With ground troops and tanks returning to Gaza, Israel is hoping military pressure will force Hamas to free more hostages, while preparing to oust the Palestinian terror group from power, even if it requires a lengthy war, insiders and experts said. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed some of his thinking to new recruits to the IDF Armored Corps on Sunday, telling them that Israel is “winning because we understand that, to defeat our enemies, those who are closing in on us, we must break through with crushing force … The tremendous crushing force is the tank corps.”

The prime minister vowed that Israel “will complete … victory as soon as possible.” 

A source in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, who was briefed after the fighting restarted, told Jewish Insider that while it may take many months to fully remove Hamas from power in Gaza, Netanyahu is likely to agree to a ceasefire as soon as the terrorist group is willing to release a “reasonable” number of the remaining 59 hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, of which as many as 24 are believed to be alive. 

The source, who supports the government’s aim of ousting Hamas from power, expressed concern that Netanyahu would not continue the war to the total defeat of Hamas.

Michael Makovsky, president and CEO of the hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security of America, who met with senior officials and military figures in Israel last week, told JI that Israel is trying to put pressure on Hamas to release hostages.

“They’ll see in the next couple of weeks,” Makovsky said. “If they can get more live hostages, as many as they can, then there can be a ceasefire for a while.”

At the same time, he said he was not optimistic that all the hostages would be released: “I don’t know why Hamas would do that.” 

While most Israelis support removing Hamas from power in Gaza, polls show that the prospect of a months-long war with no end in sight and without the remaining hostages released faces political headwinds from a war-weary Israeli public. The plan would require mobilizing a fatigued group of reservists, and would place additional challenges on the Israeli homefront.

Makovsky pointed out that continuing the war would be “tougher on the people” of Israel, and attributed the “fatigue” among reservists to mistakes made early in the war, which “went longer than it should have — for some legitimate reasons and some not — and this is one of the results, that people are tired.”

The Israeli public is divided. According to a poll conducted last month by the Israel Democracy Institute, 33% of Jewish Israeli support ending the war and seeking diplomatic arrangements, while 28% supported resuming full-scale war in Gaza. Netanyahu has faced protests from hostage families seeking an end to the war, and has faced opposition over his efforts to fire the head of the Shin Bet, who supports further diplomatic negotiations.

Makovsky said that despite the demonstrations in Tel Aviv against resuming the war, he saw a consensus among all military figures that “at some point, they’re going to have to go back in” to Gaza to defeat Hamas.

“They know they have to finish off Hamas as much as possible; that’s just a fact,” he said.

Retired IDF Maj.-Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security advisor under Netanyahu and a distinguished fellow at JINSA, said that the new phase of the war and the final defeat of Hamas may take as long as a year.

Following heavy airstrikes in the first 24 hours last week, ground forces entered three areas — the Netzarim Corridor bisecting northern and southern Gaza, northwestern Gaza on the shore and the Shaboura area of Rafah, in southern Gaza. Israel has killed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad figures, including senior political figures in Hamas.

“If that doesn’t bring Hamas into negotiations [to release the hostages] in good faith, you’ll see more ground forces going in,” Amidror said in a JINSA webinar. “The purpose at the end is to eliminate Hamas totally … That will take a year.”

It will take a “slow process” for the IDF to eliminate Hamas as a leading force in Gaza, involving large numbers of ground troops, Amidror said.

“We don’t need to rush. We have all the time, and we need to do it cautiously,” he said.

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended last week after lasting for two months. For the first six weeks, hostages were released each week in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, including mass murderers, and Israel’s withdrawal from parts — but not all — of Gaza. 

At that point, negotiations were meant to continue for the second phase of the deal, which was expected to bring about the release of the rest of the hostages along with an Israeli withdrawal from much of Gaza, with Hamas relinquishing control of the enclave. Israel sought to extend the first phase of the deal, instead of negotiating the second phase, in which Hamas reportedly sought to effectively remain in power along with Israel’s withdrawal from all of Gaza. 

U.S. negotiators subsequently suggested two interim deals with an aim to maintain a ceasefire through Ramadan and Passover, which ends in mid-April, but Hamas did not agree to the terms, insisting on continuing to the second phase of the original agreement.

Amidror said that “the idea was not a ceasefire. It was to release more hostages. What we wanted to achieve was an agreement about the period during which Hamas would release the hostages, and what we learned … is that is not Hamas’ intention. They want to achieve a total withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza without any plan for the future. The meaning of that is to allow Hamas to rebuild itself in Gaza.” 

Once that became clear, Israel relaunched the fighting in Gaza to extricate itself from the “absurd situation in which we are limiting our efforts inside Gaza and at the same time not getting any hostages out.” 

Now, Israel’s task is “to smash Hamas to a level at which they are no longer relevant inside the Gaza Strip,” Amidror said.

“To those who say ‘the IDF didn’t succeed, Hamas is still strong,’ yes, Hamas is still strong in the Gaza Strip,” Amidror explained. “They recruited young people with Kalashnikovs and RPGs and are the strongest force in Gaza … but Hamas is not relevant as an organization that can attack Israel. In the first days [of the renewed war] they only shot three or four missiles at Israel … They cannot provide new weapons systems to the people they recruited, because they cannot smuggle [arms] in from the Sinai.” 

Amidror asserted that ground troops are necessary for Israel to win the war.

“This will not be a war that will be determined by intelligence,” he said. “We will have to go and fight in the Gaza Strip to find [Hamas terrorists] and kill them. It won’t end with intelligence and precise air raids. It will be a very hard, ground forces kind of urban war.”

The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians and is not trusted as a reliable source by Israel, says 50,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the war. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 terrorists and more than 400 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the fighting.

The new IDF chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, had a “much more aggressive orientation in Gaza” when he was the head of the IDF’s southern command, and as such, Makovsky said he’s “not surprised they’ve gone in decisively this time.”

Similar to earlier phases of the war, Israel is moving towards having Gazan civilians stay in humanitarian zones where they will have access to food and medical aid, overseen by Israel to prevent Hamas control, the Knesset source said.

“Control of aid has been empowering Hamas,” Makovsky said. “Israel has to disconnect the two.”

In that vein, Israel has dropped leaflets in Gaza and published warnings on social media. 

Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Friday that the IDF would continue to capture territory in Gaza, evacuating the population, as long as Hamas continues to hold the hostages.

Makovsky said that “creating bigger, deeper buffer zones than the 1 kilometer they initially carved out … makes sense from an Israeli perspective.”

The Knesset source focused on the combination of splitting Gaza between its north and south with Israel blocking humanitarian aid, describing it as a “siege strategy” that is meant to lead to Hamas “begging on all fours for a ceasefire.” 

The source noted that Israel was not previously able to try such a strategy because the Biden administration insisted on large quantities of humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza, but that the Trump administration supports Israel’s renewed fighting in Gaza.

However, Makovsky argued that early in the war, “the IDF was a bit cautious. They didn’t go into Rafah right away, they went point to point. They didn’t [have a] plan and they had to develop one. That’s not on Biden. It became more about Biden in January” — when the administration threatened to block arms to Israel if it went into Gaza. “I think the IDF and the war cabinet, for that matter, deserve some responsibility for that.”