The New York Times headlines, "In Gaza, Israel’s Military Has Reached the End of the Line, U.S. Officials Say."
Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, according to senior American officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished.With the Biden administration racing to get cease-fire negotiations back on track, a growing number of national security officials across the government said that the Israeli military had severely set back Hamas but would never be able to completely eliminate the group.
It then admits something else about these same US officials.
In many respects, Israel’s military operation has done far more damage against Hamas than U.S. officials had predicted when the war began in October.Israeli forces can now move freely throughout Gaza, the officials said, and Hamas is bloodied and damaged. Israel has destroyed or seized crucial supply routes from Egypt into Gaza. About 14,000 combatants in Gaza have been killed or captured, the Israeli military said last month. (The U.S. intelligence agencies use different, more conservative methodologies to estimate Hamas casualties, though the precise number remains classified.)The Israeli military also asserted that it had eliminated half the leadership of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, including the top leaders Muhammad Deif and Marwan Issa.But one of Israel’s biggest remaining goals — the return of the roughly 115 living and dead hostages still held in Gaza after being seized in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — cannot be achieved militarily, according to current and former American and Israeli officials.
So these officials were completely wrong in October. They were also wrong about Israel's taking Rafah, which they now admit is exactly what destroyed Hamas' supply lines from Egypt - and cost far fewer casualties thna they had confidently predicted.
But the US wants to send a message to Israel, and the New York Times is more than happy to do their bidding:
William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, is due in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to deliver is that there is little more Israel can accomplish against Hamas.Which is the entire point. This article isn't reporting; it is a mouthpiece for Biden administration talking points.
If you look at what Israel has actually been doing, you would see that its success is not diminishing, but increasing. As it gathers more intelligence from captured terrorists and taking materials it discovers, it is getting more and more accurate than when it started.
In October, Israel tried to bomb the tunnels from the air. At the time, their extent and depth were not known as well as they are now. The percentage of civilians killed was much higher.
Consistently, Israel has gotten better and better at targeting the terrorists. The entire reason that the Palestinians made up huge casualty lies about the airstrike on the Al Taabin school is becase it was a triumph of intelligence, taking out over 30 terrorists gathered in the mosque - a proportional attack by any definition of the term under international law.
Andrew Fox describes how Israel's military accomplishents are incredible, and how patience is needed for an enemy like that. And he describes this NYT article before it was even written:
This is not, and never has been, a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operation—It is a conventional urban war against an irregular but fully formed terror army, with their own underground citadel. Yet many Western analysts are incapable of seeing the conflict through anything but the lens of post-9/11 operations. The refrain, echoing official Biden-Harris administration talking points, is that Israel should be doing what the West tried and failed to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, Israel needs to make sure it follows our lead and lose.Hamas will fight for as long as its commanders remain in control. The IDF’s operational plan at this point is to force them to crack when they understand their own lives are in danger. The IDF has its boot on Hamas’ throat and will keep pressing until it quits.This, in turn, is why Washington’s unrelenting campaign to force a cease-fire is so pernicious: It attempts to ensure Hamas will survive and have a vote in the outcome of the war. So far, Netanyahu has resisted the pressure, allowing the IDF to continue tightening the vise until Hamas is forced to agree to Israel’s terms for a cease-fire. Israel does not accept the artificial Western separation of diplomacy from military force, as if they were opposite tools with conflicting objectives. It is leveraging both toward the same goal.The IDF is only midway through a gargantuan task. The job is far from finished, but it is making progress. At this point, the only thing that can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and ensure the survival of the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist group on Israel’s border, is Washington.
Biden wants the war to go away, and if that means leaving Hamas in place to rise another day, well, the Democrats have an election to win which is the real priority.
