As Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip rages into its third month, experts believe the Israeli army’s ground offensive is now in the final and possibly decisive phase, particularly with the attacks and entry into southern areas like Khan Younis.
Ryan Bohl, a geopolitical analyst, believes Israeli operations in southern Gaza “won’t take as a long as it did in the north.”
“Once Khan Younis falls, Rafah will be next, and it is even smaller than Khan Younis,” Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at risk intelligence firm RANE, told Anadolu in a video interview.
“That will also be something of a mopping up operation. So, we are moving into the final phase of the ground invasion.”
After that, he sees a transfer over to “an occupation and to an insurgency that accompanies that occupation.”
Zoran Kusovac, another security expert, pointed out that since the end of the humanitarian pause, Israel has expanded its operations to the south without clearing the northern parts around Gaza City.
“This is practically a new prong of the offensive,” Kusovac told Anadolu.
“So generally, the way that Israel operated was pretty similar to what it did in the first four weeks of the invasion. But it took the operation into the south and this is a new development.”
Regarding Israel’s operations in the south, he said the “most worrying development is another column that is moving from west towards the sea, just north of Khan Younis.”
“It is obviously there to cut Khan Younis off and to create three separate areas of Gaza Strip under Israeli control, that would not be connected to each other,” he explained.
In the first phase, Israel ordered people to move from Gaza City down to south and now it is pushing people further south from the central part of the Gaza Strip.
“The idea is obviously to have everyone move down to Khan Younis. And it is, of course, being accomplished because people are afraid to stay where Israelis might move in and isolate,” he said.
With around 1.8 million already in the south of Gaza, an area that makes up approximately two-thirds of the Strip, the population around Khan Younis and the other urban areas has practically doubled.
About the Israeli system of dividing Gaza into sectors for evacuation orders, Kusovac asserted that it is “impossible for such a huge number of people to move in such a small area and to vacate those zones where Israel wants to conduct operations.”
New strategies and tactics
Despite the mounting civilian casualties, Bohl believes that Israel is making efforts to mitigate civilian casualties, such as moving ground troops faster and reducing the number of airstrikes.
“When they were going into the north, they were using this, it’s not quite carpet bombing, but they were using extensive airstrikes to destroy as many buildings as possible to disrupt Hamas as much as possible. They are not doing that quite at the same scale in the south,” he said.
This, he added, is “an attempt to appease the Americans, to carry out the operation both faster and with fewer significant civilian casualties, which are easier to avoid when it’s ground troops rather than airstrikes.”
For Hamas, Bohl believes there have not been major tactical changes, but they are “running out of options.”
“They’re still carrying out rocket launches towards Israel … There’s still significant rocket launches … They’re trying to use up their rocket arsenal as much as they possibly can before the IDF takes control of their launching sites and destroys their rocket arsenal. So they’re going to use that as much as they can in the coming days,” he said.
However, Kusovac is of the view that a proper Israeli move against Hamas is yet to be seen.
“It’s still a move against territory in military terms … If Hamas did not have the tunnels and if Hamas fought on the ground, what Israel is doing now would have sense as a preparatory move,” he said.
“But given that the main fighting that Hamas is doing is through the tunnels and out of the tunnels, this doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense in fighting terms. It makes a lot of sense only in terms of control of the territory on the ground, but this is still just a small part of what Israel needs to do.”
The main reason for this militarily might be to deny movement to Hamas on the ground, he said.
“So, it is quite possible that Hamas can still move, not just between the three areas that are now being created in the Gaza Strip, the northern, the central and the southern part, but also within each of these areas,” said Kusovac.
“It can move operationally and send its fighters where they can fight the Israeli advance, where they can either try to stop the advance or it can hit them from the side where they can flank them.”
For Israel, all of this can be “preparatory actions for the war against Hamas that really hasn’t happened yet,” he added.
“To be able to clear Hamas, Israel needs to clear the entire population (of Gaza),” said Kusovac, explaining that Hamas fighters might “be completely indistinguishable.”
“This, of course, is a very cruel method, but this is practically the only way to fight a guerilla movement. So, by dividing the territory into three areas, Israel is obviously trying to make its task of clearing the ground easier.”
Next phase and ‘underground’ Hamas
Bohl said Hamas has shown no sign that they are prepared to withdraw from Gaza, so that is an option that the US and Israel are exploring diplomatically “to see if they can find a place for Hamas fighters and leadership to go in order to end the war sooner.”
He believes Israel’s major combat operations, including full-scale mobilization, “will come to an end at the latest by the end of January … (or) even at the end of this year.”
Israel will then move to “an occupation of the Gaza Strip,” he said.
“That will mean that the Israelis will remain in force in Gaza for an extended period of time while they’re looking for some sort of Palestinian or international civilian partner to govern the cities and to carry out reconstruction work, which Israel clearly doesn’t want to pay for. So that be what the next phase will look like,” said Bohl.
He believes Hamas “will be suppressed and moved into an underground movement, if not mostly eliminated from the Gaza Strip.”
Hamas will continue to “have bases in Lebanon and in Syria,” and “political leadership in Qatar, and it will have support from Iran,” he said.
“So, Hamas as a movement will continue in these other countries and in the West Bank and, then in the Gaza Strip, it’ll exist as an underground movement,” said Bohl.
Israelis are in a bind
Regarding the possible political future of Gaza, Abdaljawad Omar, a lecturer at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, said: “Assuming the near complete defeat of the Palestinian resistance, one of the options would be a long-term Israeli presence in Gaza, where it both runs governance and security, and Israel would be the only party in the Gaza Strip.”
The second would be Palestinian Authority (PA) taking over the Gaza Strip in an arrangement similar to the West Bank, with Israel handling security and the PA handling civil affairs, he added.
He also pointed to a third possibility with a coalition coming in and taking over, either with “an Arab or Palestinian partner.”
“The Israelis here are in a bind. A Palestinian Authority presence means that more pressure would be placed on a two-state outcome since now Gaza and the West Bank are ruled by the same political party,” said Omar.
“An Arab force in Gaza would also mean that it would deprive from freedom of movement within the Strip or would at times make it clash with these Arab forces.”
Now, despite all the above, Israel’s game plan would or could still be an attempt to “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians from Gaza and then taking over the enclave, he added.
“Personally, I think this talk is highly presumptuous. Israel could still lose this war or find itself in quagmire. I think for now everyone is playing the wait-and-see game,” said Omar.