Over the past few weeks, Israel’s 20-month-old military campaign in the Gaza Strip has reached another crux point. On March 18, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) restarted the offensive, with ambitious new goals, which included targeting Hamas’s remaining civil bureaucracy as well as its fighters, and ratcheting up pressure on the organization by halting the entrance of humanitarian aid—which Hamas has weaponized to control the Gazan population and rebuild its military. Then, on May 4, the Israeli cabinet approved a more far-reaching plan, called Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which envisions not only the total defeat of Hamas but also seizing and holding the entire strip in what could amount to indefinite military control.

Although this recent operation has only begun, it has already highlighted the dangers of the war’s relentless expansion. Of the 255 hostages seized by Hamas on October 7, 2023, 58 still remain, of whom 20 are believed to be still alive. Yet as of early June, despite a concerted U.S. push for another cease-fire deal, it remains doubtful whether negotiations for the release of the remaining hostages, let alone an end to the war, would bear fruit. Meanwhile, the offensive has put Israel under extraordinary political, social, economic, and moral pressure. At home, the State of Israel faces looming challenges in manpower and resources; internationally, it confronts mounting criticism and condemnation, including from close allies.

From a strategic vantage point, the larger problem for Israel is the growing tension between its core security goals for the war and the government’s evolving designs for achieving them. At the heart of its stated war aims are the removal of the Hamas threat and the release of the hostages. But the protracted military campaign has been increasingly shaped by the ideological goals of the radical right parties in the cabinet, which include a permanent Israeli occupation, the rebuilding of Jewish settlements, and the establishment of full Israeli sovereignty in Gaza.

As the campaign drags on, these unofficial goals have increasingly influenced the government’s strategy. Decisions in war always reflect the sum of all pressures on wartime leaders, and it is now apparent that decision-making about the Gaza campaign is being shaped not only by military and strategic considerations but also by ideology, political rewards, and calculations about personal political survival. As it expands far beyond its original scope, the longest war in Israeli history might end up doing more to undermine Israel’s national security than to rebuild it.

SECURITY BY DEFENSE OR BY CONQUEST?

Almost since the outset of the campaign in Gaza, there has been a tension between Israel’s core strategic goals and the maximalist ambitions of its political right wing. At a fundamental level, the strategic aims were to remove the terror threat to Israel from Gaza for the long term by destroying Hamas’s military capabilities and creating buffer zones in and around the territory, and to create the conditions needed to achieve the return of all the hostages. Thus, Israel’s defense establishment formulated a war concept that distinguished between terrorists and the civilian population in Gaza and strived to cause significant damage to Hamas, even if not to destroy every last Hamas fighter. When the campaign was completed, the thinking went, Hamas’s terrorist army would have been defeated and its military infrastructure dismantled. At that point, Israeli forces could mostly remain outside Gaza and thwart any additional threats through ongoing counterterrorism operations, following in part Israel’s existing security concept for the West Bank.

To accomplish these goals, Israel’s military command planned a campaign in stages. First, after heavy airstrikes, the IDF would launch a massive land maneuver targeting enemy forces in specific areas, dismantling the Hamas brigades and battalions in them, and moving on to the next ones. Israeli forces would conduct repeated raids in any areas where the enemy might be resurgent, and create buffer zones between Israel’s border communities and potential new threats from Gaza. To sustain the campaign’s military achievements for the long term and prevent secured areas from falling into Hamas’s hands, anarchy or insurgency, the plan assumed that an alternative governance structure to Hamas would emerge in areas where the organization was defeated.

Yet all along, the defense establishment plan competed with a different vision promoted by radical right-wing parties that hold sway in the government. In their view, Gaza is part of the Land of Israel to which the country has a natural right, and both the territory’s terrorist organizations and its civilian population are part of the threat that has to be removed—even at the cost of sacrificing the remaining hostages. Those rightist parties also vehemently oppose the release of high-value Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails as part of any hostage deals, given that many such former captives have returned to lethal terrorism since their release—including Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who masterminded the October 7 operation. The lives of the hostages, they claim, must be weighed against those of future victims of the terrorists who would be set free in order to get them back.

Faced with these two diverging visions, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoided committing to a specific end game. In a December 2023 commentary for The Wall Street Journal, for example, he described an end state in which Hamas was destroyed, Gaza was demilitarized, and Palestinian society was deradicalized. But at the time, the Israeli government was also considering the expulsion of terrorists from Gaza and trying to persuade Egypt and other countries to take in voluntary emigrants from Gaza. Although Netanyahu said that this resettlement proposal was unrealistic and publicly ruled out an Israeli military administration of Gaza, he left these options open and avoided making any decision on alternative Palestinian governance for the territory.

THE HOSTAGE DILEMMA

In its first phase, Israel’s campaign in Gaza reinforced a gradual mission creep from the war’s original aims. After the launch of its massive ground campaign on October 27, 2023, the IDF proceeded as planned, attacking one area at a time so it could concentrate its efforts, reduce losses, and allow the civilian population to evacuate out of harm’s way.

As the war ground on, however, the campaign met several challenges on the enemy side. Hamas strategically used its well-prepared dense urban battlefield, including the hundreds of miles of tunnels it had built under the territory. It also systematically used Gazan civilians as human shields and turned hospitals, schools, and UN sites into military safe houses. For logistical purposes, it weaponized humanitarian aid to maintain its grip on the population and to finance its military effort and resurgence, refilling its dwindling ranks with new recruits. Tactically, it opted for guerrilla warfare rather than pitched battles, avoiding Israeli forces when they advanced through certain areas and returning as soon as they left.

On the Israeli side, there was also the problem of preparing the way for an alternative governance structure for Gaza—“neither Hamas nor the IDF,” as Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister, put it. But Netanyahu carefully avoided approving any such plans. He also rejected the notion of rule by the Palestinian Authority, thereby excluding Arab countries that had made their participation in Gaza’s reconstruction conditional on the PA’s endorsement. In the absence of alternative local governance emerging in areas where Hamas had been decimated or pushed out, its fighters gradually regrouped and regained control, continuing to treat civilians as shields and to police the entry of outside aid. Such has been the case in Jabaliya and Shajaiye in the northern part of the strip, and in Khan Younis in the south, all areas where the IDF had undertaken major operations and then moved on.

At the same time, it quickly became clear that there was an inherent tension between destroying Hamas and getting the hostages back. Operationally, throughout the war, Israeli special operations have successfully brought about the return of just eight hostages. The large majority of hostage returns have come as part of cease-fire agreements in November 2023 and January 2025, in exchange for releasing Palestinian prisoners and permitting a surge in humanitarian aid to the strip. On the other hand, dozens of Israeli hostages have been killed since the Israeli offensive began, some of them executed just as the IDF neared their locations. Thus, military operations intended to rescue hostages or pressure Hamas to agree to release them on Israel’s terms could actually hasten the death of the remaining hostages.

Strategically, Hamas has sought all along to use the hostages as a bargaining chip to constrain Israel and force it to end the war—and thereby guarantee Hamas’s own survival. The goal was to impose a choice on Israel: getting its hostages back or destroying Hamas. And indeed, the more Hamas insists that hostages will all be released only if Israel guarantees that it will stop the war, the more Israel shows its resolve to continue it, and the harder it is to reach an agreement. How to manage this tension has become an issue of deep controversy in Israel, dividing the public along the country’s political fault lines. Families and activists calling for the Israeli captives’ release are accused by some of supporting the enemy.

For his own reasons, Netanyahu has chosen to present the hostage dilemma as a zero-sum game. “Returning them is not the first goal of the war,” he has said publicly; the main objective, as he puts it, is “victory over Hamas and Israel’s enemies.” But by setting up this contrast, the government has in fact endorsed the false choice Hamas has dictated between the release of the hostages and its own defeat. This choice inevitably prolongs the war, polarizes Israel, and consolidates the right-wing coalition while endangering the remaining hostages’ lives.

In fact, these two goals are not mutually exclusive. Temporally, the struggle against Hamas until its final defeat may continue for years or decades, but the hostages face a clear and immediate threat of death. By their nature, cease-fires are reversible and flexible, but dead hostages cannot be brought back to life. Conversely, freed terrorists can be rearrested or even killed, as some have already discovered. Resolving the tension between the hostage question and the war, then, requires securing the release of the hostages first and eradicating Hamas later. This is not a zero-sum game if Israel phases its objectives. By choosing instead to expand military operations and seek more maximalist goals, the Israeli government raises the pressure on Hamas but also risks losing the remaining hostages long before the threat from Gaza is removed.

CHARIOTS IN THE MIRE

Israel’s second campaign in Gaza, which began in March and has since been elaborated in Operation Gideon’s Chariots, aims to defeat and subdue Hamas “to the end.” This plan also aims to increase the pressure on Hamas to free all the hostages. Yet while the IDF chief has repeatedly stressed that the operation’s priorities are the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas, Netanyahu has stated the opposite. And according to the order of priorities outlined for the Israeli news media, the military objectives are to defeat Hamas, take operational control of Gaza, disarm the territory, strike all remaining targets within the Hamas regime, Hamas regime targets, concentrate and move the Gazan population—and, last of all, bring home the hostages.

The new campaign seeks to separate Hamas from the population as well as from access to humanitarian aid, denying its fighters the ability to operate from densely populated areas or to control major areas of Gaza. To accomplish that, the plan calls for evacuating the entire population from targeted combat zones, such as the northern strip, to designated areas, mainly in the south. Only in these areas will humanitarian aid be provided—by an American company under direct Israeli security arrangements—to avoid previous distribution arrangements that were exploited by Hamas. Under this plan, the combat zones will be cleared of all terrorists, with any “threatening structures” flattened and tunnels destroyed. The IDF will remain in place in these areas as well as the security zone, including on the Egyptian border, for an indefinite time. The operation also openly encourages the voluntary emigration of Gazans from the Gaza Strip.

Gideon’s Chariots was officially launched on May 16 with increased airstrikes, warnings to Gazans to evacuate southward, and the beginning of ground attacks. Netanyahu announced that “a decision was made to go all the way, we will occupy Gaza and our security control there will be forever.” Deploying all of its regular and a few reserve combat brigades to Gaza under five division commands, the IDF controlled about 40 percent of the strip by late May, a figure it plans to raise to 70 percent within two months. The operation is proceeding slowly: Israeli media have described it as a raze and demolish campaign in which the army flattens the remaining buildings in combat areas and the tunnels beneath them. The plans for the rest of Gaza and for what a total victory over Hamas will look like remain unclear.

For Israel’s far-right, the new offensive is a chance to advance larger ideological goals. According to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the campaign will “destroy what is left of the Gaza Strip.” As he put it, “The residents of Gaza will reach the southern Gaza Strip and from there, God willing,’’ travel “to third countries as part of President Trump’s plan.” Smotrich said in late May: “We’re not afraid of victory, conquest, and occupation.”

For now, the new campaign allows the possibility of different outcomes. It can inflict additional damage on what remains of Hamas and seek its surrender without committing Israel to military rule in Gaza. Or it can lay the ground for direct Israeli occupation, possibly opening the path for settlement and annexation. Avoiding decisions about the day after while blocking other alternatives to Hamas rule from emerging, Netanyahu continues to maintain latitude between these two choices but is inching down the slippery slope toward military rule, with or without the resettlement of Palestinians. The strategic, diplomatic, political, societal, and moral costs of such an outcome would be profound. It also would entail extraordinary military and economic costs.

A long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza—with a population of more than two million in an urban hellscape, enduring an ongoing humanitarian disaster amid a diehard insurgency—would be the definition of a military nightmare. The IDF, which already faces shortfalls of more than 10,000 soldiers as a result of casualties and the length of the war, will find itself pinned down in a bloody quagmire for years to come. The cost of maintaining those forces would be in the billions of dollars. In such an environment, a large occupying army would set the stage for an insurgency whose fighters lived among the dense population like fish in the sea. And in the case that Israel withdrew without laying the groundwork for alternative governance, either Hamas would return or chaos would reign, with local warlords battling for control amid extreme human suffering.

ULTERIOR MOTIVES

As recent developments show, Israeli decision-making in this war has been driven not only by competing strategic visions but also, and sometimes mainly, by political considerations. From the outset, the extreme right-wing members of the Israeli cabinet have supported the total destruction of Hamas and the prolongation of the war and opposed all cease-fires, even at the expense of hostages’ lives. Netanyahu’s decisions on hostage negotiations and the conduct of the war have been made in the shadow of continual threats by Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, to resign if the war stops; were they to step down, the government might fall and Netanyahu could lose power. Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who served in the war cabinet formed after October 7, said he observed that the government was often influenced by extraneous considerations in its decision-making, both personally and on the political level, in the service of the survival of the coalition and the government.

By continuously expanding the war amid rising costs and the absence of a clear end goal, the government has completely contradicted Israel’s core security concept. The country’s founding fathers emphasized the importance of short, intense wars that could limit casualties and costs while maintaining foreign legitimacy and internal cohesion. Netanyahu himself had previously avoided drawn-out wars in favor of short operations with limited costs. But this time, it is a different Netanyahu.

The prime minister’s prolongation of the Gaza campaign and steady avoidance of final deals and day-after plans cannot be explained simply by his familiar penchant for procrastination and last-minute decisions. For months, he skirted major decisions in the war in Gaza. More important, he delayed the decision to go on the offensive in Lebanon, leaving Israeli forces on the northern border to spend 11 exhausting months on the defensive. In the end, he made the decision to attack Hezbollah only when faced with a “use or lose” dilemma: in September 2024, when an Israeli “Trojan horse” operation to equip Hezbollah members with explosive paging devices risked being discovered. He was finally forced to greenlight the sabotage campaign, which quickly led to Hezbollah’s defeat.

Meanwhile, in the negotiations over the hostages in Gaza, Netanyahu has insisted on partial deals, refusing to accept any agreement that would release all of them and end the war. Some have suggested that he has limited his decision-making to the immediate tactical level because he lacks a larger strategy. But it is possible that it is simply a strategy focused on another level. Netanyahu and his supporters have repeatedly claimed that certain things cannot be done “in the middle of war”: holding public protests against the government, establishing a national commission of inquiry into the October 7 disaster, or even holding elections. At the same time, the war has become a “reason” for seeking to urgently remove officials who uphold the rule of law, such as Israel’s attorney general or the head of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, and replace them with obedient loyalists. Such efforts became especially urgent when an investigation began into “Qatargate,” or the suspected intervention of a foreign power in the prime minister’s office itself—ironically, in the middle of war.

No matter the intensity of the fighting, the formal state of war and the Gaza campaign have given the Netanyahu government emergency powers and considerable freedom of action. Again and again, the government has cited the state of war and its need to lead it as reasons for postponing hearings in a criminal trial of Netanyahu for corruption—a prosecution that is his ultimate existential concern. As the war enters another stage, the relative influence of domestic politics—the survival of the government coalition and Netanyahu himself—on decisions seems especially high. The situation raises questions about whether the government is pursuing what is good for Israel and its people or simply prioritizing the survival of the government and its leader.

THE PRICE OF PERPETUAL WAR

Vaguely defined at the outset, the war’s initial goals left considerable room for interpretation. And indeed, the longer the campaign has progressed, the clearer it is that two contradictory purposes are in play. One is security-pragmatic; the other ideological-messianic. Against a regenerating Hamas, the demand for “total victory” and the removal of the Gaza threat “to the end” is a recipe for forever war. Even if its larger goals have not been officially adopted by the government, the “total victory” school appears to be gaining the upper hand. But a reckoning may be on the way.

In its opening weeks, the all-out Gideon’s Chariots operation has already met with difficulty in securing reservist turnout. But establishing and maintaining military control of Gaza, as is now called for, will require a far more significant investment of forces and resources—at a scale that will affect Israel’s national priorities and the state of society, the economy, and the military for decades to come. Having pursued its campaign for months without significant opposition from allies, the government may have mistakenly assumed that it could sharply escalate the war unhindered. But as the scope of destruction and civilian suffering has grown, so have the voices of condemnation in the Middle East and around the world, leading to growing signs of political and economic pressure, including from friendly parties, above all the United States.

Israel finds itself in a political, social, and moral crisis unlike any it has confronted since its founding. It now looks as if the end of the war will come only when the government hits the hard cliffs of reality, whether through the soaring costs in blood and treasure, acute constraints in resources, or overwhelming international pressure, with U.S. President Donald Trump being the most plausible war-stopper at present if he decides to take that course. Or suppose that a political crisis exposes the gap between government policy and the will of the majority of the Israeli public. Until such an event happens, however, the most likely future is an ever-expanding war with mounting costs to Israelis and Palestinians and diminishing returns for Israel’s security.