- Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann says Israel will find it ‘very difficult to dislodge and defeat Hamas,’ warns of ‘real risk’ of regional spillover
- Israel’s ‘main objective is to incorporate the West Bank into Israel to annex it, but not to make the Palestinian population Israeli citizens,’ says Hiltermann
- Israel will press on with attacks and total siege for as long as possible to make Gaza ‘unlivable’ for Palestinians, says analyst M. Muhannad Ayyash
- Israel may be striving to end Hamas rule in Gaza, set the ground for return of Palestinian Authority, says Israeli expert Yonatan Freeman
ISTANBUL
As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages on in its second month, the jury is still out over whether the Israeli military has made any gains against the Palestinian group.
What is for certain, though, is the staggering amount of death and destruction that Israel has caused in the Gaza Strip, the besieged and blockaded Palestinian enclave governed by Hamas.
“For sure, in the process of fighting Hamas, Israel is destroying Gaza,” Joost Hiltermann, MENA program director at the International Crisis Group, told Anadolu.
He believes that as long as Hamas is fighting, it is not defeated.
“Right now, there are very intense battles taking place, which to me means Hamas is not being defeated,” he said.
Political analyst M. Muhannad Ayyash has the same view, saying that all Israel has done so far is destroy Gaza.
“It doesn’t seem that they have destroyed much of Hamas’ infrastructure,” he told Anadolu.
There are no neutral observers on the ground to verify the actual claims, be it Israel saying it has advanced or Hamas refuting that, said Ayyash.
However, Yonatan Freeman, an Israeli international relations expert, believes that Israel has “no goal of destroying Gaza, but rather seeks to target Hamas.”
What lies ahead
Hiltermann believes it is still “way too early” to ascertain any concrete outcomes of the deadly conflict, which has now claimed more than 11,000 Palestinian and around 1,200 Israeli lives.
One possibility is this turning into a much longer and larger conflict, he said.
“I think … Israel will find it very difficult to dislodge Hamas and defeat Hamas from Gaza, and there’s a real risk that the conflict will spread to Lebanon and other places,” he said.
“So, if that happens, for sure, it’s going to take a long time. For the moment, it looks really bleak.”
Ayyash, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal University in Canada, said a possible outcome that Israel is aiming for is to “take over the northern half of the Gaza Strip, expel Palestinians from their land, colonize it like they’ve done other Palestinian lands and make it part of Israel.”
Israel, he added, also wants to “destroy or weaken Hamas to such an extent where they either no longer exist or are restricted to a small area in the south.”
“I don’t know if they’ll be able to achieve that, but that is a possible outcome since that is their plan,” said Ayyash.
“That would mean basically the end of the two-state solution, which was already dead for many years now, but then there will be no pretension towards it.”
Under this outcome, Palestinians will be offered “some kind of semblance of self-administration in really small areas of the West Bank and whatever remains of the Gaza Strip,” he added.
“And it would just be self-administration, not statehood, not sovereignty, not self-rule. It would just be self-administration, meaning that the Palestinian Authority would continue to be a subcontractor of the Israeli state and just police Palestinians,” said Ayyash.
Another possibility, according to the analyst, is Hamas achieving its stated aim of resisting and foiling Israel’s plan and “maintaining their hold on the Gaza Strip.”
“In such a case, the Israeli state would be forced to retreat, and what they would do is cut off all movement of people and goods through Israel to Gaza,” he said.
“Hamas would stay in power, but Israel will continue to restrict the entry of food and water and electricity, and make life basically unlivable for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, with the long-term goal of making life so impossible that Palestinians would no longer want to live there or they would try to overthrow Hamas.”
The third possible outcome could be a regional war, according to Ayyash.
“If that happens, then nobody knows, nobody can tell you what the possible outcomes of that would be,” he added.
On the other hand, Freeman, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also feels that it is too early to assess the possible outcomes.
“Generally speaking, though, it will depend on three main factors: whether or not Hamas still will have a hold on power in Gaza, whether there will still be Israeli hostages unaccounted for, or whether or not the conflict expands dramatically to other arenas such as Lebanon,” he told Anadolu.
“I think that the optimal solution that, at this time, Israeli leaders may be striving for will be first to end Hamas rule and hold in Gaza, provide the ground for the return of the Palestinian Authority through maybe elections, and to maintain a security buffer inside Gaza territory to push away potential future threats from Israeli communities on the border.”
What next for Gaza?
As far as a cease-fire or pause in hostilities is concerned, Hiltermann feels the enclave’s situation has already deteriorated to a point that could be beyond recovery in the short term.
“I don’t see any progress in getting a humanitarian pause or cease-fire. It could happen, but so far it hasn’t happened,” he said.
“The destruction in Gaza is so extensive that it’s very difficult to see that, even with a cease-fire in place, how people can go back to some form of normal life anytime soon.”
The question then becomes who will end up governing Gaza and how could there be a return to stability there, he added.
Ayyash, meanwhile, believes that Israel would press on with its attacks and total siege for as long as possible to make Gaza “unlivable” for Palestinians.
“This isn’t about Hamas. It was always an attack on the Palestinian people as a whole and an effort to expel them from Gaza and make Gaza unlivable for human habitation, Palestinian human habitation. That’s what this operation is about,” he asserted.
“The assault on the Palestinian people hasn’t stopped for 75 years and it will continue after this particular moment of intense genocide ... It could go on for weeks and months, for all we know.”
Freeman, meanwhile, said that Israeli society completely backs the “military operation” to eliminate Hamas, “which may take some time and be costly in soldier lives.”
“At this point Hamas has been weakened, but there is still work to be done to further weaken its hold on power,” he said.
“The length of the conflict may depend on Israel continuing to get international legitimacy, which at this point continues to be high.”
Role of regional actors
Freeman said the main role of regional countries right now is to “pressure Hamas to release the hostages, many of them with foreign citizenship.”
“Secondly, to put into place humanitarian assistance to Palestinians affected by the fighting,” he said.
Hiltermann said Arab countries have not been “doing anything except calling for a cease-fire.”
“Qatar is involved in negotiations over hostage releases, and that’s about it,” he said.
“I don’t expect anything else from that because they’re so afraid and worried about the war spreading throughout the region.”
On a potential spillover in the region, the Crisis Group expert said there is “always a risk of this happening,” pointing to the ongoing exchanges on the Israel-Lebanon border and from Yemen towards Israel, as well as the attacks from Iraq on US bases in Syria.
West Bank and the Middle East
About the increasing violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, both by Israeli settlers and the military, Hiltermann believes that things can “escalate further.”
“We’ve seen in the last few days since, since Oct. 7, also a hardening of the Israeli occupation and the increase of the actions by Israeli settlers. So, you know, this could, this could escalate further,” he said.
Clearly, Israel’s main objective is not to occupy Gaza or to reoccupy Gaza, he added.
“Its main objective is to incorporate the West Bank into Israel to annex it. But not to make the Palestinian population Israeli citizens,” he said.
Regarding the repercussions of the conflict in the Middle East, Hiltermann said the region “will not look the same as it did before.”
“I think to some extent, the deep divisions that existed before between, on the one hand, Arab states seeking to make peace with Israel, on the other hand, Iran and its non-state allies opposed to that, that division is deepening,” he said.
However, he is optimistic that Iran and Saudi Arabia “can talk to each other now again, and that can help reduce tensions.”
Regarding the normalization of ties between the Arab countries and Israel, he said that the process would be delayed, if not canceled.
