Over the past year, Israel has doggedly insisted that negotiations for a Gaza cease-fire be focused solely on a phased deal that would begin with a temporary truce and see some hostages released in exchange for some Palestinian prisoners, while deferring agreement on a more permanent pact.
And yet, even as Hamas recently said that it would agree to a phased deal, the Israeli government has switched gears, saying it wanted only a comprehensive deal that would free all the hostages and end the war. It is as unclear as ever how, or when, that might happen.
At the same time, Israel said it would carry out a new, expansive campaign into Gaza City to root out Hamas militants. The military is poised this week to call up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers for its advance.
Both those steps, experts say, would most likely prolong the war, not shorten it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to keep fighting until his country has decisively defeated Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, by stripping it of its military and governing capabilities and forcing it to disarm.
Hamas has so far refused to surrender and largely rejects Israel’s terms for ending the war. Experts are skeptical that Israel could now achieve what it has not managed to achieve in the 22 months since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — whether militarily or by negotiation.
“Netanyahu has defined success as something that is unachievable,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, describing the total elimination of Hamas as an impossible goal. Success, he said, should be defined as what has already been achieved: “that Oct. 7 won’t happen again.”
The Israeli military says it already controls more than 75 percent of Gaza, but many analysts say that chasing down every last Hamas operative and eradicating the movement as an ideology is an unobtainable objective.
Mr. Nides and other experts say that only President Trump has the power to pressure Mr. Netanyahu to end the war. But for now, the Trump administration appears to be backing Mr. Netanyahu’s war plan and appears to have also reversed course on the negotiations.
About a month ago, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in a meeting with the families of hostages that Mr. Trump wanted to see all the living hostages released at once. Israel says that about 20 are still alive.
“No piecemeal deals; that doesn’t work,” Mr. Witkoff said, according to an audio recording of part of the meeting published by the Ynet Hebrew news site. He said there was a plan around shifting the negotiation toward an “all or nothing” deal.
He did not offer details and there have been no obvious signs of progress since.
The last cease-fire, reached in January, collapsed in March when Israel went back to fighting in Gaza. In the months since then, Israel and the United States, along with the other mediating countries, Qatar and Egypt, have pressed Hamas to accept a framework for another gradual deal.
That push called for a 60-day cease-fire during which about half the living hostages and the remains of several others would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Under the plan, negotiations would also start immediately for a permanent cessation of hostilities. At the time, Israeli officials described that proposal as the only offer on the table.
By mid-August, when Hamas, under pressure, had broadly accepted a deal along those lines, Israel suddenly moved the goal posts. While Mr. Netanyahu has not yet publicly ruled out a phased deal altogether, his ministers have described that approach as no longer relevant, and the government has not officially engaged with the Hamas response.
“There isn’t an option any longer for a partial deal,” Miki Zohar, a minister from Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, said on Israeli television on Saturday. “The only thing on the agenda is ending the war, along with the return of all the hostages, of course, and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip,” he added.
A comprehensive deal will be much more complicated to achieve, if at all.
According to Shira Efron, an expert in Israel policy at the nonprofit RAND Corporation, “It means more stalling and prolonging” of the war.
The Israeli military has already been in Gaza City, in the early months of Israel’s ground invasion of the enclave that began in 2023.
Ms. Efron said that Mr. Trump might think that this time, the military operation could be “quick and clean.” But, she added, it could also be “dirty and long.”
The question of which kind of deal to aim for — gradual or comprehensive — presents a serious dilemma for Israel’s political and military leaders, and shreds the emotions of the hostages’ relatives and of many citizens. A partial deal that would see only about half the living hostages released in the first phase would mean choosing who gets released and who gets left behind. There would be no guarantee that negotiations for the next phase would succeed where they failed before.
And many Israelis say they believe that Hamas will never relinquish all of the hostages, an action that would leave the militant group exposed.
“It is not clear that Hamas would want to give up on its insurance policy,” said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former official with Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security agency.
On the other hand, images released by the captors of weak and emaciated hostages have underlined the urgency of the hostages’ situation, leading many Israelis to ask whether it would be better at least to get 10 out alive sooner rather than to try to negotiate a more complicated comprehensive deal.
“There is no good answer,” Mr. Ben Hanan said.
Israel’s planned takeover of Gaza City poses risks for all sides.
The Gaza Strip is already gripped by a severe humanitarian crisis, and a report by a panel of food security experts has found famine in parts of the territory, a designation that Israel refutes.
The military plan, expected to displace nearly a million residents of Gaza City, would most likely lead to more Palestinian deaths and destruction, and could endanger the lives of hostages held in the area.
Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has already drawn severe international criticism, including from some of its closest allies.
On Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a leading group of academic experts on the topic, declared that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide.
A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry denounced the conclusion as “an embarrassment to the legal profession,” adding in a statement that it was “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.”
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including about 18,000 children and minors, according to Gaza health officials, whose toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
The Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 killed about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to the Israeli government. About 250 others were taken to Gaza, and 48 remain there, either living or dead.
Some analysts have presented the plans for an assault on Gaza City as a threat intended to pressure Hamas into agreeing to Israel’s conditions for ending the war as much as an operational certainty. If an agreement is reached, so that thinking goes, the plans could be scrapped at any time.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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