At the six-month mark on Sunday of Israel’s longest war since 1948, the country – taking stock of gains and losses since October 7 – heard the news that the IDF pulled out its last division from Khan Yunis, leaving only a brigade and scattered commando units inside the Gaza Strip.
The news was broadcast as part of one of the day’s regular hourly news bulletins, not during a specially-called press conference or video statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that one may have expected given the drama of the announcement.
Further, there was no build-up to it; no signal that it was about to happen.
One minute the ground maneuver in Khan Yunis was still ongoing – four soldiers were killed in an ambush near the city on Saturday – the next it was over.
One brigade – the Nahal Brigade – was left of the five and a half divisions, between 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers, that were inside Gaza at the peak of the fighting in December. The Nahal Brigade is patrolling the road bisecting the strip from east to west to keep Gazans pushed south at the beginning of the war from returning to the northern part of the coastal strip.
“Is the war over?” many asked on Sunday, while others – cognizant of the heightened tension in the north – asked instead: “Is it over in Gaza?”
After months of saying that Israel would not stop fighting in Gaza until Hamas was defeated and the hostages were released, was this sudden announcement the result of US President Joe Biden’s angry call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, since the hostages were not returned nor Hamas completely defeated?
It’s hard to know. Yet the sudden and unexpected nature of this decision left many with the feeling – or even the hope – that they were in the middle of watching a movie, and that something big and dramatic was still yet to come.
Israelis know how this “movie” started on October 7, and they know how the government and military had told them it would end: with Hamas’s defeat and the hostages returned home. But here was neither a defeated Hamas nor the release of the hostages – only a significant Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza.
This can’t be, many people thought. There must be something else going on, something else afoot. Perhaps this is a ruse meant to lull Hamas into complacency, part of some kind of grand strategy to wage war through deception. Perhaps it was a down payment on a hostage release deal being cooked up in Cairo at this very moment?
Is this the end of the war?
But this couldn’t be the end of the war, could it?
First of all, maybe it is not. Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi have all said it was not.
Maybe it is part of some grand strategy to draw Hamas out or now take the battle to the Hezbollah in the North, or both.
Hamas thought that Israel had left Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and as a result returned to try and reset up its command center there, only to be surprised by an Israeli attack two weeks ago that left some 200 terrorists dead and another 500 captured. Maybe the current troop withdrawal is part of the same strategy, to lull Hamas terrorists and leaders out of their tunnels into the daylight, where they could be better targeted.
Or, perhaps, what you see is what you get.
Maybe with international legitimacy for the war pretty much spent, with Jerusalem’s ties with the US administration at a nadir, with internal dissent again on the rise inside Israel, Netanyahu decided that the time was ripe to pull the majority of troops out of Gaza, and from here on in treat it like Jenin: an area where Israel would watch carefully and strike whenever it received intelligence information of hostile activity or the stockpiling of weapons.
In that sense, this war could be compared to Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, just at a much more massive scale. Just as that operation began with a horrendous terrorist attack – the Park Hotel Seder massacre – so did this war begin with the October 7 atrocities.
During Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF moved into the major Palestinian cities in the West Bank, areas off-limits under the Oslo Accords, and cleared them of the terrorist infrastructure that the Palestinians built there.
Although within six months that operation brought about a significant drop in the number of suicide bombers, it did not end the Second Intifada, which only petered out without much fanfare some three years later. Ever since then – up until today – the IDF goes back into those Palestinian cities whenever it feels it must deal with security threats. The IDF doesn’t have forces inside Jenin but rather goes in from the outside when necessary.
Perhaps this is the same plan now for Gaza.
If it is, however, nobody is saying that clearly. This may be because of a need to keep Hamas guessing. If Israelis were surprised by the sudden pullout from Khan Yunis, one can only imagine how surprised Hamas was by the move, wondering what would come next.
The same is certainly true of Hezbollah, Iran, and the Lebanese government who must all be asking themselves what Israel has up its sleeve, and whether all this might just be an effort to redirect the focus from the South to the North.
That Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are left guessing is a good thing. But that Israelis themselves are left wondering and in a period of limbo is unsettling.
That sense of unease followed quickly on the heels of the anxiety that enveloped much of the nation following the killing in Damascus on Wednesday of Iran’s top military commander in the region Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Reckless statements made by various sources – including IDF officials – about stocking up on water, buying generators, and that the worst “is not yet behind us,” fueled that anxiety and left millions feeling that an Iranian attack was imminent.
The mind yearns for a degree of certainty, predictability, and order. When the forces were inside Gaza, the country had a certain grasp of what the IDF was trying to accomplish. Suddenly removing the troops, without much of a public explanation – and doing so with the country anxious over a possible Iranian retaliation – left many heads spinning and people wondering where things were headed.
Netanyahu’s statement Monday that the IDF will enter Rafah and take out the remaining Hamas battalions there, and that there is a date for this operation, only added to the uncertainty. When, exactly, and how?
Israelis have learned to live with a great deal since October 7: with the knowledge that their security situation was more tenuous than originally thought, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens in harm’s way, with hostages in Gaza, with internal evacuees, and with the startling realization that many in the world are rooting for the terrorists.
Now they will need to get used to something new and unsettling: living in limbo. Hopefully, it will only be temporary.•