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This weekend, Israel’s war in Gaza turned six months old. It’s already left at least 33,000 people dead in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel continues to mourn not only for the 1,200 people estimated killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, but also for the 250-plus soldiers killed in Gaza since the war began.
There are signs of an inflection point. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said that its 98th commando division, which consists of special ground forces, had “concluded its mission” in southern Gaza and would leave the enclave “to recuperate and prepare for future operations.” Only one brigade would remain in southern Gaza, the IDF said, stationed upon a corridor that divides northern and southern Gaza.
Concurrent with this troop drawdown, Israel has moved to open additional access points to northern Gaza that would allow more aid to flow in — in theory at least, bypassing the logistical blocks that had led to most aid ending up stuck near border crossings in southern Gaza. Israel has said it is working to increase the number of aid trucks that enter Gaza, with the IDF announcing that 468 aid trucks were “inspected and transferred to Gaza” on Tuesday — the largest single-day total since the start of the war, it said.
Looming over these moves are cease-fire talks in Cairo, where Egyptian officials have spoken positively about the potential for a deal that could see some of the more than 100 remaining hostages kept by Hamas in Gaza freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said Monday that negotiations were at a “critical point,” while Hamas said it would “review the proposals.”
The shift comes amid international pressure on Israel. The country is facing its worst international backlash in decades, exacerbated by the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in an Israeli strike on April 1. The Biden administration has repeatedly called for a cease-fire and said Israel should allow more aid into Gaza to avert famine, while opposing the idea of an offensive on the southern city of Rafah, which Israel says is Hamas’s last major stronghold.
President Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that he could lose U.S. support for the war unless he changes course. Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, Biden suggested that Israel had not yet met the standard he called for. “We’ll see what he does in terms of meeting the commitments that he made to me,” Biden said of Netanyahu.
U.S. officials are pointing to the changes in Israeli policy as a sign they are getting results. During a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers that American pressure on Israel is working. “It clearly had an effect. We have seen changes in behavior, and we have seen more humanitarian assistance being pushed into Gaza,” Austin said. “Hopefully that trend will continue.”
But the strongest leverage on Israel has not been used yet. Western nations like the United States and Germany face calls to halt or limit arms sales to Israel. The two countries supplied roughly 99 percent of all arms imported to Israel from 2019 to 2023, according to an analysis published in March by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Some smaller nations have already moved to block arms exports to Israel.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces significant domestic pressure to reach a deal that could free the remaining hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7. With no clarity on how many are dead or alive, families have faced an anguishing wait and resent their own leader as well as the captors. One Israeli familiar with the negotiations told The Post this week that Netanyahu “really does need to make a significant achievement with a deal.”
The outcome of this window of change is not clear. The most important factors in the conflict remain as unresolved as ever. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have said that destroying Hamas remains their ultimate objective, with an offensive on Rafah, a city now crowded with displaced civilians, still being planned, despite strong objections from the United States and other allies.
Hamas is still operating in Gaza, where its most important leaders are in hiding, with the group pushing back on U.S. cease-fire proposals. They continue to call for a full end to the war, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. There is little evidence of a retreat. “With this pain and blood, we create hopes, a future and freedom for our people, our cause and our nation,” Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, said Wednesday in Qatar after reports that three of his sons and at least two grandchildren were killed in an Israeli strike on a car west of Gaza City.
In Gaza, Palestinians now able to return home after the withdrawal of Israeli forces are finding themselves in limbo, with their old homes damaged beyond return, their new refuge unsafe. “I couldn’t recognize the place,” one Palestinian humanitarian worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters, told The Post in a phone interview Monday. “Even the streets are no longer there.”
Israel remains in its own form of abeyance too, with the looming Rafah offensive hanging over it along with the lives of the remaining hostages. Analysts fear it is entering a counterinsurgency that will fail to resolve its fundamental problems in Gaza. Even while proclaiming a partial victory Wednesday, Israeli war cabinet minister and Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz seemed to admit so.
“The war with Hamas will take time,” Gantz said, according to Israeli media. “Youth in middle school will one day fight in the Gaza Strip, as in Judea and Samaria, and against Lebanon.”