Seven months into Gaza war: Has Israel achieved its objectives?

Prior to the explosion of the ongoing Gaza war following Hamas’s October 7 blitz, the Israeli political leadership, under the country’s most extremist government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, boasted confidence in securing “a total victory” over the Palestinian resistance group.

With the fighting across Gaza entering the seventh month, the Israeli army has made no progress in freeing Israeli citizens who were taken as hostages by Hamas on October 7. Instead, Hamas continues to pull daring attacks on heavily armed Israeli troops, inflicting serious casualties upon them.

The current scenario paints a grim picture for the Netanyahu government, which not only fails to convince the Israeli public about the safe return of the hostages or winning this war but also faces international pressure in light of student protests spreading across universities in the US and other pro-Israeli Western states.

All these signs show that Israel is no place close to “within touching distance of absolute victory” Netanyahu claimed to have during a February meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Last month, Netanyahu repeated the same rhetoric of “the total victory” prior to Israel’s announced invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza.

Yoram Schweitzer, a former member of the Israeli intelligence community who now heads the Program on Terrorism and Low-Intensity Conflict at the INSS, describes Netanyahu’s rhetoric as “the stupid declaration of complete war” which no army in the world can do against a guerilla force like Hamas, he says.

Two weeks ago, Hamas claimed to kill 12 Israeli soldiers during military engagements in Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, which Tel Aviv claimed to have cleared from Hamas fighters after the Israeli army announced launching a wide-scale military operation in the area.

In the same period, five Israeli soldiers were killed and seven others were injured in an apparent friendly fire in the same area the forces of Tel Aviv are operating. It’s not clear this friendly fire incident is related to Hamas’ announcement of killing 12 soldiers. Another Israeli soldier, a reservist, was “killed in a blast caused by Israeli munitions” inside Israel near Gaza.

‘Impossible mission’

“If you are a democratic country and Israel is a democratic country, you can not take all the measures that you can to fight this kind of war. So all this nonsense of the complete victory is the political maneuver of the prime minister which of course gives advantage to Hamas and (Hezbollah leader Hassan) Nasrallah because no one can have a total victory (in a guerilla warfare),” Schwitzer tells TRT World.

Netanyahu’s “unrealistic” declaration helps Hamas and its allies to present their military position as a success, according to Schwitzer. While Schwitzer describes Israeli attack on Gaza as “defensive” because “there was no other way to deal” with Hamas’ October 7 attack, he has “a very civil criticism” on the way the Netanyahu government is handling the situation, which he will “not share” with TRT World fully.

“So far, Israel has not achieved its three major goals in the Gaza war. The hostages have not been released, Hamas' military power has not been completely defeated, and Gaza remains a security threat to Israel,” says Hongda Fan, professor at the Middle East Studies Institute of Shanghai International Studies University.

Other analysts have a similar take to both Fan and Schweitzer, a realist Israeli veteran, who cares about both Palestinian human rights and the future of his state.

“I don't think anyone writing about the Gaza War today believes that Israel has identified a clear objective for ending the war,” says Edward Erickson, a former American military officer and a retired professor of military history at the Department of War Studies at the Marine Corps University.

“If you don't know what victory looks like, then, it is impossible to plan and execute operations to achieve it. Every army in the world trains its soldiers to identify the objective and then backwards plan the operation. This is a bad failure for the (Israeli) government and the general staff,” Erickson, a prominent military analyst and author of several books, tells TRT World.

Gregory Simons, a Sweden-based independent analyst and researcher, also finds Israel out of reach of its stated objectives. “It has so far failed and is likely not to be successful as they would be difficult to achieve even with more appropriate tactics,” he says.

“Hamas has not been destroyed politically or militarily, and Israeli security has not been this bad in a regional sense for a very long time,” Simons tells TRT World.

Is Israel losing global psychological warfare?

Israel’s brutal conduct in Gaza has triggered wide-scale anti-Israeli protests across the globe from US Ivy League university campuses to Western Europe, with states like Colombia cutting ties with Tel Aviv. That is also something going against Israel’s long-term interests, according to analysts.

On May 20, more bad news came for Israel as the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, a slap on the face for Tel Aviv and a shock for the pro-Israeli Western states like the US, which found the decision “outrageous”.

While the ICC also issued arrest warrants for Hamas commanders like Israeli leaders, US President Joe Biden and some other American senators were “outraged” by the decision, seeing an implication to equate the Palestinian resistance group with their Middle Eastern ally, something unthinkable until this week.

The current Gaza war has led world public opinion to shift toward the pro-Palestinian position, says Erickson. “There is no question that the war has increased the world-wide visibility of the plight of the Palestinian people. Not just for the Gazans but for those in the occupied West Bank as well.”

With the help of global media coverage, a new perception has also emerged that being pro-Palestinian “does not automatically identify someone an antisemite or anti-Israel”, he says, pointing out a crucial development going against Tel Aviv. “Casting Palestinians in the world media as victims of Israeli aggression will surely help them in the long run,” he adds.

“The Gaza War has put Palestine on the global map. It has also shown Israel and its allies, US and Western political leaders, in a genocidal light that is at absolute odds with the supposed values of the rules based order to the Global South and even their own publics to some extent,” says Simons.

Simons thinks that this new political phenomenon is not only bad news for Israel but also something which “shall accelerate the Global North's decline.” He also assesses that the ongoing Gaza war “sharpened greatly the anti-Zionist element of Jewish organisations in the West.”

While Hongda, the Chinese professor, agrees with Erickson and Simons on the ongoing war’s negative global effects on the Israeli image, he is not sure this could be a real factor to reach a concrete solution to the bloody conflict.

“After paying such a heavy price, whether this global attention can be transformed into a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is more worthy of attention,” he says.

Rafah offensive

The pending Rafah offensive is also something both Palestinians and the global audiences are concerned about. Israel has already bombed the area close to the Egypt border.

The US has declared its opposition to Israel’s Rafah offensive, which will increase the catastrophic humanitarian crisis into terrible levels, according to both international organisations and human rights groups.

But Schwitzer, the Israeli analyst, suggests that Israel does not aim to conduct a full-scale operation in Rafah. “In spite of all these hoo-ha and fuss about it, at least at this stage the Rafah operation is intended to put pressure on Hamas in order to have a better position in these negotiations.”

Israel needs to focus on a deal with Hamas on releasing hostages, he says. “First of all, Israel must get into a bargain to bring back hostages because it touches core values of Israeli society.”