Developments in Gaza are dizzying.
One day the news of the day is that Gaza’s Hamas chief Mohammed Sinwar has likely been assassinated by Israel along with one of the two highest Hamas commanders who might have replaced him.
The next day, the focus shifts to the broad new invasion of the Gaza Strip by five IDF divisions – a potential jump of tens of thousands of soldiers into and around the Strip.
Heavily covered globally but almost forgotten in the Israeli media are hundreds of Gazans reportedly killed and over 600 wounded.
With all of these developments overlapping, the IDF is beginning to conquer or take control of new areas (the government seems unable to decide between conquering or taking more temporary control, as well as resuming passage of food aid into Gaza.
What do all of these simultaneous trends mean?
However, because Israel only decided to allow food aid to pass to Gaza at the last minute and due to US pressure, it has not yet rolled out its new mechanism for ensuring that the food reaches only Gaza civilians. Therefore, next week’s food aid, slated to be handed out by the United Nations and traditional global groups, may just be intercepted by Hamas.
What do all of these simultaneous trends signify?
Does Sinwar’s death (after his brother Yahya Sinwar’s elimination in October 2024) bring Hamas any closer to crumbling or to making more concessions regarding the 59 Israeli hostages (around 21 reportedly alive) it is still holding?
We don’t completely know because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put confidantes in charge of the latest negotiations, apparently to ensure that they wouldn’t agree to a deal, so that he could reinvade Gaza.
There have been leaks from Hamas, American sources, and other Arab sources about Hamas offering bridging proposals with some level of compromise, but all of these still involve ending the war, and Netanyahu is having none of that for now.
Additionally, it is hard to tell whether Hamas will collapse militarily, given that it has not mounted any organized defense against the IDF invasions since March.
In relative terms, a minuscule number of IDF soldiers have been killed since March, and mostly on one-off ambushes, again with no broader attempts to fight Israel’s military.
So many of Hamas’s pre-war top commanders have been killed that Sinwar’s death would seem to leave only Gaza City Brigade commander Az-adin-al-Hadad alive from the five top brigade commanders, which defense sources told The Jerusalem Post would make him Hamas’s next military chief.
Next, the five IDF divisions constitute the biggest news for the military in Gaza since early 2024, the last time there was anything near that number of troops in the area.
Since then, for much of the time, the IDF was down to around 1,000 troops in Gaza at a time.
The IDF and Netanyahu hope that this latest invasion and separating the Strip up into multiple zones, with the Palestinian civilian population limited to possibly 20-30% of its full area, will finally isolate Hamas enough to finish it off or lead it to make more concessions regarding the hostages.
However, if Hamas remains hidden in humanitarian zones, often without its weapons, how will it be found, isolated, and dealt with?
And how long can the IDF keep this new invasion going with the whole world – including increasingly the Trump administration – and much of the Israeli public, opposed to it?
One reason even Israeli allies are opposed is that the ratio of killed Gaza civilians in the opening weekend of this latest campaign seems to be off the charts and higher than the rest of the war.
If for much of the war, the percentage of killed civilians to terrorists was 60% to 40% – unfortunately not a bad ratio in urban warfare where Hamas uses civilians systematically as human shields – so far IDF sources have indicated that the estimates of around 75% of civilians killed this week may be accurate. That is not to mention the around 600 wounded Gazans.
In addition, there have been, reportedly, internal allegations within the IDF that the new IDF Southern Command Chief Maj.-Gen. Yaniv Asur is less careful about incidental civilian harm than his predecessor, Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkleman.Another source of criticism is Israel’s use of the word “conquering” in many of its official press releases.
Even if in the past Netanyahu said he did not want to reconquer Gaza, if in another week or two the IDF will in fact have taken control of and be holding on to 70-80% of Gaza, it will not matter whether the prime minister said that or if it was his plan all along or not? Most of the world is already treating Israel as if it has permanently occupied Gaza.One bright spot, which might alleviate some pressure, is Israel’s resumption of allowing humanitarian food aid to pass into Gaza.
It is infuriating to many Israelis that the IDF allows food aid to get to Hamas. However, Israel fell into a self-laid trap the moment it cut off food aid in March.
There was no scenario where Netanyahu or the IDF would let Gazans just starve en masse, despite accusations by Israel’s critics. That meant that in a staring contest where Hamas does not care about its civilians, Israel was always going to lose.
An interesting question is whether Israel’s new mechanism for distributing food aid will succeed at cutting Hamas out of the food chain next week. There are so many ways for the terror group to manipulate the process that it is hard to imagine they could be completely removed from the issue.
These sometimes contradictory trends do not provide any clear picture for the future.
It is possible that Hamas will be somewhat more diminished in a few weeks or months than it is now, and it may have somewhat less control over the food aid that comes in.
But as long as Hamas has Israeli hostages, it would seem that it can again wait out Israel until Jerusalem decides it is either willing to sacrifice the hostages to continue trying to eliminate Hamas or to make concessions to Hamas in exchange for a much longer ceasefire or even an end to the war.