An Israeli tank drives through Gaza City. Photo / AP
ANALYSIS
Israel is making progress in ground control of Gaza, but it has not vanquished Hamas or freed most of the hostages. And international condemnation of civilian casualties is growing.
The Israeli military’s seizure of Shifa Hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest medical complex, is central to the military strategy at the heart of the ground invasion: Eradicate Hamas and free roughly 240 hostages taken during the October 7 surprise attack.
That strategy has unfolded over the past three weeks as more than 40,000 Israeli soldiers encircled Gaza City, where Israeli officials say Hamas commanders were concentrated. The soldiers then attacked fighters and bunkers, all while targeting a vast tunnel network that Israeli officials say enables Hamas forces to hide and carry out operations. Israeli officials also assessed that striking so deeply in the heart of Gaza City would pressure Hamas to reach a deal on hostage releases.
Israel has long accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields in the densely populated Gaza Strip, and says the terrorist group positioned underground military facilities near homes, schools, mosques and hospitals throughout Gaza. Shifa became Exhibit A in this narrative, as the Israeli military claimed Hamas used a vast maze of tunnels underneath the hospital as a base.
So far it is not clear that the Israeli strategy is working.
US military officials said their Israeli counterparts tell them to expect more weeks of clearing operations in the north before Israel prepares a separate initiative in southern Gaza, widening the offensive.
The Israeli military’s chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that its troops would continue their offensive “in every place that Hamas is, and it is in the south of the strip.”
And although Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a video statement last Monday that Israel had “accelerated our activities against the tunnels” and that Hamas militants had lost control in the north and were fleeing south, military analysts said Gallant’s statements raised many questions.
How will Hamas be eliminated if its fighters blend into the rest of the population as they head south? How long can Israel, which lost about 1,200 people in the October 7 atrocities, sustain growing international pressure for a cease-fire as civilian casualties in Gaza mount? Most immediately, was Shifa an important enough military target to raid?
Israel blames the high death toll — 12,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, a number that includes both civilians and combatants — in part on Hamas’ decision to hide its military fortifications and command centres in residential neighbourhoods and hospitals such as Shifa.
But US officials said Israel’s rapid decision to launch ground operations in the enclave left Israeli commanders little time for extensive planning to mitigate risks to civilians and all but guaranteed a high civilian death toll.
The hospital has become a particular flashpoint. The military has yet to present public evidence of an extensive tunnel network and command centre under Shifa, and Israel is coming under growing international pressure to show that the hospital was a crucial military objective.
On Friday, Israeli military officials said the search of the hospital would take time because of the risk of encountering Hamas members and booby traps, and that they would have to use dogs and combat engineers. Israeli forces are advancing slowly and currently control only part of the hospital site, according to three Israeli officers. They also have avoided entering a shaft that was discovered there.
But the military claims it has proof of at least part of an underground tunnel complex under the hospital. A video, which an Israeli official said was filmed by a camera that was lowered into the shaft by troops on Friday, and which was reviewed by The New York Times, indicates that it is a human-made tunnel, with at least one lane wide enough for the passage of people. The tunnel appears to be 50 feet or more in length, and at the end of it is a door that the official said is fortified to withstand explosives. The video shows that the door has a small porthole that, according to the Israeli official, allows one-way shooting from the other side of the door into the tunnel.
On Sunday Israel’s military released video of what it said was a 55-metre section of a fortified tunnel running 10 metres beneath the Shifa Hospital complex.
The military released two videos, one of which appeared to have been filmed by a drone and shows parts of a metal spiral staircase. A longer video, which appeared to have been recorded by a robot or a camera carried by an animal, starts out above ground and shows the descent to a cloister-like tunnel with utility cables along one wall that leads to what Israeli officials described as a blastproof door.
The door had a firing hole in it, the military said, adding that such doors are used by Hamas “to block Israeli forces from entering the command centres and the underground assets belonging to Hamas.”
The New York Times verified that both videos were recorded at Al-Shifa Hospital.
Targeting Shifa Hospital was “not the result of a strategy,” said Giora Eiland, a retired major general in Israel’s military and former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “It is more an important tactical manoeuvre” in Israel’s attempt to control the narrative about Hamas, he said.
While Hamas commanders might have been under Shifa at the start of the war, Eiland said, most of them have evacuated to the south. As a result, he said, Israel will have to evacuate civilians and target Hamas brigades there in the coming weeks and months. Eiland predicted that this might be complicated by an international community losing patience with Israel.
Yagil Levy, an expert on the Israeli military, said that attacking Shifa was “a show of power and might rather than part of a clear strategy.” In doing so, Levy said, Israel might have jeopardised the hostages’ lives.
“The army didn’t take into real consideration the future or the safety of the hostages by going into Shifa,” Levy said. The recovery of two corpses near Shifa Hospital was a clear sign, he said, that “we are losing hostages by delaying the exchange of prisoners.”
Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, a retired head of the US military’s Central Command, said the Israeli military had achieved some of its objectives, such as suppressing Hamas rocket fire into Israel and reducing risks to its own troops. More than 55 Israeli soldiers have died in the ground operation, an indication that the Israeli army is moving cautiously on the ground while warplanes and artillery pound targets.
But McKenzie said it was still unclear how many top Hamas leaders the Israeli military had killed. And so far, Israel’s decision to reduce parts of Gaza to rubble and kill more than 1,000 Hamas fighters has not secured a major deal to release the roughly 240 hostages, many in the vast tunnel network.
Israel began its ground invasion after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad assailants rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, killing women, children, babies and the elderly. Israeli authorities are investigating claims of rape and other brutality.
Hamas fighters used video cameras to gleefully publicise the atrocities, taking a page out of the playbook of the Islamic State group, which used beheading videos to shock the world and distributed violent propaganda as a recruiting tool.
The Pentagon has rushed a steady stream of arms and ammunition to Israel in recent weeks. US Special Operations forces are flying unarmed MQ-9 surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip to aid in hostage recovery efforts, but are not supporting Israeli military operations on the ground, Defence Department officials say.
Gen. Michael Kurilla, the head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, arrived in Israel on Friday for briefings on the ground operation in Gaza and the military plans going forward, a US military official said. It is Kurilla’s second trip to Israel since the October 7 attacks. The general and his senior staff are in daily contact with members of the planning department at the Israel General Staff and other senior Israeli military officials.
In the meantime, the longer the war drags on, the more the strain on Israel’s economy grows, with 360,000 military reservists pulled away from their civilian jobs to fight.
“Time is not on Israel’s side internationally or domestically,” McKenzie said.
That is putting pressure on the Israeli military to inflict as much damage on Hamas as quickly as possible, officials and analysts said.
“They may not need an endgame because it’ll be imposed on them,” said Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East defence specialist for Janes, a defence and open-source intelligence firm in London. “They’ll make it look like they’ve done the best military operation in the time available.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eric Schmitt, Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman
Photographs by: Tamir Kalifa
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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