#WTH The state of the war in Israel

Hostages, Hamas, Hezbollah, Bibi, and Joe Biden

The IDF rescue of four hostages held in Gaza by Hamas-loyal “civilians” was a massive boost to an Israeli war effort that many worry has dragged on. We asked Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur to join us again to talk what the rescue means for the remaining 120 or so hostages, what the prospects are for victory against Hamas, the odds of war with Hezbollah, and what the departure of a senior minister from the Israeli national unity government means for Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Hostages

What’s now clear to the world is that one reason it has been so difficult to find and rescue hostages is that they are living with “regular” Gazans, serving as slaves in their homes, suffering regular beatings, malnutrition, and psychological and physical torture at the hands of individuals not known to be members of Hamas.

Some have integrated this information with polls showing widespread support among Gazans for October 7th, to suggest that Gaza is irretrievably lost — that Gaza is Hamas. Haviv points out that it’s more complex than that: Gazans love and hate Hamas; they suffer at Hamas’s hands, yet appreciate their effectiveness against the Israeli enemy. What that suggests is that fatally disabling Hamas and replacing it with a technocratic government is critical. Who staffs that government? Excellent question, with no viable answers as yet. I wrote about this back in November, and not much has changed.

In the wake of the hostage rescue, Hamas put out the order that if Israeli troops are advancing, hostages are to be killed. Is this a death sentence for the remaining living hostages? Not necessarily. What’s evident is that the hostage rescue relied at least in part on human intelligence from Palestinians. Imagine there are hostages living next door; if you rat out their “hosts,” the odds of your being killed in the coming Israeli onslaught are lower. In other words, all is not lost.

The War

Israeli authorities have suggested the war with Hamas will continue until 2025. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has done its utmost to stymie the Israeli war effort, leaning so hard on the Jerusalem government that the assault on Rafah was, for all intents and purposes, paused for three months; alternately threatening and praising the Israeli government, but since early 2024, consistently providing Hamas with a reason to believe it can prevail if it hangs on long enough.

The Biden administration’s confusion and mixed messaging, and desperate efforts to broker another cease-fire with ever changing terms has given Hamas and its supporters reason to believe that ultimately, Joe Biden will force a permanent cease-fire, if only to secure a few additional votes in Michigan.

The Rafah pause has caused incredible anger inside the Israeli military, and against Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Suggestions by Washington of an intolerable death rate in a Rafah incursion have proven shockingly inaccurate in the event, and laid bare Team Biden’s total lack of understanding of the strategic topography in Gaza. In fact, the IDF has gotten much better at the operations necessary to root out Hamas, find its leaders, and otherwise continue the process of grinding away at the terrorist group. But the strategy that saves lives doesn’t lend itself to the speed the outside world desires, nor to the immediate hostage rescue many in Israel hope for.

Is the war still “winnable” on Israeli terms? Yes. Is it winnable on a timeline that works for Joe Biden? No.

War in the North

Hezbollah has been lobbing missiles at Israel’s north with increasing intensity in recent days. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced from a large swath of northern Israel, and there has been serious damage done to cities, businesses, and farms. The drumbeat for a more decisive Israeli military operation against Hezbollah has grown, and more than half the country supports taking the war to the enemy in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s interests in provoking such a war are mixed: Hezbollah’s de facto government in Beirut is deeply unpopular, and increasingly unpopular even in the Shi’a group’s southern strongholds. The last time Hezbollah provoked a war with Israel, leader Hassan Nasrallah was forced to apologize to the nation. That said, Hezbollah has the capacity to inflict serious damage inside Israel — as far as Tel Aviv — with precision weaponry. Israel would ultimately prevail in such a conflict, but the implications of diverting forces from Gaza and the “widening” of the war would not serve Israeli long term interests.

In short, Hezbollah is risking a great deal with unclear benefits to itself or Iran. And this is no slam dunk for the Israelis either. Unfortunately, while the analytical risks of escalation are clear, Israel’s democratic government cannot continue to withstand the pressure from its irate northern residents. Something’s gotta break.

Bibi

Last, but not least, the Israeli leader with nine lives appears to be in real trouble. It’s not the departure of opposition politico Benny Gantz that’s killing him, it’s the nature of the Israeli national unity government, the craptastic Israeli electoral system that advantages fringe parties, and the war itself. As Haviv lays out eloquently, the left won’t let Bibi do what he needs to win, and the right won’t let him make a deal. Most Israelis of all political stripes now believe that Netanyahu is prolonging the war to advantage himself politically. Ironically, one of the things helping Bibi is the enmity of Joe Biden. He is able to paint himself as a stalwart facing down an American leader that doesn’t want Israel to win.

What a bloody mess.

HIGHLIGHTS

Does Hamas think it’s winning the war with Israel?

HG: Hamas thinks it's winning, and the more death and destruction happens in Gaza, the more that Hamas believes that. By the way, you saw the Wall Street Journal piece about Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, who was communicated those very things to Ismail Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders.

For anyone who didn't catch the article, I really, really recommend reading it. It's a Wall Street Journal, essentially, expose of the Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, his letters to supporters, to allies, to colleagues. And he explicitly details his desire in clear, explicit language to have massive death toll in Gaza. And so the Israelis have found themselves run up against just not a Hamas willingness to suffer massive casualties, but a Hamas desperation because their only strategy for survival is that Israel's forced to heal through international pressure because of massive Palestinian death toll. So their real massive strategic problem is that the Israeli war can grind on because there isn't enough Palestinian death toll. So they're actively looking for more. Under those kinds of strategic conditions and under those kinds of tactical conditions, how do you rescue hostages? How do you rescue hostages when a large Palestinian death toll is an Israeli liability and a Hamas asset, and the Hamas intentionally builds things in order to facilitate that large civilian death toll?

So how did they get the hostages out?

HG: So long story short, there's a sense that this was almost impossible. And in eight months we haven't been able to do it really in any significant way. And then this particular kind of operation, which was so clever, the elite police forces disguised, heading into where the hostages were held, the pulling out of the hostages, even the gun battle. The gun battle that begins after the IDF and the police forces are already trying to withdraw, and then Hamas has already understood what's happening and moves in and begins to engage and does so from civilian areas. And the claim by Palestinian officials, by Hamas is 270 dead. I don't know how Western journalists can believe Hamas numbers at this point. I truly don't know how. After the UN has to revise the death toll down by 10,000 from 35,000 to 25,000, and then pretends that there's some kind of unidentified 10,000.

The hostages were being held in what many refer to as a refugee camp, but the Nuseirat Camp is a rather large city. How does Palestinian ideology think about the term “refugee camp”?

What’s a refugee camp in this case?

HG: The term refugee camp, in the case of Nuseirat, there are actual refugee camps in Gaza right now. There are people who fled Gaza city or Khan Younis during the battle and are living in tents. What the refugee camp refers to here is what Palestinian ideology calls a refugee camp. It's a city with sewage and malls. There's beautiful one, at least beautiful shopping mall in Nuseirat and businesses and generations of Palestinians who have lived there. And it is not in any sense except a Palestinian ideological sense, a refugee camp. So it's a town. And these hostages were held by civilians who turned out not to be civilians, but to be absolutely in every sense, Hamas operatives.

Hamas’s entire MO, its existence, all it is the denial of the distinction between military and civilian. And that's its war plan. That's its strategy for survival. And then the world plays to its fiddle. And that to me is very frustrating because if you do believe there's a difference between a civilian and a military in a war, if you do believe there's such a thing as a war crime, Hamas is a far greater enemy than Israel. Israel accepts the principle, and Hamas is literally challenging the principle in every way. So yes, it's a little maddening to watch the Western response.

Why did Hamas hold the hostages among civilians, all but guaranteeing civilian casualties, if it claims to fight for the Palestinian people?

HG: Here's the thing about Hamas. Hamas both wants massive Palestinian civilian death, but also profoundly oppresses the Palestinian civilian population and Palestinian civilians constantly burst out with these angry tirades. There's countless videos of this online from Gaza saying this about Hamas, that they come for us, they're driving us into... Hamas is a sort of Islamist renewalist movement that believes that it's going to restore Islam to its prominence in history by the mass death of Palestinians. Hamas officials routinely talk about the Palestinians as a nation of martyrs, and that is not a compliment. That is a strategy. And one final point is the compartmentalization. In other words, the reason Hamas was able to pull off October 7, its great achievement as an institution on October 7, was managing to compartmentalize the 1500 fighters of the Nukhba force in ways that Israeli intelligence couldn't get to. That continues, that ability remains. And so it is entirely possible that there's a debate over whether neighbors knew, it's possible they didn't. And that's important to say.

And that's important because now some of the neighbors knew the families who understand that the food budget is higher knows, but it is actually quite possible given that this is Hamas and given the capabilities we've seen from Hamas in terms of counterintelligence and compartmentalization, that this is actually something that the neighbors in the building don't know. And there's a lot of Gazans right now throughout Nuseirat, throughout Rafah, throughout Jabalia, which is in the north, a place that the Israeli army is going in and out of now, one of the great Hamas strongholds who are saying, "Wait a second, is my neighbor in apartment 3B holding a hostage? Will I only find out when Israeli intelligence finds out and soldiers are going up the stairwell?" There's a lot of that also happening.

Do the Palestinian people feel persecuted by Hamas?

HG: One of the interesting things the polls say is that Palestinians feel deeply abused and oppressed by Hamas and also extremely proud of Hamas's achievement as they see it on October 7th. And both of those exist in the same brains at the same moment as they contemplate the vast tragedy that Hamas has brought up on them. People who think Hamas brought the tragedy upon them. So it's complicated.

How was human intelligence involved in the hostage rescue operation?

HG: The military human intelligence unit was deeply involved in this operation, which means that there were people on the ground, which means that there were Palestinians involved, which means that there a desire, excuse me, which means that there is a desire among a great many Palestinians in Gaza, I don't know to tell you how many, but enough to produce this kind of intelligence to get Hamas out. And that's translating into real intelligence for the IDF. And so if that can be replicated, if the sense that Hamas's weakening can be replicated, one of the most interesting and totally unnoticed things that have happened in Gaza over the last month is that when the IDF now says to Palestinian civilians, "Please leave a place because we're going in," they do immediately. And that's a function of two things. We saw this in Rafah. The American administration sent to the Israelis, "You can't move the civilians out of Rafah. It'll take you four months." And then they moved a million civilians out of Rafah in 10 days.

Now, why were they willing to do it? Two reasons. One, the aid is flowing and the civilians know that where they're going to go, they believe that where they're going to go, they're going to have food and water and medicine. Two, they believe the IDF will move in anyway, and they believe the IDF will not attack them and kill them if they do leave.

What does the hostage rescue operation mean for the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza?

HG: This is the beginning. Now, we don't know if this is also the end and there's no other way to get any more hostages, because Hamas still has the unit discipline to actually kill them if there's another kind of rescue attempt. But if this is the beginning of a breaking of enough Palestinians, it doesn't matter if the polls show that there's a rise to 70% support for Hamas, as long as that 30% gets more anti-Hamas, we might have a lot more hostage rescues.

And so I think going forward, this is a good sign. Couple that with the way that well over a hundred thousand people left Jebalia two weeks ago, just Israel said, "In 14 hours, we're moving." In 14 hours, over a hundred thousand people were out. And that battle with Hamas killed a major Hamas commander, and also went deep into tunnels and also probably took out 10%, the Israeli estimate, 10% of the Hamas fighting forces underground in that area. And then the Israelis pulled out again and the civilians came back.

So if we can now do that over time in Gaza, plus there is this turning of some part of Gazan society into people who are willing to give up those hostages, things are going to go much better.

Has the Biden administration's approach of restraining Israel undermined the success of Israel’s operations in Gaza?

HG: Absolutely. Unquestionably. Nobody questions it. Nobody doubts it. Left and right in Israel agree on this point. It's absolutely a policy error of the Biden administration. I mean, I think I understand what's happening in the Biden administration that's leading them to constantly make these just frankly incompetent mistakes of judgment. The idea that it would take four months to move civilians out of Rafah is just... The way I imagine it in my head is that they have a map on the wall of the NSC, like Russia-Ukraine, and they have a map of Gaza, and the maps are the same size, so they don't have a good sense of the sheer scale. Rafah is five square miles. It's not a four-month operation. I don't even understand where that came from.

The Americans thought there'd be 10 times the Israeli military casualty toll than there actually is. There is a sense among the Americans that the Israelis are incompetent. Maybe that the Israelis are malicious, and therefore can't be trusted to fight a war without massive civilian casualties. The Gaza City battle, the first battle back in October, November, was actually much more damaging to... Had a huge civilian toll in Gaza City for Palestinian civilians.

But that was a battle fought by an Israeli army that hadn't really fought a ground war in 40 years. And as it moved south, by the time it got to Khan Yunis, it was a whole different Israeli military with a whole different tactics, and it was a ground war that went into cities and actually defeated Hamas on the battlefield Hamas built. And now in Rafah, it's incredibly precise. I mean, the death toll is there, but it's two orders of magnitude less than what it was in Gaza City.

So the astonishing learning curve of the Israeli military in how to handle this kind of battlefield is something the Americans just refuse to factor in, don't see, don't understand.

Do you blame the Biden administration for Israel’s struggle to win in Gaza?

HG: Yes, the Biden administration has been mistaken on Gaza. I don't blame the Biden administration because I'm Israeli and the buck stops with my prime minister. My prime minister stopped the war for three months. That was a terrible mistake. This isn't a left-wing critique of him, this is a right-wing critique of him. We could have been past Rafah a long time ago and into the whack-a-mole counterinsurgency type of battle a long time ago. And that's much lower grade fighting, much less civilian death toll.

Do Israelis trust their government to win this war? How are Israelis thinking about the cease-fire proposal?

HG: There are basically two camps in Israel. There's one camp that says, "Because we distrust this government..." That's what every poll tells us. Most Israelis saying it. It's hard for me to even say it now, and I've said it several times and it's still hard for me to say. But nevertheless, most Israelis tell us in polls, polls by the right wing, polls by the left wing, that they distrust this Israeli government and don't think this Israeli government can win this war because they think it is politicking rather than fighting and rather than making the decisions. It is caving to political pressures, whether it's from the right or the left or the Americans or whatever, and not actually seeing through a serious viable policy.

How many Israelis want to stop the war to get the hostages back?

HG: I'm giving ballpark figures and the polls change based on the news cycle, but the way I think of it is approximately 40% of Israelis think we stop the war, get as many of the hostages out as we possibly can, even at the cost of stopping the war. And they are not stupid. In other words, in theory, that's a very stupid idea because Hamas will just come back.

These are people who say, "If Sinwar remains in power in Gaza, that's a terrible blow to Israeli deterrence." Also, it's much, much worse for Gazans. It's like, who actually loses more? And don't worry, it's Sinwar. We'll have another war in two years, and our one job between now and two years from now is to not let them take 245 hostages again. And that'll be a war that this 40% of Israeli society will go fight. In other words, the center left, it overlaps quite a bit with people who call themselves left and center left, are huge part of the volunteer reservists and standing army that actually fought this war, and they're going to be there to fight the next war. So that's one part of Israeli politics.

And then there's the other argument, and this is the argument that comes from the right that says that this Gaza is the weakest of our enemies. Hamas is the weakest of our enemies. And the really big enemies, Iran, Hezbollah as a branch of Iran, are standing there watching, blowing up towns in the north. A third of the city of Metula in the north is demolished. That war in the north that we refuse to actually fight has been terribly damaging to our deterrence. If we can't even defeat Hamas, there is guaranteed to be that desperately powerful war with Hezbollah, because Hezbollah will say, "They can't even defeat Hamas, and we have five times the firepower." And Iran will double down on all of its attacks on us on every front.

In other words, if the Americans manage to convince us that we should stop this war with Hamas intact, there will be more war. There's a diverging now, a profound diverging of American and Israeli perceived interests.

Is America effectively managing negotiations between Israel and Hamas?

HG: It's frustrating to watch American officials prove to be utterly incompetent negotiators. It's frustrating when there's so much on the line in the negotiations.

But what was fascinating was then to watch the arc of the next few days of Hamas's responses. So Hamas's responses to President Biden's announcements were, "We welcome it. It's an interesting thing." President Biden then calls the Qataris and the Egyptians and he says, "Pressure Hamas. Pressure Hamas." And then finally, Hamas releases its statement, its answer. And its answer is, "If you follow the actual Israeli offer." As far as we can tell from what Biden presented. We don't have the Israeli version of the Israeli offer, we only have the American version of the Israeli offer. Then you discover that in fact there's a six-week pause and then a stage two that doesn't have to happen in which the Israelis can go back to the war.

And Hamas said, "No, no, no, no, no hostage gets out unless it's total end of war." Hamas is trying to play on that fifty-fifty divide in Israeli society, which is couched as, "Do we end the war for the hostages or not?" But it's really a vocabulary for talking about deep distrust in this government.

Can this government in Israel finish the job?

HG: That is why I, for example, among many people who are not deeply identified with the political left have just come to believe that this specific Israeli government can't do the job. It cannot negotiate a deal because the far right won't let; it cannot win the war because it is deeply susceptible to the pressure from the center left and from the Biden ministration. So we have a government that, this is true of Netanyahu for many years now, but that chooses the path of least resistance at all times.

But the point is that what Biden is trying to squeeze the Israelis, he's trying to force the Israeli hand. He's trying to commit the Israelis to their own offer by publicizing it. And he runs into the same brick wall everyone always runs into in this region. And everyone is always surprised by it, which is that Hamas will not agree, it will not negotiate. It will not give up the hostages except with the price of its own survival.

It is smelling American pressure on Israel to end the war and it is going to double down, and it is going to force the Americans to choose between ending the war with Hamas surviving, or not ending the war, and potentially losing an election if the Democrats go haywire in the convention in August.

Biden clearly is more comfortable exerting more pressure on Israel than on Hamas because he thinks he has more leeway with Israel. Does Biden have room to pressure Hamas?

HG: You can pressure Hamas, you can pressure Hamas, go to the Israelis and say to them, "Murder every last member of Hamas. Go for it. We got your back."

And then Hamas says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." That's how we got the hostage release in November was Hamas trying to save its northern battalions, Hamas facing a torrent of anger in the world because they were holding little kids. Hamas trying to explain to the Thai government why it was still holding, six weeks in, Thai workers.

How can Biden better be exerting pressure on Hamas?

HG: Here's the thing, if they actually double down on the Israelis, the Hamas would feel the pressure. But to squeeze the Israelis is to relieve the Hamas pressure and push away the very result that the American administration... By the way, again, if you've ever negotiated a real estate deal, you would understand this. I don't know why this is difficult.

What is Benny Gantz’s calculation in leaving the war cabinet?

HG: As far as I understand, Benny Gantz's calculation, it goes something like this. Right now Netanyahu is... The last eight months in which Hezbollah has made large parts of Israel's north uninhabitable and the Israeli government has been just literally unwilling or unable to mount a serious response, at least a response that would satisfy the Israeli public, that is a huge blow to this government's credibility.

And the idea that the war in Gaza is dragging on insanely long. The military and civilian populations in Israel are very close. We all know soldiers, and they all come home and talk to all of us. And so there's this sense that the Israeli army was just told, "Stop," in Gaza for three months for no apparent reason, that was this massive pressure. And so there's a sense in Netanyahu can neither take the left-wing policy, "Get the hostages out even at the cost of ending the war with Hamas intact," nor the right-wing policy, "No matter the cost of hostages, we're saving the future hostages by exacting a decisive and catastrophic cost from Hamas the organization, they actually must be defeated."

And because he can't make that choice to go to either, we're going to end up losing on both fronts. There's a tremendous frustration with Netanyahu.

How is Netanyahu managing the rest of the government amid the war effort?

HG: If you take out all war spending, this is a Bank of Israel report about three weeks ago or four weeks ago, you take out all war spending from the equation, there's a government spending increase of 12% in the middle of a war that the country is buckling under with people losing jobs and businesses with tens of thousands of people having abandoned whole areas of the country and their agriculture and their small businesses and their towns. And in that period, Netanyahu has been spending and spending and spending to hold together a coalition so he doesn't fall.

You mentioned that many Israelis have grown distrustful of Netanyahu and his government. Are serious people in Israel growing distrustful or is it more of the political fringe?

HG: I have to just tell you, my dad is a very thoughtful, serious calm man. He's a rabbi, has a PhD, he is a very serious thinker, writer, and he has come around to the view held by some polls, a third of Israelis and some polls, 45%, I don't know how many that Netanyahu's extending the war artificially, refusing to win, and refusing to lose, and refusing to call any ending of any kind. The left wing one, the right wing one, because when the war ends, the whirlwind, the political whirlwind comes, and the protests come and he has to actually face the people.

He hasn't won an election poll since January, 2023, not a single one, Netanyahu. And he's doing everything to avoid collapsing. And my dad now thinks that's what's happening. As of this week we had that conversation.

Let me explain why that's unbelievably shocking, because that means that we have a leader, by the way, I'm not there yet. There are other explanations, but so many Israelis are there, and that itself is the problem. It means we have a leader who maybe half the people, maybe as much as half the people, think is leaving Israelis in those dungeons and Gaza for his political survival, who thinks is spending wantonly and irresponsibly for his political survival, who thinks that every decision ultimately is about him and not about the war, even as every Israeli family sacrifices.

Why have Biden and Netanyahu grown very publically antagonistic of each other?

HG: The joke is that Biden needs to appear to be antagonistic toward Netanyahu for his domestic political reasons. And Netanyahu desperately needs to appear to be holding back the Americans and be antagonistic to the Americans for domestic political reasons. This helps them both. And so they're both committed to the bit.

Do you think Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress is a good idea?

HG: As for the speech in Congress, I had some interesting conversations with members of Congress from the Democratic Party on this question, and they're horrified and they don't understand why it's happening. It's an Israeli ask. The goal is... And from Netanyahu's perspective, there's no downside. If he comes and half the Democratic Party turns their back or doesn't show up, that's a great win for him. He's holding the line and, "Carrying our truth to Washington." He appears the great statesman and not as most Israelis see him today, which is a basically feckless prime minister who won't get the job done. And if all of Congress is there and stands up and gives him a standing ovation, well, that's great for him as well. So it's a perfect political act by the man.

What do you make of prospects for a war between Israel and Hezbollah in northern Israel and how might that affect Israel’s war effort in Gaza?

HG: The war in the South, strip away everything we've talked about and just get down to the actual tactical questions on the ground of the IDF operation in Gaza, they're basically three sort of fronts right now. There's Philadelphia/ Rafah in the south. Nuseirat was a single operation, but there's going to be more there. And Jabalia in the north where they're now out, but they're going to go back in. So they're different pockets essentially. But pretty soon, two weeks, four weeks, I don't know the military schedule, the entirety of the Gazan territory above ground will have been taken by the IDF once.

And taking a place a second time is a whole different vastly easier act than taking it the first time. You saw that in the Shifa Hospital operation where the first battle of Shifa was long and bitter and bloody and it took huge manpower, and Hamas had built out a whole ring of all kinds of defenses and reconnaissance positions. Reconnaissance positions and it took I think two battalions and a month to actually get into Shifa. The second time Israel went into Shifa, killing 200 Hamas fighters and taking 500 captured, it took 30 minutes.

And so that initial taking of the ground, breaking up the Hamas infrastructure, demolishing the tunnels that are accessible to you from above ground, and taking out all the traps and booby traps, that's the hard part. And that will be over. And then we're into the last stage of the war, which is also the longest stage of the war, and it's going to be this long chasing after Hamas a year, two years. If it follows the model of ISIS in northern Iraq, it'll be five years. This is something Hamas itself has planned for once. Sinwar tells... In these letters that the Wall Street Journal cites, he says that, "We're now going to keep them bogged down in Gaza and that'll exact cost from them and we are prepared for that counterinsurgency."

Well, the IDF has proven incredibly competent in exactly that kind of counterinsurgency. But Gaza will become the secondary front when that initial stage ends and then the north becomes the primary front. And then Hezbollah will face a choice. It can go to an escalation because the Israelis politically will be unable to avoid an escalation, or it can immediately say, "Well, now that the massive ground war in Gaza is over, we were just defending Gaza, we're going to now immediately de-escalate." And then the Americans will pressure the Israelis and it'll be very difficult to fight that war.

That tells me that there's an Israeli interest in having a decisive escalation in the North somehow as much as possible controlled, but nevertheless something very bloody for Hezbollah that they will not recover from easily and quickly before the end of Gaza, before the end of that current stage in Gaza, when Hezbollah will have that easy out. Easy out that'll make it impossible for the Israelis to leverage any kind of international pressure to push Hezbollah back from the border, which no international pressure will be capable of doing anyway.

So I think it's quite likely, it's a decision of about five people so it's very hard to predict. It's very easy to predict what a million people are going to do and very hard to predict what five are going to do. But I think it's quite likely, just based on the dynamic I've described, that we're going to see massive escalation in the North very, very soon. Two to four weeks is the kind of schedule that I'm talking about, that I'm imagining.

Would Israelis support a war with Hezbollah given their growing discontent with Netanyahu’s government?

HG: There's double-digit higher percentage of support for a war in the north than there is for the war in the South right now among the Israeli public. He would be supported more if he... The war in the north, it doesn't need to be a war of ground conquest and it doesn't need to be a war of complex movements of millions of civilians because we don't have to root Hezbollah out. We have to deliver a fast and painful hit, and then Hezbollah will escalate to show that it can, and then we have to walk them to that edge. We're talking about a very, very bloody dangerous moment. We're talking about a dangerous moment for Israelis. Hezbollah has the firepower to set Tel Aviv on fire. And that means that the Israeli response will be commensurate and will probably be much greater because it'll have to make it untenable for Hezbollah to do so.

Our great and immense and enormous disadvantage in that regard is that these kinds of organizations, Hezbollah in the sense that Iran, and Hamas just because of who Sinwar is and how he thinks, are much less susceptible to their side's suffering to the destruction of Gaza or Lebanon, and usually see it as their own strategy. So they think it is a good thing.

Hezbollah is much more susceptible than Hamas because there's a larger Lebanon Hezbollah lives in and has to explain that destruction. And if you follow Lebanese social media right now, it's absolutely heartbreaking because they expect this war and 80,000 Israelis, something like that, have been unable to go home to the Israeli North, 100,000 Lebanese villagers fled and have been unable to go back over the last eight months because they think Hezbollah is going to drag exactly that horrible war to them. And so it's going to be... I don't know how to escape the escalatory logic. It's going to be very, very bad. It's also basically unavoidable. Hezbollah is telling us that we have two choices: live with permanent shelling or have that one fast, hard, agonizing moment. And if you had to choose, which would you choose?

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas (Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2024)

Report: Israel’s full proposal includes ‘permanent’ truce before all hostages return (Times of Israel, June 10, 2024)

In Egypt, Blinken urges regional leaders to ‘press Hamas to say yes’ to Gaza deal (Times of Israel, June 10, 2024)

Hamas operatives said to have standing orders to kill hostages if IDF approaches (Times of Israel, June 10, 2024)

How Israel Saved a Hostage Rescue Mission That Nearly Failed (WSJ, June 10, 2024)

Far-right leaders slam Gantz’s exit from government, but hail ‘big opportunity’ (The Times of Israel, June 10, 2024)

Gantz’s misguided departure: Gallant won’t follow him, and Netanyahu couldn’t care less (Shalom Yerushalmi, The Times of Israel, June 10, 2024)

What's next for truce talks after Israel rescues 4 hostages and 274 Palestinians are killed? (Tia Goldenberg, AP News, June 10, 2024)

Inside Israel’s hostage rescue: Secret plans and a deadly ‘wall of fire' (Washington Post, June 9, 2024)

Netanyahu preventing victory over Hamas, Gantz says as he exits coalition (Barak Ravid, Monday 9, June 2024)

Gaza journalist who wrote for Al Jazeera was holding 3 hostages in home with family, Israel says (New York Post, June 9, 2024)

US urging Arab allies not to set deadline for post-war two-state solution (Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, June 8, 2024)

Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz quits emergency government  (BBC, June 9, 2024)

Haviv Rettig Gur on the Ceasefire Proposal on X (June 10, 2024)

Haviv Rettig Gur on the Hostage Rescue on X (June 10, 2024)

Haviv Rettig Gur on the War in Gaza on X (June 4, 2024)

Jubilant over the hostage rescue, Netanyahu knows more difficult times lie ahead (Amir Bar Shalom, June 10, 2024)

Blaming Israel for Rescuing Its People (The Editorial Board, WSJ, June 9, 2024)

John Spencer on X responding to Francesca Albanese (X, June 9, 2024)

One-Third of Hostages in Gaza Believed Dead (FDD, June 4, 2024)

Improving an Overlooked Aspect of the Gaza Ceasefire Proposal (Robert Satloff, Washington Institute, June 3, 2024)

Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It? (John Spencer, Newsweek, March 25, 2024)

Israel-Hamas war: Gaza's women, children are killed less frequently as toll rises, AP finds (AP, June 10, 2024)

Don’t Fall for Hamas’ Numbers Game (Danielle Pletka, National Review, March 6, 2024)