On August 8, 2025, Israel’s cabinet endorsed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest plan: to assert full control of the Gaza Strip, beginning with Gaza City. The move would force roughly a million residents south by Oct. 7, two years to the day since Hamas’s massacre. The symbolism of Netanyahu’s timing is not subtle. It is meant to project resolve, to frame the war as unfinished business, to tie the next operation to that trauma. But in truth, it reveals not a plan to end the war, but a plan to never end it.
Netanyahu’s long game is decades in the making. This month marks 20 years since Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, a dramatic withdrawal with no “day after” plan. That vacuum paved the way for Hamas’s takeover and years of blockade, rockets, and reprisals. Successive governments, Netanyahu’s above all, reinforced the split by quietly propping up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, ensuring no unified Palestinian leadership could press Israel toward statehood talks. Two decades on, Israel is again acting with maximal force and minimal diplomacy—and again without a credible end state.
Nearly two years into the war, the battlefield has lurched forward and back; “final pushes” have come and gone. What’s different now is stark: Hamas, as a governing army, has been stripped of its capacity to rule—its battalions shattered, its ministries dismantled, and its command structure dispersed. What remains is guerrilla warfare: still able to kill and sabotage, but no longer able to govern. Yet instead of scaling back in the wake of this military reality, Netanyahu is pressing ahead with an operation that will displace huge numbers yet again, even though military experts across the spectrum agree that everything achievable by force has already been accomplished.
Even Israel’s senior military leadership objected to Netanyahu’s takeover plan. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned that a Gaza City assault would imperil the remaining hostages and thrust exhausted troops into a “death trap,” an extraordinary act of public defiance for a chief of staff.
After the cabinet’s green light, the Israeli army announced that Zamir had approved the operation’s “main concept.” In the end, Zamir fell in line with a political order he had warned against. The episode was telling: objections may be voiced, and sometimes shape policy, but ultimately they will be overridden by a political momentum that thrives precisely because the government refuses to define a clear endpoint.
A perpetual pattern
In recent days, mediators advanced yet another ceasefire proposal with a partial hostage release; Hamas accepted. For days Netanyahu dithered, buying time with silence. Under mounting pressure, he finally declared that he had “instructed” the start of “immediate” talks for the release of all the hostages— “on terms acceptable to Israel”—even as he announced final approval for the operational plans to take over Gaza. In effect, this rejects the current offer and sets up a formula for deadlock: the very conditions Netanyahu insists on are those Hamas will never accept. What looks like movement is stalling by design. It is not negotiation; it is delay dressed as resolve. In that sleight of hand lies Netanyahu’s method: clarity would force a choice, while ambiguity keeps every option open.
As in so many prior announcements, this one keeps all options open—Netanyahu’s preferred mode of perpetual maneuver, deferred decisions, and strategic vagueness. He has already hinted this is only “the first step,” with more to follow. What that “more” will be is anyone’s guess, not least Netanyahu’s. The cycle repeats: a dramatic declaration of decisive action, followed by mission creep, inconclusive results, all without resolution, setting the stage for yet another offensive.
The pattern is unmistakable. Whenever an exit lane appeared—such as negotiations on ending the war—many critics, including myself, believe that Netanyahu blocked it or steered back into combat. In May, his government launched its most recent offensive, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots,” expanding Israel’s ground control to roughly three-quarters of the Gaza Strip. After two months of fighting, with thousands of reservists mobilized and scores of Israeli soldiers killed, the operation’s ostensible objectives were nowhere near achieved. Hamas had not surrendered; Israeli hostages remained in captivity; and a dubious plan of aid distribution not only failed to ease humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip but deepened the starvation, leading many observers, including two of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations, to call it “genocide.” Instead of pivoting to diplomacy, however, Netanyahu prepared the next assault.
Worse still, I believe that by opting to continue fighting, Israel has, time and again, squandered strategic gains. These missed opportunities are not accidental; they serve a political purpose. This past March, for instance, was one such moment, when instead of expanding a ceasefire-for-hostages deal (a swap that had paused fighting and freed 30 hostages alive), Israel violated the agreement and chose to resume fighting. U.S. President Donald Trump, who had the leverage to enforce that deal, instead gave Netanyahu a free hand to collapse it—a choice that not only doomed the hostages but began to tie the Gaza war to his own presidency.
The aftermath of the June war with Iran—a brief but intense conflict that many believed had fully restored Israel’s deterrence—was another example, in my view, of Netanyahu forfeiting progress for political power. Former negotiators and security chiefs have been blunt: the government has turned away from every viable offramp, playing even Trump in the process.
Why reject every viable offramp? Because Oct. 7 was a catastrophic intelligence failure that many predicted would end Netanyahu’s career in short order. But war gives him cover: a way to postpone the political reckoning and ensure no election is called before the last possible moment. His coalition, the most extreme in Israel’s history, is sustained by perpetual conflict. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly demand the expulsion of Gaza’s population and the reestablishment of settlements; Netanyahu avoids saying this outright, but ties himself to the far right with repeated promises of “total victory” and a steady drip of escalation.
The cost of never-ending war
Continuing a maximalist ground war after Hamas has been stripped of its military and governing capacity, let alone its ability to wage another attack on the scale of Oct. 7, does not free the hostages or make Israel safer; it only primes the next round.
The costs now mount: Israeli society is riven over the hostages and the war’s aims; the army is stretched by record-long, high-intensity combat. Just this past week, hundreds of thousands filled Tel Aviv demanding a truce to bring the captives home. The protests are not a turning point, but rather proof of how deeply the government’s refusal of an off-ramp has split the country.
Meanwhile, even Israel’s strongest allies recoil at the starvation in Gaza. Israel’s relationship with the U.S. rests largely on Trump’s mood, and even strains within the Republican Party have emerged. Most damning, the Israeli government’s deliberate choice to prolong the war has frozen the one outcome most Israelis agree on: bringing the hostages home. Yet despite this mounting toll, a clear path forward exists, one that Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.
Indeed, the way out is not a mystery; it has been on the table for months. It begins with Hamas relinquishing control of Gaza in exchange for a full ceasefire and hostage release. Gaza would then be secured by an Arab-led stabilization force, operating under international oversight, and potentially joined by European partners, while a technocratic interim administration prepares the ground for a reformed Palestinian Authority to take over. Reconstruction would proceed alongside demilitarization and Palestinian security reform, paving the way for Gaza and the West Bank to be politically reunited under a single, accountable Palestinian Authority. Arab states and Washington have both signaled readiness to contribute if the transition leads back to PA rule and a clear political horizon. Several of Israel’s key Western partners are moving toward recognizing a Palestinian state to strengthen the PA for this role. This is the sole credible political off-ramp; there is no sustainable alternative in which Israel permanently controls Gaza. Netanyahu’s answer has been to veto the very plan that could give Israel a way out.
By now, the “endless endgame” is not only Netanyahu’s. Trump, who entered office promising to free the hostages and close the Gaza chapter quickly, has instead become complicit in prolonging it. Each time he has indulged Netanyahu—most starkly in March, when he let a full ceasefire-for-hostages deal collapse—he has bound the war to his own presidency. The longer it drags on, the less it looks like Netanyahu’s forever war alone, and the more it risks becoming Trump’s war as well.
Netanyahu insists that the Palestinian Authority is indistinguishable from Hamas and therefore promises Israel will retain indefinite “security control” over the Gaza Strip, as if security could be neatly separated from civilian governance. It cannot. In practice, security control seeps into every aspect of life. The West Bank is proof: Israel’s security apparatus governs not just borders but also water and electricity, the ability to move from town to town, the granting of permits, even the terms of economic activity. To imagine Gaza under such a regime is to imagine not a free or stable entity but a territory micromanaged by the gun, combustible by design.
The war has long outlived its cause, sustained only by the political needs of the man directing it. Until Netanyahu leaves power, expect more tactical pivots dressed up as strategy, more military gambles for political gain, and more futile searches for an “endgame.”
But Netanyahu’s only endgame is no end at all.
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