U.S. officials see strategic failure in Israel’s Rafah invasion

Top Biden administration officials traveling to Israel this weekend are running out of chances to persuade the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt their vision of how to end the war in Gaza and bring lasting peace.

More than seven months and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths after the brutal attack in Israel last October, the two sides are as far apart as ever on both battlefield tactics and overall strategy to achieve their shared goal of defeating Hamas.

Their profound differences range from whether it is possible for Israel Defense Forces to militarily destroy every vestige of Hamas - razing most of Gaza along with it - to whether the establishment of a Palestinian state is capitulation to terrorists or the only way to end the decades-long cycle of violence.

“I think in some ways we are struggling over what the theory of victory is,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a NATO youth conference in Miami on Monday. “Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory. I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”

Israel’s expanding assault on Rafah, the southernmost Gaza city where 1.5 million Palestinians had fled from relentless air and ground attacks farther north, is but the latest example of its disregard for U.S. warnings on military operations and the growing humanitarian crisis in the enclave.

Having committed itself to “ironclad” support of Israel’s defense, the Biden administration believes Israel’s current strategy is not worth the cost in terms of human lives and destruction, cannot achieve its objective, and will ultimately undermine broader U.S. and Israeli goals in the Middle East.

President Biden, already under severe domestic and global criticism for providing Israel with defense aid and diplomatic support, has threatened to withhold offensive weapons if it proceeds with a “major military operation” in Rafah without sufficiently protecting civilians there. But even the threat of a pause in shipments has cued outrage from Republican lawmakers who back supporting Israel at any cost.

Despite the evacuation of more than 600,000 Palestinians from the Rafah area over the past week, largely to areas where the United Nations says there is no shelter, food, water, sanitation or medical care, the administration has so far declined to characterize Israel’s attacks as the major Rafah operation it has made a red line.

This account of the strategic and political dilemmas faced by both the United States and Israel comes from more than a half dozen current and former U.S. and Israeli diplomatic, intelligence and military officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive relationship and the fraught future. Few expressed any optimism that a meeting of the minds was near, or that the administration had any new initiatives to bring an end to the conflict.

In Rafah and beyond, Israel faces choices that will once again be presented to Netanyahu this weekend when a delegation headed by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan arrives on a trip that also includes stops in Riyadh and other Arab capitals. Sullivan will be accompanied by a triad of Biden’s top aides on the issue, including National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who spent most of the week in Ukraine.

“We have been doing a lot of work on this … with partners in the Arab world and beyond over several months,” Blinken said at a Wednesday news conference in Kyiv. “But it’s imperative that Israel also do this work and focus on what the future can and must be.”

Israel, Blinken said, “cannot, and says it does not want responsibility for Gaza. We cannot have Hamas controlling Gaza; we can’t have chaos and anarchy in Gaza. So there needs to be a clear concrete plan, and we look to Israel to come forward with its ideas.”

In an interview Wednesday with CNBC, Netanyahu acknowledged disagreements with the administration, but said “we have to do what we have to do,” which includes retaking all of Gaza. “You can’t leave Hamas there and talk about the day after because we’re not going to have a day after.”

The two-state solution that the United States and most of the rest of the world have advocated for decades “would be the greatest reward for the terrorists that you can imagine … giving them a prize. And secondly, it would be a state that would be immediately taken over by Hamas and Iran,” Netanyahu said.

Instead, he said a path forward in Gaza might be Palestinian administration, similar to what now exists on the West Bank, with Israel retaining “certain sovereign powers,” including all military and security functions and control over what and who crosses Gaza’s borders.

To the Biden administration that is a recipe for ongoing strife: a diminished but festering Hamas insurgency bolstered by angry Palestinians who see their territory destroyed and their rights again denied.

U.S. intelligence officials share White House doubts that Hamas can be fully defeated. “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces,” the U.S. intelligence community reported in its annual threat assessment in February.

To end the war in the short term and gain the release of the hostages, administration officials have pressed since the early months of the war an alternative to Israel’s scorched earth tactics of relentless attacks on dense urban areas, urging more intelligence-based, precise targeting.

The United States has long supplied Israel with various intelligence streams, including drone feeds from military sources and communications information collected by intelligence agencies, according to U.S. officials familiar with the long-standing arrangement.

Although it does not provide targeting information to help the IDF attack rank-and-file Hamas figures, officials said, it has been supplying information to help locate very senior figures, such as Hamas military leader Yehiya Sinwar, as well as hostages, since the war started.

Current and former U.S. officials said it can be difficult to know precisely how the U.S.-provided intelligence is used. In the CNBC interview, Netanyahu downplayed its amount and utility. While any input is appreciated, he said, “the main intelligence on Palestinians” and the Middle East broadly “is what we have on our own.”

The task of persuading the Israelis to change course, U.S. officials acknowledged, has become much harder with the ongoing failure of U.S.-backed negotiations offering a temporary cease-fire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.

While there is widespread support inside Israel for eliminating Hamas, Netanyahu’s failure to win release of the hostages is increasingly unpopular. A number of current and former U.S. and Israeli officials expressed doubt that a full-scale invasion of Rafah would bring an end to the conflict or achieve the government’s goal of eliminating Hamas.

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who utilized the “clear, hold and build” strategy to counter al-Qaeda forces in Iraq, said that Israel’s “punitive” clearing operations in Gaza, without any follow-up to hold territory or rebuild infrastructure and livelihoods for Palestinian civilians, would only result in Hamas reconstituting within an angry and alienated population.

“What you have is a cycle,” Petraeus said in an interview. “If you don’t hold and rebuild, you’re just going to have to clear again and again … all they’ve done essentially is to go into Gaza, destroy a target and then pull out.” While perhaps able to destroy Hamas as a military organization, Israel does not have the troops, doctrine, experience or political will to conduct the kind of comprehensive strategy that would prevent an insurgency from being reborn, he said.

“If Israel’s strategy is making it more likely, and not less likely that future terrorist attacks will occur, then it is not an effective strategy,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at an Appropriations Committee hearing last week.

Austin concurred, saying that a “key lesson” and “strategic imperative” learned by U.S. forces in recent decades “is you have to protect the people, the civilians in the battlespace, otherwise you create more terrorists going forward.”

Many in Israel’s security and intelligences forces say they understand the problem, but that Biden’s efforts to pressure Netanyahu has achieved little. “Rafah is not the turning point. Nominating an alternative government to Gaza is the key,” said Rami Igra, who ran the Prisoners and Missing Persons Division for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

A broad, armored invasion into Rafah would ensure a quagmire and lead to more civilian deaths, said Alon Pinkas a veteran Israeli diplomat and former senior government adviser. “Wake up,” Pinkas said. “‘Toppling Hamas’ is only possible through diplomatic means.”

Even as it continues to urge a change in Israeli strategy, the administration has committed substantial effort to the heavy diplomacy of trying to preserve the crucial relationship between Egypt and Israel. It has worked to persuade Arab states in the Persian Gulf, primarily Saudi Arabia, to normalize their historically tense relations with Israel as a long-term security bulwark against Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, and to help secure and rebuild Gaza as part of a new Palestinian state.

It is trying to convince them to not only pay for reconstructing Gaza but also to provide troops to form a postwar security force there until a trained Palestinian force can be readied. But “nobody has raised their hand” to participate, a former senior U.S. military official close to the issue said, in the absence of any clear idea of what conditions on the ground would be, or Israel’s role.

As a sweetener for normalization, the administration has offered a strengthened bilateral defense pact with the Saudis, along with approval of an enhanced civil nuclear program, that would have the added advantage of steering them away from China and Russia as defense partners.

None of the terms have yet been settled in a form they can be offered to Israel, even were it to show an inclination to yield to Arab political and security demands for Gaza and the West Bank. “I don’t know how much longer they’re going to wait around,” one U.S. official said of the Saudis.

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Abigail Hauslohner and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.