Hot take from a random nobody on the internet. Take with a bubble of ball sweat. People keep saying that IDF operational tactics make no sense with regard to defeating Hamas. Half true. They’re doing a kind of shifting surge thing, trying to degrade resistance command structures, communications, and movement ability, and separating Gaza into bite-sized segments that are easier to occupy, control, and re-enter later. If they break enough tunnels, this would weaken their opposition significantly.
It won’t defeat it, however. And this is where the speculation comes in. It will have the effect of breaking resistance groups up from a single, unified fighting force into smaller resistance groups. Something larger than a cell but smaller than an insurgent army. Now, when coupled with the fact that the population is being starved and deprived of basic necessities over a year, what this does is ensure that, while resistance won’t be broken, it will be controllable in terms of space and volume.
They don’t want Hamas defeated. They want it, and the population and any potential new resistance recruits, tamed. Functional but not strong. Too hungry and sick to grow. They want the terrain of Gaza split up into sectors that can be occupied, entered, disrupted, policed, and then left in a state of relative ‘normalcy’ after the occupation has things under control. This is a plan for a decades-long occupation, with the specter of an ever-present armed resistance enemy for them to ‘fight.’
If a sector behaves, it’ll be developed and settled, similar to how things work in the West Bank. There will be food (in amounts and types controlled by the occupation). There will be medicine (likewise, strictly controlled by the occupation). They can then police Gaza as they do the West Bank. Usually no one bothers putting a paramilitary police raid of a house on the world news, so long as you say it was a police action against ‘terrorists’ or whatever. They can do that every night, forever.
They can then settle Gaza as they do the West Bank, while at the same time using the sporadic local uprisings as an excuse to keep the sectors militarized and heavily controlled. It’s not a campaign to ‘defeat terrorism’ or even to squash an insurgency. It’s the same playbook as the West Bank, a campaign of slow displacement, with episodic ethnic cleansing, from which Israel can profit over the long term while realizing its goal of eventual default annexation of the Palestinian territories.
This is the twenty-first century version of a nineteenth-century colonization plan, on live television. They have no intention of ‘winning’ this war. The plan is for a manageable long-term excuse to do what they’ve been trying to do since Israel was founded: get the Palestinians out, either through displacement or slow, orchestrated replacement. This is Zionism, and there is money to be made and political capital to be harnessed, all over the west, which is why it isn’t being stopped.