Israel signals shift in Gaza amid US pressure — but war presses on

Israel is carrying out a significant shift in its military operation in the Gaza Strip nearly three months into its war to defeat Hamas, as the Biden administration presses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to scale down its campaign. 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced this week its decision to withdraw and rotate out military units, reportedly amounting to five brigades or several thousand troops, after steadily ramping up its operations in Gaza since Hamas’s brutal attack against Israel on Oct. 7. 

President Biden has staunchly supported Israel’s right to wage war against Hamas, but the United States has increased pressure on Israel to shift to a more targeted campaign, taking measures to protect civilian life and ease the humanitarian crisis for nearly two million people.  

The move follows Israel’s statements in recent weeks that it would move to a lower-intensity phase of the conflict focused on targeted raids, compared with a sweeping aerial and ground assault aimed at destroying Hamas military tunnels, rocket launchers, weapons caches and command posts. 

The Israeli attacks have also wrought immense suffering on the civilian population in the narrow strip of land, killing some 22,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. 

“I would say it reflects military logic and necessity,” said Seth Frantzman, an adjunct fellow in Israel with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, describing the shifting campaign.

“Hamas has been partly defeated, and it makes sense that you would want to have some of these soldiers returning home, to their families, or for the economy.” 

Other units rotating out are primarily involved in training, Frantzman explained, and will go back to preparing forces for what is expected to be a war that will last months, if not years. 

Corey Feldman, an American Israeli reservist who spent two months fighting in Gaza, said when his company was released a few weeks ago, his commander said in no uncertain terms that the unit would be back to duty in 2024. 

“It wasn’t ambiguous,” he said. “War sucks. War is not a good thing or a fun thing, not a thing that anyone asks for or desires. But sometimes it’s a necessary thing. And this is a fight for our homeland and a fight to keep our family safe. And so there’s no price that we won’t pay.”

While Biden has increased public warnings to Israel over the Palestinian death toll and postwar occupation of Gaza, he has refused growing calls within his party to condition U.S. military assistance to Israel on the conduct of the war. 

Last month, he signed off on two weapons sales that skirted congressional approval and have opened him up to criticism, particularly among a growing swath of Democrats demanding a cease-fire. 

“Unnecessarily bypassing Congress means keeping the American people in the dark. We need a public explanation of the rationale behind this decision — the second such decision this month,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Saturday. 

Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen and director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, called it “extraordinary” that Biden had twice used presidential authority to send weapons to Israel. 

But despite the criticism from the left, lawmakers are likely to follow through on Biden’s national security supplemental request for Israel — more than $10 billion — when they return from the holiday recess. 

Bodine warned that the Biden administration’s stance alongside Israel — when even allies such as Germany, France and the U.K. have called for a cease-fire — is going to impact U.S. influence on other global conflicts. 

“We are more isolated on a much more consequential issue than we have been before, and that’s squandering the international support, even wobbly on the edges, that we had with Ukraine. This is going to have major consequences,” she said. 

Bodine said Israel’s decision to announce a withdrawal of troops was likely “​​urged on by a lot of pressure from the [the U.S.] and others” but largely reflects the changing nature of the battlefield and the strain on the Israeli economy.

An analysis by the Institute for the Study of War said that about 23 out of Hamas’s 30 battalions — a force ranging between hundreds to 1,000 fighters each — have been degraded, but that it likely maintains “a deep bench of experienced military commanders.” 

“Israel claims it has defeated almost all of the Hamas battalions in the northern part of the Gaza Strip and most of the ones in the central Gaza Strip,” Frantzman said, “which means there isn’t necessarily a lot more to defeat except the remnants of Hamas in the south.”

He said that makes it possible for Israel to transition into a lower-intensity conflict as it settles on a strategy for the next phase of the war.  

Frantzman recently toured northern Gaza alongside the IDF’s so-called ghost unit, which combines special forces, infantry, combat engineers, drones and tanks.

“It was clear that what’s important now is all these kind of pinpoint raids and trying to find all this Hamas infrastructure, like tunnels, or to neutralize threats when they emerge,” he said. “You want to make sure you have drones in the air, make sure you can identify a [Hamas fighter] as fast as possible, otherwise they’ll vanish back into the urban landscape, I think that’s the real challenge.”

While Hamas’s main military capabilities are centered in Gaza, it also supports terrorist attacks in the West Bank, with its political leadership spread out across the Middle East.

Israel has killed a number of top Hamas commanders, including Saleh al-Arouri, who was reportedly assassinated Tuesday in Beirut by an Israeli drone. However, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack, remains at large in the strip. 

Michael Koplow, chief policy officer with the Israel Policy Forum, called reports of Arouri’s death “a huge deal” and a blow to Hamas’s financing and logistical operations in the West Bank. 

“After Sinwar, he would have been the most important Hamas leader for Israel to eliminate in order to handicap the group,” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. 

Israel is also still working to restart negotiations to release more than 100 people Hamas is holding hostage — including men and women, young to elderly, and IDF soldiers — that were kidnapped from Israel on Oct. 7.

An initial deal at the end of November saw the return of more than 100 hostages to Israel in exchange for a weeklong pause in fighting, a scaling up of humanitarian deliveries to Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. 

Axios reported Monday that Israel rejected a proposal by Hamas for a months-long pause in fighting in exchange for more hostages but said the offer showed the U.S.-designated terrorist group was ready to engage in negotiations. 

“There’s a big question mark about whether or not the campaign to pressure Hamas to release more hostages has been successful,” Frantzman said. “Especially if the case is that the campaign becomes less intense, then how will Hamas be pressured to release hostages?”

He added that there’s little pressure in Israeli society to end military operations. 

“People are very united, I think, in terms of the war efforts as long as they think something’s being accomplished,” he said.

“Hamas still has thousands of fighters, and has lots of terrorist infrastructure, and the hostages have not been returned.”

— Updated at 9:56 a.m.