200 days of war on Gaza: ‘Israel has already lost strategically and operationally’

By Rabia Ali

ISTANBUL (AA) - Israel has now been waging a devastating war on Gaza for more than 200 days, killing and injuring tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroying any semblance of life in the besieged enclave.

Despite the excessive use of force, which has sparked global criticism and led to accusations of genocide, experts believe Israel has faced a strategic defeat in Gaza, failing to achieve its declared objectives of defeating Hamas or rescuing those taken hostage last October.

“Essentially, Israel has already lost the war, strategically and also operationally, because there will be no way to defeat Hamas militarily without a political strategy,” according to political analyst Andreas Krieg.

Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is frantically trying to draw up a “victory narrative” to sell to the public.

“Netanyahu needs to show to the Israeli public that he won the war, which is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible,” Krieg told Anadolu.

Speaking about Israel’s military aims, International Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann said it “certainly hasn’t delivered on the objectives that Netanyahu set for himself, which was the destruction of Hamas.”

Whether this will ever be achieved is also not clear, he said, adding that American and Israeli intelligence reports are now pointing out that it will not be possible.

- No plan, no political strategy

According to Krieg, Israel’s primary mistake was a lack of political strategy.

“Netanyahu didn’t generate a political strategy until now. There is no strategy of what should happen after the war,” he said.

A war or military action is always a tool for politicians to achieve essentially political outcomes and objectives, he said, adding that Israel has simply not used its military in this manner.

“It has been used to achieve military outcomes only, and without a political strategy to tie the military strategy in, you end up just having a military operation that will not generate anything,” he said.

Hiltermann, MENA Program director at the International Crisis Group, concurred with Krieg’s assessment.

“The main challenge Israel faces in Gaza is that it doesn’t have a plan,” he told Anadolu.

“Beyond wanting to destroy Hamas, what’s it going to do with 2.2 million people in Gaza, or the utter destruction of the housing and infrastructure?”

- ‘Hamas is an idea, not something based on people’

Krieg believes Hamas will survive, irrespective of how Israel proceeds in the coming days, including the possible invasion of Rafah.

“Hamas is an idea, and the idea of armed resistance remains an idea. It's not something that is based on people,” he said.

Defeating the idea of resistance is actually not about killing more people or killing more Hamas fighters, it is about protecting more civilians and saving civilians, he said.

“If we look at the anti-Hamas operation since Oct. 7 as a counter insurgency operation, where the primary objective is supposed to be protection of the civilian population and offering the civilian population an alternative to Hamas, then Israel has failed dramatically,” Krieg asserted.

He believes Israel’s deadly military operation will reinforce the idea of armed resistance, not just within Hamas, but in the wider public of Gaza.

“The survivors of this Gaza war will have all experienced hardship, starvation, death … and certainly would want to take revenge and fight Israel instead of working together with Israel,” he added.

The key problem is that Israel is actually less secure now than they were before Oct. 7, he said.

Hiltermann also believes that Hamas is now likely to transform “from a military group into an armed insurgency that could operate much more flexibly in different places, including in northern Gaza.”

- Rafah invasion a political ploy

Regarding Israel’s expected invasion of Rafah, Krieg believes it is part of Netanyahu’s attempt to find a victory narrative.

“He (Netanyahu) hopes that by clearing Rafah and potentially killing more Hamas fighters, he can say that the infrastructure of Hamas has been eroded, that the majority of fighters were killed and that, therefore, the war is now concluded,” he said.

However, in reality, even if Israel “clears the ground in Rafah, it doesn’t mean that … they’ll be able to clear and kill Hamas fighters,” he said, adding that there is a high likelihood that Hamas fighters will survive.

“Even if they (Israel) kill a considerable number of battalions that they expect to be in Rafah, then you will still have an entirely new generation of potential fighters who were created in this war by this indiscriminate violence used by Israel against the public in Gaza,” Krieg reiterated.

- Operational strategy and ‘moral failures’

Analyzing the Israeli military’s operational strategy, Krieg pointed out it has failed to free the hostages, a task that “was always going to be very difficult.”

“They have failed to destroy the tunnel system … They destroyed some tunnels and some entrances, but I would say a large part of that underground infrastructure is still intact and will also not be taken out by a single operation in Rafah,” he added.

Israel has also failed to protect civilians and only pushed false claims, while deliberately destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure without any military advantage, he said.

Regarding the hostages, Hiltermann said it was always a trade-off, “because it wasn’t clear that Israel could both destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages alive.”

“I think the government has chosen to pursue the militaristic war of destroying Hamas ... If that’s a strategic failure, that is a choice he (Netanyahu) is making, and the Israeli public will have to decide in the end whether that they consider that a failure,” he said.

On Israel’s bombing of hospitals and killing of aid workers, including the recent attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy, Hiltermann believes Netanyahu does not see them as strategic failures, precisely because he has repeated these actions time and again since October.

“We may consider them to be, first of all, moral failures, if not mistakes … But to the extent that these were targeted attacks, then we could call them moral failures,” he added.