Postwar

This war is not turning out very well for either side. It is hard to imagine a viable endgame either for Israel or for the Hamas.

When Hamas launched its insane attack on Israel on Oct. 7, they had only the faintest idea of what the objective of this brutal operation could be. We now know from documents recovered from dead Hamas militants that they were under instructions to kill as many Jews and take as many hostages as possible.

The militants had detailed maps of the settlements they were assigned to assault. About 1,500 of them were killed when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) counter-attacked.

No recovered document, however, spoke of the general strategy. They were mere foot soldiers given tactical assignments. Strategy was something the Hamas leaders and their sponsors were supposed to think through.

n the absence of any evidence describing Hamas strategy, we could only surmise from the intentional brutality of this attack that that the goal was to provoke Israel into a mad response. This, in turn, would lead to agitation among other Palestinians and supporters across the Muslim world.

It was a long shot: but it seems Hamas anticipated their allies would quickly join the fray. A violent uprising could erupt in the West Bank while the Hezbollah could mount an attack from their bases in southern Lebanon. All the ruckus would upset the diplomatic process where key nations such as Saudi Arabia would finally recognize the State of Israel.

None of that is happening. The rapid deployment of American carrier-led assault groups close to Israel seems to have been an effective deterrent. Hezbollah has been firing routinely across the border into Israel but there is no indication of a large offensive being prepared.

While the war between Hamas and Israel begins to dwindle, the humanitarian crisis looms larger each day. Gaza has about 2.2 million people. Israel’s siege on the territory means there will be no water, no food and no fuel for the trapped population. The suffering escalates with each passing hour.

The most US President Biden got when he visited Tel Aviv was to get Israel and Egypt to agree to allow humanitarian aid to flow through the Rafah crossing at the southern end of Gaza. That is a small crossing controlled by Israel. The international aid is accumulating on the Egyptian side of the border. Rafah will be a severe bottleneck.

For its part, Israel declared the obliteration of the Hamas infrastructure as the goal of its armed response. Inevitably, this will involve incursions into Gaza. An Israeli assault, however, will endanger the lives of the hundreds of hostages taken by Hamas fighters.

We now know that Hamas, in the years it ruled Gaza, built hundreds of kilometers of tunnels where they hide their arms, their missile factories and their militants. For an invading force, the only thing worse than doing house-to-house fighting is to do tunnel-to-tunnel fighting.

In addition, Hamas laid down booby traps and landmines to stop Israeli armor. They knew an attack would provoke an incursion and prepared for that. They are determined to make this as costly for Israel as possible.

The IDF has massed armor along the border with Gaza for over a week now. But, apart from a few small raids, they have not moved in force. Apart from calculating the possible repercussions of a full-scale invasion, the Israelis must be developing tactics for such an assault. It is not going to be easy.

To be sure, Israel does not want to end up governing Gaza. No one wants to govern a devastated settlement with two million hungry people and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels underneath. It will take months to clear those tunnels. The Hamas militants do not give up easily.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is not keen on governing Gaza. None of the surrounding nations want to play that role. The task of rebuilding Gaza will be costly and will probably require a generation to complete.

Over the last decades, three wars have already broken out between Israel and Hamas. In all these wars, Israel limited its incursions, content to merely “trim the grass” to degrade the enemy’s fighting capability. This time, Israel has declared the complete obliteration of Hamas as their military goal. They must at least try to approximate that goal.

We have managed to repatriate a paltry few Filipinos from Israel. A lot of Filipinos who work there actually prefer to stay – even as four Filipinos have been killed so far.

A mandatory evacuation of Filipinos from Gaza has been ordered by our government. But no government has been able to extract their nationals from the besieged territory.

Increasingly, it appears likelier that the Israeli war with Hamas is not going to redraw the geopolitical map of this troubled region after all. Israel does not want to fight a two-front war in its south and its north. Tel Aviv does not want an insurrection to happen in the West Bank.

Only Iran appears to want to widen the conflict. Iran, like the Palestinian militant groups, wants to wipe Israel off the map. Tehran has been expending billions supplying militant groups with arms.

But Iran should hesitate jumping into this war. The best they can do is to fire long-range missiles into Israel – that will likely be intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.