Israel, resuming the fight against Hamas terrorists to free the hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, is stepping up the pressure with the threat of land seizures.
It is a tactic that could work, according to some Israeli military strategists who suggest it could already be a driving force behind hundreds of Gazans risking their lives in unprecedented demonstrations against Hamas.
On March 25, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened “the taking of territory” that would go along with “taking out militants and terror infrastructure until [Hamas’s] complete surrender.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated the threat the following day during a hearing in Knesset, the Israeli Parliament.
“The more Hamas continues in its refusal to release our hostages, the more powerful the repression we exert will be,” he said. “This includes seizing territory, and it includes other things.”
Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2006.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) taking and holding land would have multiple effects, strategists say.
Militarily, they suggest the IDF’s decision not to hold territory during the first 15 months of the war, following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, may have left the terrorist group more intact than it otherwise would have been.
This time around, the IDF, if it keeps up the offensive, plans to do it differently.
Politically, the threat pressures Hamas to come back to the negotiating table by pressuring Gaza’s residents.
Suddenly plunged back into fighting after two months of relative peace, they now not only face evacuating once again, as most have done numerous times, but this time with the dark prospect that they might not be able to return home, possibly permanently.
A faction in Netanyahu’s cabinet has advocated for renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza. Few think that will ever come to pass.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has advanced the idea of resettling Gazans elsewhere—perhaps in Egypt or Jordan, both of which have publicly stated they don’t want them—to clean up and then redevelop the wartorn area as an international resort.
Gazans showed their anxiety this week in demonstrations in Gaza City and Beit Lahiya, close to the Israeli frontier.
They called for an end to the war, the freeing of the hostages, and the ejection of Hamas.
Analysts said fear of being forced out contributed to the demonstrations.
Israel wants Hamas to resume negotiating, said strategist Elliot Chodoff, a reserve army major who wrote the IDF’s tactical field manuals.
Israel has not yet moved irreversibly to a ground war, he said.
It renewed the offensive with air attacks and ramped up with ground raids the next day, but has not yet fully committed its ground forces.
Both air attacks and ground raids can be halted instantly should Hamas come back to the negotiating table, albeit now forced to consider giving Israel better terms, such as freeing more hostages, Chodoff told The Epoch Times.
He said he thought Israel would allow a few weeks for that to happen, and to avoid recalling reservists before Passover, which begins on the evening of April 12.
With both reservists and regular soldiers battle-hardened now, they don’t need any training period if called back up to duty, he said.
The fighting resumed after Israel and Hamas failed to prolong the cease-fire, which began on Jan. 19. For six weeks, the two sides exchanged Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners, primarily those convicted by Israel and serving long terms for terrorism.
The cease-fire expired on March 1, and the two sides, with White House special envoy Steve Witkoff mediating, tried unsuccessfully for two weeks either to move to the second phase in the cease-fire framework, or to extend the first phase with more hostage exchanges.
Israel resumed air attacks on March 18.
Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, said the threat of land loss definitely put pressure on Hamas to return to the table.
“Absolutely, yes,” he told The Epoch Times. “Nothing is more visible and clear than taking land from them.”
Land secured by Israel is unlikely to go to new Jewish settlements, he said. However, Israel might hold it for the long term if it renews Israeli military government rule, Chorev said, an idea he advocates.
After Israel pulled out of Gaza unilaterally in 2005, Israelis turned against the idea of ever retaking responsibility for the hostile territory.
But now, Chorev said, there may be no other choice.
Handing the territory over directly to a new Palestinian or Arab administration won’t likely succeed without a transitional period.
Gazans need to see life carrying on without Hamas—to see food, power, medicine, and order restored—for there to be any hope of a permanent “Day After” government taking root.
Both Chorev and Chodoff acknowledged there are different interpretations of the demonstrations.
Some on Israel’s right, Chodoff said, suspect Hamas of instigating them, in a ploy to garner international sympathy and pressure to resume humanitarian aid.
He also didn’t think Hamas had been so weakened it couldn’t send a few terrorists with AK-47s to shoot the demonstrators.
“They’ve done it before and nobody cared.”
Chorev disagreed. He said Israel’s resumption of war spurred a “psychological crisis” among Gazans.
“They thought the war was over, and suddenly the war resumed,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons for the demonstrations.”
Hamas thought that letting half a million of them return to their homes in northern Gaza would deter Israel from attacking once again.
The attacks show Hamas can no longer stop the IDF, he said.
A year ago, Israel intercepted a telegram from Khan Yunis brigade commander Rafa'a Salameh to the late Hamas military chief Yahya Sinwar and his brother Mohammed, Chorev said.
Salameh not only expressed frustration with lack of ammunition, destroyed infrastructure, and fighter fatigue but said, according to Chorev, “the population hates us.”
“This was a new phenomenon, hatred of Hamas,” Chorev said.
As such, he thinks this week’s demonstrations are a genuine show of Gazan discontent.
Chorev said the Gazan demonstrations are the more remarkable coming against Hamas, which has ruthlessly suppressed any dissent in nearly two decades in power.
They kill or kneecap those who speak out against them, he said.
Neither thinks the demonstrations indicate any willingness to co-exist with Israel.
Gazan civilians, Chodoff said, willingly participated in the Oct. 7 attack.
Nor did any free hostages, nor tip off Israel to where Hamas was holding them.
He compared them to the German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
They weren’t anti-Nazi, Chodoff said, and had been on Hitler’s side while he was winning. They turned against him because he was losing.
Chodoff said he sees the Gazan demonstrators in a similar light.
Chorev and Chodoff said Israel’s new attack has already hit Hamas leadership hard.
Chodoff said the IDF was targeting Hamas’s civilian leadership, as its military leaders were in tunnels and too hard to get at.
In short order, air attacks killed first the prime minister and then, a few days later, the one who succeeded him, as well as other top-ranking officials.
The IDF said as it renewed the war that it was targeting members of Hamas’s political bureau.
On March 27, Chorev noted, the IDF eliminated the Hamas spokesman, Abdel-Latif al-Qanoua.
And, he said, Hamas’s rocket firings at Israel since the fighting resumed—two or three rockets each on two different occasions— appear pathetically small compared with the estimated 3,100 they fired at Israel on Oct. 7 alone.
“One may ask how they still have rockets,” Chorev said.
He attributed it to the 30 percent of Gaza the IDF largely stayed away from in the first 15 months of fighting, believing many of the hostages were being held there.
That left underground workshops intact where Hamas could continue to produce rockets, he said.
He said the left-alone parts included half of Gaza City and the central Gaza Strip, where refugee camps are located.
The IDF on March 26, showing new aggressiveness, ordered the evacuation of parts of Gaza City.
Chodoff said Israel fights more confidently this time and with less interference from Washington since the change of administration.
The army after Oct. 7 didn’t know how well its troops, many untested in battle, would fare in urban warfare.
Israel could not afford to lose one soldier for each member of Hamas it killed, or even one for every two, Chodoff said.
The ensuing war did not lead to that nightmare, he said. Israel lost 400 IDF soldiers and killed an estimated 20,000 Hamas fighters, according to Chodoff.
He said one can make a military case for the IDF’s early war strategy of not holding territory.
If it had done so, its soldiers would have become more vulnerable to terrorists popping out of tunnels and taking a steady toll, he said.
In addition, Hamas didn’t have large industrial facilities that Israel could take over and hold.
Israel’s confidence now, he said, showed in the IDF’s willingness to attack the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis on March 23 to take out Ismail Barhoum, who had been prime minister for only five days.
While Hamas’s leaders said he had been receiving treatment, Israel’s military spokesman dismissed that and said he had been hiding out there for weeks and holding meetings with other senior Hamas leaders.
Israel had eliminated his predecessor Essam al-Da'alis in the renewed offensive’s opening air attacks.
Chodoff said Israel’s relative restraint could end quickly if, say, Hamas started killing hostages.
Chodoff quoted from “The Godfather” to express when a full ground offensive could begin: when and if Washington concludes “but no one can reason with this fellow,” referring to the terrorist group.
“When Don Corleone gets up and walks out,” Chodoff said, “you know what that means.”
