JERUSALEM — As Israel’s forces push back into Gaza after a two-month ceasefire with Hamas, its political and military leaders are considering plans for a fresh ground campaign that could include a military occupation of the entire enclave for months or more.
How Israel plans to escalate its war on Hamas in Gaza
Israel’s political and military leaders are considering plans for a fresh ground campaign that could include a military occupation of Gaza for months or more.
Updated
March 23, 2025 The Washington Post
By Gerry Shih
Israeli officials say they are still waiting for the outcome of ceasefire talks and that no decisions have been made on whether — and how — to escalate the current phase of the offensive, which has so far consisted of mostly aerial bombardment.
But if the maximalist tactics are implemented, they would represent an escalation of a 17-month operation that the Gaza Health Ministry says has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children. The war also has killed more than 400 Israeli soldiers.
And they would mark a significant departure for the Israeli military, whose previous leaders feared becoming mired in the Gaza Strip. A full-scale invasion and occupation would require up to five army divisions, people familiar with the planning say, and the Israel Defense Forces could become stretched, given that reservists are increasingly voicing skepticism about fighting an open-ended war.
But some officials say that only a full-scale invasion now, followed by a lengthy counterinsurgency and deradicalization effort, would accomplish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated aim of eradicating Hamas after the group launched the attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis and sparked the war.
Amir Avivi, a former deputy commander of the military’s Gaza division, said the IDF’s campaign last year was constrained by disagreements between political and military leaders over tactics and strategy, and by the Biden administration’s concerns about harm to Palestinian civilians. But the arrival of the Trump administration in the United States and changes in the Israeli defense establishment have loosened those constraints, Avivi said.
“Now there is new [IDF] leadership, there is the backup from the U.S., there is the fact that we have enough munitions, and the fact that we finished our main missions in the north and can concentrate on Gaza,” Avivi said. “The plans are decisive. There will be a full-scale attack and they will not stop until Hamas is eradicated completely. We’ll see.”
Israeli officials say they are still willing to negotiate with Hamas through mediators before launching any large-scale invasion. Before dawn Tuesday, Israel carried out a devastating aerial attack targeting dozens of Hamas leaders and fighters and conducted limited raids on the ground. Hamas launched rockets at Tel Aviv in retaliation.
An Israeli official denied that Israel broke the ceasefire agreement and said that Israeli officials had laid out, on the 16th day of the truce, their conditions for entering the second phase of the agreement, but that they were rejected by Hamas.
Hamas then declined a “bridge” proposal by President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to extend the ceasefire by 40 days in exchange for 11 living hostages, and offered instead to release one American Israeli hostage, the official said, adding that Israel then decided to resume hostilities — which the official claims was permitted under a clause of the ceasefire agreement if talks were deemed to have broken down.
That proposal is “still on the table,” according to the Israeli official, who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks. “But we’re back to negotiating by different means: under fire.”
Hamas wanted to immediately open talks for the second phase, which would entail a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Hamas releasing the remaining living hostages. Hamas said Saturday it was still considering Witkoff’s proposal.
Israel has destroyed nearly all of Hamas’s 24 fighting battalions, it says, leaving a few thousand fighters in Gaza. But to fully eradicate the remnants, it would have to hold the territory — which some officers and analysts say carries high risks for Israel.
“If you look at the French in Algeria, [the U.S.] Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Americans in Afghanistan, the history of counterinsurgency attempts teach us that even the Israelis will fail,” said Sascha-Dominik Dov Bachmann, an expert on warfare at the University of Canberra. “It would undermine the moral and ethical basis of Israel.”
But supporters of a more intense and lengthy operation in Gaza argue that the campaign last year only resulted in Hamas reemerging from its tunnels in crisp uniforms in January, and that the political conditions are ripe now to further ratchet up military pressure and hold Gaza if necessary.
Last year, the Biden administration refused to send a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel unless it allowed more humanitarian aid into Gaza and did more to prevent civilian casualties.
But Trump, who took office in January, has approved the sale of the heavy bombs. And officials have said Israel consulted with the Trump administration before cutting off all aid to Gaza earlier this month.
A leadership change within the Israeli military establishment, meanwhile, has produced a hawkish shift, analysts say. Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir replaced officials who sometimes clashed with Netanyahu.
Netanyahu last year asked the IDF to consider taking control of distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza to prevent Hamas from siphoning off supplies and profiting from their sale; Israeli assessments have estimated that Hamas made $1 billion in profits from skimming. Then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi resisted the idea, arguing it would expose soldiers to unnecessary risk and amount to mission creep for the IDF, current and former Israeli officials said.
By February, the prevailing thinking had changed. Israeli officials informed international aid agencies that future humanitarian assistance would be screened and directed to new “logistics hubs” established by Israeli authorities, agency officials told The Washington Post.
Another point of contention: Gallant and Halevi favored striking Hamas’s military capabilities; Netanyahu wanted also to target the organization’s civilian officials, who dominate the enclave’s government posts.
After Gallant was dismissed in November, he told the families of hostages held in Gaza that Israel had achieved all its military objectives, media here reported. He also cautioned against trying to take control of the Gaza Strip.
Last week, Israel appeared to be taking a new approach, launching airstrikes that Katz, Gallant’s replacement, likened to “opening the gates of hell.” The strikes, which killed more than 400 people, targeted not only members of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, but also the director general of Gaza’s Interior Ministry, the director general of the Justice Ministry, and members of the Hamas political bureau as they gathered at home for predawn meals before the daytime fast of Ramadan.
On Friday, Katz threatened to not only temporarily occupy Gazan territory, but to annex it, if Hamas did not make concessions with hostages. “The more Hamas persists in its refusal, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed to Israel,” Katz said in a statement.
“There is less opposition now with Zamir and Katz. They are more ready” for a more aggressive approach, said Yossi Kuperwasser, a former senior IDF intelligence official and head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security think tank.
“The government was committed to removing Hamas from power,” Kuperwasser added. “The security establishment was not happy with this idea. They were trying to focus more on military assets and less on civilian assets. Because once you remove Hamas from Gaza, the IDF would have to rule Gaza.”