As protests spread around the world, Derek is joined by Natan Sachs to discuss what is currently going on in the conflict between Israel and Hamas
Today, with Gaza protests spreading across the country and around the world, we dive deep into what’s actually happening on the ground in the war between Israel and Hamas—and how this war might actually end, or lead to a broader conflict.
The status quo in Gaza is horrendous in every conceivable way. Following an attack that killed more than a thousand Israelis on October 7, Israel has retaliated with a bombing campaign more destructive than the most aggressive World War II fire-bombings in Germany. 80 percent of buildings in north Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Tens of thousands of Gaza civilians have been killed, according to various estimates. Millions are displaced and hungry, and many are camped near Rafah, where Israel is considering a new military campaign to root out Hamas leaders.
Today’s guest is Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. I asked Natan to come back on the show because, while the entire media is covering the campus protests in excruciating detail, I felt like the news cycle was losing its grip on the actual war itself. Today, I asked Natan my biggest questions about the war as it stands, including whether Israel’s military strategy has already failed; whether Hamas’s top leadership actually wants the kind of ceasefire that campus protesters are calling for; and whether anything about this war would actually change if the U.S. immediately halted military aid to Israel.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Natan Sachs discuss how close Israel has come to meeting its objectives in the war with Hamas and why negotiations have stalled.
Derek Thompson: I understood from the onset of this war on October 7 that Israel had two objectives in its war against Hamas and Gaza: number one, to free the hostages, and number two, to fully destroy Hamas. We are now six months into this war; 1.7 million people have been internally displaced in Gaza. There are shortages of food, water, medicine, among other essentials, in much of the region. Is Israel any closer to fully meeting its original two objectives?
Natan Sachs: Marginally so. Israel, the way it defined the objective of destroying Hamas was not eradicating Hamas as a movement, but destroying it as the governing power in the Gaza Strip that could threaten Israel. And in that sense, a lot of the Hamas forces have been destroyed physically and killed. Perhaps many thousands of Hamas fighters have been killed. And Hamas no longer controls many parts of the Gaza Strip, but it is not completely destroyed. In Rafah in particular, there’s still forces. And we’ve already seen Hamas come back in areas that were previously cleared by Israel, and the leadership of Hamas is still there. So in that sense, this is a very partial success. And this partial element stems from the lack of another one or two goals that really had to be there from the start for everything to succeed. Destroying Hamas is great, but if you don’t have—or not “great,” I shouldn’t use that term; nothing is great right now—but if destroying Hamas is perhaps a worthy goal, but if there was no strategy for what comes after, whatever that might be, no strategy for what is the replacement, then you cannot hope to hold the Gaza Strip free of Hamas rule.
If you think of U.S. counterinsurgency—[which was] learned very much the hard way—it first clears a territory, but then it tries to hold it, and then it tries to rebuild it. Without those elements, you are not only failing in a human sense, which I think is important, but you’re also failing in the military sense, because Hamas will come back. We saw, for example, in the Shifa Hospital in Gaza city itself, which was cleared once, and then returned to again. It was, from the Israeli perspective, evidence of Hamas using Shifa just like Israel had claimed, but it was also evidence of another thing. They had already cleared that, and Hamas was able to come back.
So in that sense, a very partial success. Hostages, there have been some number that returned early in a deal with Hamas. There have been three that have been freed by Israeli forces. Only three. And now for well over a month, there’s been another deal on the table that the sides have not come close to signing that would free more. But the strong suspicion in Israel is that of the over 130 that still remain, perhaps only 40 or some are alive, and they are probably in terrible condition, and they will not perhaps last that long. And so on this front, the lack of success is even more glaring.
Thompson: One of the latest deals on the table had a ceasefire attached to the release of these 40-some hostages. What is Hamas saying in terms of why it won’t release the hostages back to Israel?
Sachs: The stumbling block, there’s the release of hostages and the release of prisoners in Israel’s prisons, and on that, actually, there’s not a huge difference, or at least there wasn’t on certain stages of this negotiation. The big differences are on whether there would be a permanent end to this war. In other words, that Hamas remains as a force that can take over the Gaza Strip and, in particular, whether Israel would have to remove all its forces from the Gaza Strip. In other words, would Hamas be allowed to return to the northern Gaza Strip unfettered? Israel currently has actually very few forces inside compared to the past.
The ground war, to a large degree, has either ended or transformed dramatically, but it does maintain a presence in the central Gaza Strip, splitting the strip in two. And that is a point of contention. Hamas wants to be able to move back to the north. Israel refuses completely. And so the question is: Can the negotiators—the Americans, the Egyptians now more than before, the Qataris perhaps less than before, but maybe them—find a formula that would allow Israel to tell itself the war is not necessarily over and Hamas will not be able to come back, and Hamas can tell itself perhaps it will?
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Natan Sachs
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify