Israel will not end its war with Hamas anytime soon, officials say
Israel stressed on Tuesday that its war in Gaza would not end anytime soon and vowed to complete its mission of dismantling Hamas no matter how long that takes, despite widespread international calls for a ceasefire.
Israeli forces were “constantly attacking” in the Gaza Strip, said Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the army chief of staff. The fighting, he added, would continue “whether it lasts a week or months.”
“We are very, very determined,” General Halevi said in a television statement filmed along the Gaza border. “Wherever our forces operate, they are accompanied by intense fire from the air, sea and land.”
His comments came after a defiant statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who visited the front lines on Monday, and preceded a meeting on Tuesday in Washington between a close adviser to the prime minister and members of the Biden administration.
The adviser, Ron Dermer, Israel’s strategic affairs minister and member of Mr. Netanyahu’s war cabinet, was scheduled to meet Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Tuesday afternoon.
The Israeli government, which declared war on Gaza after Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, has been unyielding in its prosecution of the war despite growing disagreements with its closest ally, the United States. The Biden administration has pledged its support, supporting Israel in the United Nations and promising the delivery of thousands of tank shells. But there is growing understanding among the allies about the plans for the scope of the war, its timetable and plans for the governance of Gaza after the war.
The talks between Mr. Dermer and the Americans are expected to focus on the next phase of the war as well as on post-war Gaza, an Israeli official said.
During a visit to Gaza on Monday, Mr Netanyahu insisted his army would continue the war until all objectives were achieved.
“Whoever talks about stopping – there is no such thing,” Netanyahu told Israeli forces in Gaza, according to his office. “We are not stopping. The war will continue until the end, until we end it, no less.”
The intense fighting in the enclave, which Gaza health officials say has killed around 20,000 people, comes as risks of an extended regional war increase.
Recent satellite images showed the Israeli army crossing the border at a new location in central Gaza and reaching the outskirts of Al Bureij, where the army said it would attack a Hamas battalion.
And early Tuesday, the United States carried out a new round of airstrikes in Iraq, likely killing militants and destroying three facilities used by Iranian allies targeting U.S. and coalition forces, U.S. officials said.
The U.S. strikes followed a series of attacks by Iran-backed militants in Iraq, including a drone strike hours earlier on an air base in Erbil that wounded three U.S. service members, said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.
Tensions in the region soared on Tuesday, a day after Iran accused Israel of killing Brig. General Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in a rocket attack in Syria.
General Mousavi is believed to have helped oversee the shipment of missiles and other weapons to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed military force in Lebanon and Syria that has exchanged artillery fire with Israeli forces along Israel’s northern border.
Israel declined to comment directly on Iran’s accusation that it was behind General Mousavi’s death. But Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that the country was already “in a multi-front war” and “under attack from seven theaters,” targeting Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran mentioned.
“We have already responded and taken action in six of these theaters,” he told lawmakers.
Vice Admiral Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said Hezbollah fired a number of anti-tank missiles into Israel from Lebanon on Tuesday, hitting a Greek Orthodox church. Two civilians and nine Israeli soldiers were injured, he said.
As the death toll in Gaza has risen, Israel has faced mounting international opprobrium, including a non-binding vote passed by the UN General Assembly this month calling for a ceasefire.
UN officials and agencies have made some of the strongest criticisms of the war in Gaza, describing it as a graveyard for children.
Israel said on Tuesday it would stop automatically issuing visas to United Nations employees. Instead, Israel will consider each visa “on a case-by-case basis,” government spokesman Eylon Levy said at a news conference.
Since the end of a week-long ceasefire in November, which provided respite for the besieged population and allowed the exchange of some Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians held in Israel, little progress has been made in the towards reaching a similar temporary truce.
Egypt’s government has circulated a proposal calling for further exchanges of hostages and prisoners as a step toward a permanent ceasefire, according to three diplomats in the region who insisted on anonymity due to the sensitivity of the talks. But the diplomats warned that neither side appeared to be anywhere close to such a proposal.
As the war continues, Israeli leaders are also under pressure over their inability to secure the release of the remaining hostages and the rapidly rising number of soldier deaths in Gaza. Last weekend, 15 soldiers were killed in a 72-hour period. As of Tuesday, the total number of Israeli troops killed in ground fighting in Gaza reached 161.
“The war demands very high costs from us,” Netanyahu said last week.
General Halevi, the chief of staff, said on Tuesday that the army in northern Gaza was “close to completing” the dismantling of Hamas battalions, but that in the dense, urban environment “it cannot be said that we have killed them all.” .”
The army, he said, was concentrating its efforts in southern Gaza and warned of a complex battlespace, including fighting in Hamas’s underground war tunnels and close-quarters battles.
“The objectives of this war are essential and not easy to achieve,” General Halevi said.
Mr Netanyahu laid out the war’s aims in simple terms in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal reported this on Tuesday: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”
Mr Netanyahu and the Biden administration appear to be at serious disagreement over how the Gaza Strip will be governed after the war.
Mr. Biden has proposed that Gaza would eventually be united with the Israeli-occupied West Bank under a revamped Palestinian Authority, as a step toward establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority from the Gaza Strip in 2007, a year after winning the Palestinian parliamentary elections and following an episode of factional fighting. The authority, which analysts say is weak and unpopular, has since been limited to governing parts of the West Bank.
Mr. Netanyahu has publicly rejected putting the Palestinian Authority back in charge of Gaza, citing in part the refusal of its leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, to denounce Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
“The expectation that the Palestinian Authority will demilitarize Gaza is a pipe dream,” Netanyahu wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
Reporting was contributed by Ronen Bergman, Eric Nagourney, Rachel Abrams, Erica L. Green And Nadav Gavrielov.