
“Netanyahu has set himself an unachievable definition of success, and therefore the operation will never succeed,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.
“The definition of success should be that Hamas can never attack Israel as it did on Oct. 7, 2023 — and that has already been achieved,” Mr. Nides said. “What Netanyahu defines as success — the complete elimination of every last Hamas member — is simply not achievable.”
In his pledge on Thursday to occupy all of Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to anticipate and try to soften such criticism by simultaneously promising that Israel would not seek to control the territory in the long term. In a concession to foreign critics, he said that Israel would eventually cede Gaza to Arab partners, a move that would upset his coalition partners, who want Israel to annex the territory and resettle it with Jewish civilians.
If Mr. Netanyahu is serious, his plan could offer a more hopeful future for the strip — one in which neither Hamas nor Israel controls it. It would also be a rare example of Mr. Netanyahu publicly engaging with the kind of fraught postwar planning that alienates much of his domestic base but that is necessary for the war to end.
Yet for now, Mr. Netanyahu’s thinking is still unacceptable for many in the Arab world.
The Egyptian foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, said this week that his country was open to the idea of allowing an international force to keep the peace in Gaza.
But he also indicated that such a move needed to be in the context of a diplomatic process, rather than renewed hostilities, and one that led to the creation of a Palestinian state.
In general, analysts say, Arab governments only want to engage in Gaza at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized Palestinian leadership in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, rather than on the coattails of another deadly Israeli military campaign.
Yet the Israeli cabinet announced on Friday that, in addition to capturing Gaza City, Israel would always retain “security control” over Gaza and would not allow the Palestinian Authority to govern it.
Unless Mr. Netanyahu moderates or cancels the plan, Israel’s renewed campaign will probably make Arab leaders less likely to engage with Israel on Gaza’s postwar future, said Ibrahim Dalalsha, a Palestinian analyst.
“It is both ironic and maddening that Prime Minister Netanyahu now speaks of the need to reoccupy Gaza in order to later ‘hand it over’ to Arab forces, as if this were a new and strategic revelation,” said Mr. Dalalsha, the director of the Horizon Center, a research group in Ramallah, West Bank.
“Netanyahu’s current framing ignores the reality that Arab leaders have already indicated willingness to play a constructive role in Gaza’s future, but within the framework of a negotiated cease-fire and broader political solution and a request by the Palestinian Authority, not the government of Israel,” Mr. Dalalsha added. “That opportunity was within reach — until Israel unilaterally withdrew from talks.”
It is also possible that Israel stops short of completely occupying Gaza, or even of beginning any new operation. Though the Israeli cabinet announced its intended plan on Friday, it will take days or weeks to plan such a large maneuver and to call up enough reserve soldiers, during which time the operation could be called off.
Israeli commentators said that the discussion of occupation could be a negotiating tactic to persuade Hamas to give up without a fight.
“I don’t see him going all the way,” Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said of the Israeli prime minister. “He wants a deal, and from his perspective, every time he put more military pressure on Hamas, he got a better option for a deal.”
Whether or not the operation proceeds, the threat that it might has already won Mr. Netanyahu some breathing space at home. The far right appears to have been placated, at least for now, by Mr. Netanyahu’s pledge to occupy Gaza, even if it has angered relatives of hostages, who fear that their loved ones will not survive a full Israeli assault.
Weeks ago, Mr. Netanyahu had seemed likely to forge a truce in Gaza once the Israeli Parliament broke for its summer recess in late July, since it is procedurally difficult for members of his coalition to bring down the government while lawmakers are not in session. His decision to intensify rather than halt the war suggests he wants to keep his coalition intact beyond Parliament’s return in the fall.
Now, “Netanyahu has time and space to experiment with any number of options,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat who joined negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians during the 1990s.
“He keeps his right wing on board, maybe presses Hamas back to the table and shows a skeptical military chief of staff who’s boss,” Mr. Miller added. “Typically Netanyahu, no end game and more than a few exit ramps.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.
Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
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