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"Today's World View:  Six months of War in Gaza."

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Today's WorldView

By Karen DeYoung

with Sammy Westfall Email

Six months into Gaza war, Biden confronts the limits of U.S. leverage

President Biden speaks on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday. (The White House/Reuters) Just after dawn on Oct. 7, President Biden watched live television images of rockets raining down on Israel from Gaza as top aides briefed him on the Hamas militants who were rampaging across southern Israeli towns and villages. Dead and mutilated bodies had been left strewn on the ground and hostages were being dragged across the border into the Palestinian enclave. He had already spoken on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said later that day in a forceful statement from the White House State Dining Room. “The United States stands with Israel ... . We will not ever fail to have their back,” he declared, calling his administration’s support for Israeli security “rock solid and unwavering.” U.S. defense and intelligence officials had been ordered “to make sure Israel has what it needs” to defend itself against the Hamas terrorist attack, the president said. U.S.-made Israeli warplanes were already striking inside Gaza. It was not the first such scene of carnage for current and former U.S. officials with long experience in the volatile Middle East, who have witnessed decades of episodic battles between Israel and its enemies in the region. On the day the war in Gaza began six months ago Sunday, they thought it would probably be over within weeks. At most in a couple of months. Certainly by Christmas. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths later, the war goes on, largely unabated. Frustrated and sometimes furious with a Netanyahu government that has often ignored its advice on how to conduct military operations in Gaza and publicly rejected U.S. visions for a permanent peace, the Biden administration now finds itself in a policy cul-de-sac from which there is no easy exit. This account of the past six months of brutal war and difficult diplomacy comes from previous reporting throughout the conflict, and recent public statements and interviews with regional experts and multiple senior administration officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. Many Hamas fighters have been killed, but thousands remain in the fight, their senior leaders believed to be hidden — along with many of the remaining hostages — in tunnels deep below ground. While the United States and allies in the region plead for a cease-fire to allow a hostage release and for aid to flow to starving Gazans, the two sides are locked in what both consider an existential battle. ADVERTISEMENT   Much of Gaza, a sliver of land the size of Las Vegas with three times the population, has been reduced to rubble by Israeli air and ground attacks. Most of its 2.1 million people have been displaced by the fighting, many fleeing into an area around the southernmost city of Rafah, where they live in squalid camps with little food and even less hope. International support for Israel in the immediate wake of Hamas’s invasion — which saw the killing of about 1,200 Israelis and the taking of around 250 hostages — has turned to outrage and charges of Israeli war crimes. To much of the world, the U.S. backing for Israel’s war effort has left the administration morally compromised, even complicit in the destruction and death. At home, in what is already a contentious election year, Biden is stuck between a Republican Party demanding support for Israel at all costs, and increasing numbers of Democrats demanding he stop the steady stream of weapons sent to Jerusalem. His campaign stops are frequently disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests. Administration officials maintain that things, as bad as they are, would be worse still had they not successfully pushed for changes in Israel’s war tactics, and persuaded Netanyahu to lift his government’s embargo on all supplies of food, water and fuel into Gaza. The negotiation that won a week-long cease-fire in November and brought about half the hostages home was a bright spot, one they had hoped would be followed by a longer and more significant pause in the fighting. In Israel, Netanyahu’s right-wing government coalition has its own troubles. Enraged and traumatized by the Hamas attacks, most Israelis want Gaza destroyed. But many also blame their prime minister for allowing the terrorist invasion to happen in the first place and accuse him of abandoning the hostages. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets to demand new elections. ADVERTISEMENT   “We have arrived at a terrible milestone,” Martin Griffiths, the senior U.N. official for humanitarian affairs, said in a statement Saturday. “For the people of Gaza, the past six months of war have brought death, devastation and now the immediate prospect of a shameful man-made famine. For the people affected by the lasting horror of the 7 October attacks, it has been six months of grief and torment.” U.S. President Joe Biden  meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (Miriam Alster/Pool via Reuters) The United States was the first country in the world to recognize Israel’s independence in May 1948. But even as it has long supplied the weapons for Israel to defend itself, it has sometimes pressured Israel to stop using them. When Israeli forces occupied parts of the Sinai, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in early 1957 bucked congressional opposition and threatened trade sanctions and a suspension of military aid if they did not withdraw. It worked, and Israeli troops spared the surrounding Egyptian Third Army and left the desert territory. Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon ultimately ended the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt with a land-for-peace deal that led to Egypt becoming the first Arab country to recognize Israel as a legitimate state. In early 1991, the United States strong-armed Israel into not responding to Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks on its territory, fearing a wider Middle East conflict and saying that it would handle Saddam itself. Since Hamas took over Gaza after winning parliamentary elections in 2006, it has been engaged in at least four separate, relatively brief direct conflicts with Israel. U.S. involvement was limited to defending Israel’s right to security and protecting it from censure in the United Nations. But the circumstances of the current conflict, the devastation wrought, and the length of time it has gone on have shined a harsh light on the limitations of any control the United States might have thought it had over Israel’s actions. “The influence of any outside party — even one that has theoretically on paper an enormous amount of influence on Israel — is limited,” said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former diplomat who spent nearly three decades working on Israeli-Palestinian relations in both Republican and Democratic administrations. “The Middle East is literally littered with the remains of great powers who believed they could impose their limits” on the actions of those who live there, Miller said. Many factors make this situation unique. Though Biden has had a complicated relationship with Netanyahu, the president is said to have a deep-seated, personal commitment to Israel that goes back to his first years as a U.S. senator. But Netanyahu “is trying to save his political skin by performative opposition to Biden in his approach to Gaza,” said Jeffrey Feltman of the Brookings Institution, who served as top official on the Middle East at the Obama administration’s State Department before becoming U.N. undersecretary for political affairs. Losing U.S. support in the past “would be an almost insurmountable obstacle for an Israeli politician,” Feltman said. And unlike Washington’s prior interventions to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States has no leverage at all against Hamas, a terrorist organization that is still holding upward of 100 hostages, including a handful of Americans.

READ THE FULL STORY: SIX MONTHS INTO GAZA WAR, BIDEN CONFRONTS THE LIMITS OF U.S. LEVERAGE

1,000 WORDS

One of the cars used by World Central Kitchen workers that was hit by an Israeli strike in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Monday (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP) Israel’s military released the results of its own investigation into its deadly attack on a World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy that killed seven of the organization’s members.  The IDF statement said a commander “mistakenly” assumed that Hamas gunmen were in the convoy’s vehicles and that Israeli forces also failed to identify the vehicles as belonging to the WCK. The vehicles were clearly marked with the organization’s logo (a frying pan) and name on their roofs, but that wasn’t visible at night, the IDF said. The military also said the biggest mistake was that the operators of the unmanned aerial vehicle tracking the convoy were not made aware of the aid convoy’s coordination plan. Some of the details by the IDF appeared contradictory. Officials suggested both that the convoy was never identified as belonging to the WCK, but also that the drone operator became convinced that a convoy with a humanitarian mission had been taken over by Hamas.

Before WCK strike, aid groups had warned of peril to Gaza relief workers

By Claire Parker, Loveday Morris, Karen DeYoung and Louisa Loveluck

TALKING POINTS

• Israel said Sunday that it was withdrawing all but one brigade from the south of Gaza, describing the move as an opportunity for troops to rest and retool for the next chapter of the war. Israel’s defense minister said soldiers would now be preparing for the “mission in the Rafah area” along the Egyptian border, home to some 1.4 million displaced Palestinians. The drawdown announcement seemed to mirror a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza City earlier this year, after the army said it had dismantled Hamas brigades in the north and was pivoting to more targeted operations.  • The Biden administration is scrambling to finalize essential components of its plan to install a floating pier off the Gaza coast for processing aid and food deliveries, though some U.S. officials are doubting whether the military operation is even necessary. Four Army ships, deployed from southeastern Virginia in mid-March, are due to arrive in the eastern Mediterranean within days. But evolving conditions amid the war, including the precarious security situation, have cast new uncertainty over how the effort will play out. • Our colleague Shira Rubin reports on the families of the Israelis who were thought to have been taken by Hamas as hostages, but were found recently to be killed on Oct. 7. Amid new waves of grief, the families have faced a grim decision: Should they put empty coffins into the ground, to comply with Jewish burial traditions stipulating immediate burial, or wait for an elusive cease-fire deal that would allow the release of their family members' remains?

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FROZEN IN TIME AND FEAR

Visitors to the memorial site of the Tribe of Nova trance music festival, where on Oct. 7, Hamas militants killed 360 people and dragged another 40 into Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post) ALONG ISRAEL’S BORDERS WITH THE GAZA STRIP AND LEBANON — Six months after Oct. 7, Israelis are struggling to recover their bearings, their core, their belief that Jews are safe in Israel. In Israel’s south and north, more than 120,000 people have been evacuated, their neighborhoods transformed into front lines. The homes sit empty, toys still scattered in front yards. In the southern kibbutzim, where 3,000 Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise assault on that indelible Saturday morning, the residents return not to live but to serve as guides for visitors from abroad. They give heart-rending tours, recounting how 1,200 people were slaughtered and 253 hostages were dragged into Gaza, according to Israeli government figures. Evacuees fear that their communities are becoming places frozen in time and loss. They worry that if no solution is found for them — if security is not restored along the borders they share with their enemies — the rest of the country will remain exposed, in a permanent state of existential danger. There is nationwide support for the military’s punishing war against Hamas. The images from Gaza — of shattered cities, families killed together in their homes, malnourished children — do not often appear on the nightly news here. Most of the world thinks Israel has gone too far. Most Israelis don’t think they’ve gone far enough. In the ghost towns of the north, residents are haunted by uncertainty. A retired intelligence officer, Sarit Zehavi, said she sleeps fitfully five miles from the border, “listening for voices outside,” for “the monster” at the door. The northern front faces daily rocket and missile fire from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political party that is backed by Iran. The people of both borderlands feel that outsiders, even their fellow Israelis, cannot fully understand their sense of vulnerability. The home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza of Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hasidim, killed on Oct. 7. The home is now a museum. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post) An Israel Democracy Institute poll found that more than 60 percent of Israelis say their lives have returned to normal.  But they have changed. Asked how they feel, that is what they say: changed. Many Israelis have pivoted to the right, believing the prospect of a Palestinian state threatens the future of their nation. More than 230,000 Israelis have taken out gun licenses. Volunteers have been flowing into Israel’s new front lines, helping to tend agricultural fields and guard the perimeters. Middle-aged men with dad bods have joined home defense units, patrolling in golf carts, militarizing what were once suburban neighborhoods. Mothers, like Zehavi, have escape routes planned. “We have told children, if you hear sirens, go to the safe room inside. If you hear gunshots, leave the house and run.” In Kibbutz Beeri, one of the pastoral villages that hug Israel’s border fence with the Gaza Strip, Alon Pauker says that he recently returned to his full-time job as a professor at Beit Berl College. But he has also, for the past six months, been devoted to his second, unofficial job in Israeli diplomacy — memorializing his 96 neighbors who were killed on Oct. 7, and the 26 more who were taken hostage, for an audience of international diplomats, humanitarian workers and donors who he believes will be instrumental in allowing Israel to finish its mission in Gaza. “I have gone from being a historian to a Holocaust tour guide — a one-day Holocaust,” he said on a recent afternoon after concluding a two-hour round through the ruins with international aid workers. Pauker walked them through Beeri’s hardest-hit neighborhoods, showing the houses with their roofs torn off during heavy fighting, children’s shoes charred beyond recognition, bullet holes and grenade blasts covering virtually all surface areas. Even some of the air-conditioning units were torched, a tactic used by Hamas fighters to smoke victims out of their homes. He wants guests to see and hear, firsthand, what sparked the war. He understands that the world has been shocked by the widespread death and destruction in Gaza. It pains him, too, he said, but he hopes his tours will help critics understand the cruelty and manipulations of Hamas. Like so many of his fellow Israelis, he believes the international community should be pressuring Hamas, not Israel, to stop the war. – Shira Rubin and William Booth Read more: Six months after Oct. 7, Israel’s borderlands are frozen in time — and fear

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