Can Hamas Be Destroyed?

“I can only compare their attack to ISIS,” Haim Regev, Israel’s ambassador to the European Union and NATO, told Foreign Policy from his office in Brussels. It was a reference to the hundreds killed and dozens more abducted—including women, children, and older people—when armed Palestinian militants infiltrated southern Israel early Saturday morning. The world must put pressure on Hamas to release Israeli hostages unconditionally, Regev said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, promised to unleash fury. He called up 300,000 reservists and alluded to an imminent ground incursion. Netanyahu warned Gaza residents in Hamas areas to get out, as Israeli armed forces amassed at the de facto border with Gaza in preparation. Their ostensible mission, judging from the fiery statements of Israeli officials, will be to decapitate Hamas and definitively end the threat it poses to Israel.

But it’s less clear what that might mean in practice. Is Israel in a position to eliminate Hamas? Would it be sufficient to force Hamas’s leadership to leave Gaza? Would they have to be killed? Or is Hamas inevitably a permanent fixture of Palestinian politics, so long as there isn’t a permanent resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

While Netanyahu may not admit it, he likely understands that Hamas has a lifeline in the form of its Israeli hostages. As long as Israeli citizens are in Hamas’s hands, Netanyahu will be under pressure to eventually negotiate their release. In 2011, the Israeli government released more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured by Palestinian militants who entered Israel through a tunnel.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, a senior Hamas leader said the group has captured enough Israelis to seek the release of all Palestinians in Israeli prisons. “What we have in our hands will release all our prisoners,” said Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau. Al Jazeera reported that there are more than 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. That includes 33 women and 170 minors, according to Addameer, a prisoners’ rights NGO.

According to a report first published by Xinhua, China’s state news agency, Qatar is mediating a deal between Israel and Hamas to get female Israeli hostages released in exchange for female Palestinian prisoners. “With U.S. support, Qatar is seeking to accomplish an urgent agreement,” an anonymous source told Xinhua. But thus far there is no official word on any such deal. So far, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have increased Israel’s leverage by arresting a senior Hamas leader, Muhammad Abu Ghali, the deputy commander of the southern division of Hamas’s naval force. They are also building pressure on Hamas’s leadership by blockading Gaza’s supply of food, fuel, and power.

Rescuing Israeli hostages is a priority for Israel, but that is only one of the many reasons holding Israel back from a definitive ground incursion that it has long contemplated and decided against. The Israeli security apparatus has long believed that decapitating Hamas will require far more than a one-off, short-term military operation, and a wider campaign presents a host of challenges to Israeli authorities. It was not an accident that Israel unilaterally decided to evacuate the strip in 2005, decades after occupying the territory in 1967.

Yet the pressure is high in Israel not just for retribution against Hamas but for some significant strategic victory. “Our civilians have been slaughtered,” retired Col. Eran Lerman, a former Israeli deputy national security advisor, told Foreign Policy. “We cannot live under this exterminatory threat.” Two years ago, in a previous conflagration between the IDF and Hamas, Lerman advocated a more cautious response. “Hamas’s capabilities must be destroyed but not to zero—that has been our idea,” Lerman told me then. “Iran and Hezbollah are the bigger threat, and we must remain focused on them.”

Even relatively liberal and peace-seeking Israelis are expressing a shift in perspective in the aftermath of Hamas’s latest attack. Its scale and brutality have shocked Israel and united the diverse and quarrelling political landscape, with many now seeking a permanent solution to Hamas. For many, this means removing the group entirely from its sanctuary in Gaza. Lerman said Israel can no longer allow Hamas in operate in Gaza, not after its recent “murderous attack” on the people of Israel. Regev, the ambassador, said Israel “cannot tolerate” such attacks.

Any ground incursion that seeks a permanent diminution of Hamas, however, requires not just going in but staying back and reoccupying the strip. Israel thus faces a dilemma. Without boots on the ground, it cannot stop Hamas, but being on the ground means not just spending vast sums of money to take responsibility for the Palestinians post-conflict but also inevitably losing a lot of lives on both sides.

As in the past, Israel can bomb buildings and other infrastructure in Gaza used by Hamas, such as its underground tunnel network. But events this week are proof of how such measures have been insufficient to deter Hamas from inflicting terrorism on Israel. To find and destroy capabilities not in sight and to decimate the leadership, the IDF would need to go inside Gaza—supported by intelligence and air power—and scour each neighborhood, every single home, in the highly contested strip. The humanitarian cost alone of such an undertaking could be enough to deter Israel.

Moreover, the sympathy that Israel has garnered this week, despite often being seen as an aggressor in the conflict reluctant to make concessions and find peace, might soon deplete if unarmed residents of Gaza have nowhere to go and die in droves in Israeli bombings. And an armed conflict inside a Palestinian territory that threatens the lives of its 2 million inhabitants could lead to a wider conflict with Iran or its proxy Hezbollah, which has already heeded Hamas’s call and launched a few attacks on Israel this week. It may even inflame passions on the dormant Arab street, forcing the hands of Israel’s new friends in the Islamic world to stand with fellow Muslims and against Israel.

There have been demonstrations in Bahrain, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen, Tunisia, and Kuwait. Two Israeli tourists were killed in Egypt. Abdul Majeed Abdullah Hassan, who joined a rally with hundreds of people in Bahrain, told the New York Times: “This is the first time that we rejoice in this way for our Palestinian brothers.” In the context of the Israeli occupation and blockade, the Hamas operation “warmed our hearts,” he said, calling his government’s participation in the Abraham Accords “shameful.”

A limited ground incursion could be one way out. Israelis could go in quickly and destroy current stockpiles and factories where large- to medium-sized rockets are built. But to make sure Hamas does not manufacture weapons in the future, the IDF would have to remain in Gaza. Hamas has time and again proved that it can adapt and build rockets in local workshops with products in daily use. For instance, it assembles crude but effective Qassam rockets with industrial metal piping and homemade fuel of potassium nitrate fertilizer and commercial explosives.

None of this should come as a surprise. It has always been true that unless the IDF is permanently stationed inside Gaza, Israel cannot contain Hamas’s threat effectively. In 2021, while I was researching Hamas’s capabilities, Michael Armstrong, an associate professor of operations research at Brock University in Canada who has written about the operational performance of weapons built by Hamas, told me that unless Israelis want to stay in Gaza and occupy it, he couldn’t really see how they could disarm Hamas.

Moreover, targeting Hamas members inside Gaza, where many people may support the group especially at a time like this, requires extremely good intelligence, which probably isn’t as readily available as Mossad’s folklore would have you believe.

Regev downplayed Israel’s intentions toward Hamas when speaking with Foreign Policy, describing them simply as “destroying their capabilities,” rather than occupying Gaza.

At the same time, however, it’s safe to assume that this time Israel isn’t bluffing. Even if hostages are released under an exchange, Hamas’s leadership faces a threat like never before. Some of its leaders are already in Lebanon and Qatar, while the group in the past has also operated from Turkey. More of its members might now be planning an escape as Israel’s counteroffensive intensifies.