(Dobbs) "Everyone Is Losing-- Except Hamas"

It is almost impossible to believe that the two sides can ever peaceably live side by side.

If the eradication of Hamas is at the heart of Israel’s war in Gaza— the eradication of its army, of its arsenal, of its tunnels, of its commanders, of its leader Yahya Sinwar— it isn’t working.

What’s worse for Israel, parts of its war strategy have become counterproductive. 

• Even if only to cater to world opinion, its efforts to mitigate the destruction it has rained on its targets have proved futile. 

• Hamas fighters are slipping back into the rubble of northern Gaza from which they had been chased. 

• Some of Israel’s most ardent supporters are now outraged critics. 

• And maybe most ominous of all for the Jewish state, incalculable numbers of Palestinians, although not part of Hamas, have lost virtually everything since October 7th and now face famine and many have turned more militant themselves— especially the young ones. In the future they will enlist with the terrorists. Or already have.

For much of the world, and certainly among Palestinians, the valid view that Israel keeps stressing, that Hamas started this war in the first place, has become moot.

Now a closer look at the trouble Israel is in.

First, the air strikes that ravaged the makeshift refugee tent camp late last month in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. They prove the point about Israel’s inability to mitigate its “collateral damage.”

Hundreds were burned alive. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency now says at least 200 died. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether Israel used the kinds of 2,000-pound bombs it dropped like confetti in the earlier parts of the war, or the far smaller 37-pound bombs that evidently it dropped on the tent camp. In a way, it also doesn’t matter whether this was, as Israel’s military spokesman said, “the smallest munition that our jets can use.” And in a way, it doesn’t matter whether it was Israel’s bombs that ignited the fatal firestorm or, as Israel propounds, a secondary explosion of terrorist weapons that were stored there. It doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, the death toll was monstrous and Israel has been blamed.

What people will remember will be accounts of what survivors experienced. Accounts like Ahmed Al-Rahl’s: “I saw with my own eyes someone burning and crying for help, and I could not save his life.” Or Mohammad Al-Haila’s: “The faces were eroded, and the features were completely disappeared.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu offered an uncommon mea culpa: “Despite our utmost efforts not to harm innocent civilians… there was a tragic mistake.” Against the backdrop of burning bodies, that will change nothing.

Second: Israel’s drone strikes last week on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza— since the founding of Israel, the largest permanent refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

They prove another point: that even with the massive destruction inflicted there six months ago, in the first weeks after the war broke out, it didn’t bury Hamas. I wrote on October 8th, the day after Hamas raped and kidnapped and killed more than 1,200 Israelis and war already was certain, “The advantage is with the fighters on their own home turf.” Meaning, Hamas. That was based on my own experience covering urban warfare. The fighters of Hamas, I wrote, know “every safe house, every alleyway, every arms cache, every ally.” The Israel Defense Forces said last week, after withdrawing from Jabalia for the second time, that the area still had a network of Hamas-built tunnels, a weapons production facility, rocket launch positions, even a command center that had survived. The IDF conceded that this camp, although reduced to rubble, still was a Hamas “stronghold.” That’s why they went back in.

It’s a manifestation of the immutable principle, if there’s a vacuum, someone’s going to fill it. A week ago, a spokesman for Israel’s military told Newsweek Magazine, "The total amount of forces of Hamas before the war is around 30,000 or so. We understand based on our assessments, based on forces reporting and strikes that we've conducted, around 15,000 have been killed in engagements with the IDF.” The math is obvious: although some are injured and out of action, roughly half of Hamas is still alive. They might be filling that vacuum.

Third: international support. Israel isn’t just losing some of the contested ground it has taken on the battlefield, it is losing some of the international goodwill it has nurtured through diplomacy. Condemnation by the United Nations is no surprise. The deck always has been stacked against Israel at the U.N. But condemnation by longtime allies is a different story. After the tragedy at Rafah, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that "Israel must respect international law in its actions.” French President Emmanuel Macron was more explicit: “Outraged by the Israeli strikes that have killed many displaced persons in Rafah,” he wrote on X. “These operations must stop.”

What governments think about Israel’s war is critical, of course, but for their own geopolitical purposes, governments often forgive and forget. It’s equally critical to remember though that citizens of the world aren’t usually so pragmatic.

President Biden has held his own views close to his chest, although the White House has said that because Israel has not waged a “major ground operation” in Rafah, it has not yet crossed Biden’s arguably elusive “red line.” But the president already had warned that if Israel were to wage a major offensive there, he would withhold the kinds of arms shipments that Israel has used on major population centers. He’d already ordered a pause of “high-payload munitions.” 

Fourth: the Palestinians themselves. Polls in the past had shown that although Hamas used some of the money from international donors to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads, the majority of Gazans did not align with its ideology. Now, according to an opinion poll in March, support for Hamas had gone up 14 points since December, and now sits above 50%.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, Audrey Kurth Cronin, summarized the situation in two brief sentences: “The war in Gaza has settled into a mind-numbing pattern of violence, bloodshed, and death. And everyone is losing— except Hamas.”

When I covered conflict in this region, the complaints from Israelis about Palestinians was that when Israel was created in 1948, Palestinians fled rather than live beside Jews. The complaints from Palestinians were the opposite: that when Israel was created, Jews pushed them from their homes.

From all my time there, I am convinced that there is some truth to both versions of the story. Now though, the grievances from both sides are more potent and more immediate. For generations to come, people on both sides will remember losing children and parents and siblings. Some will remember losing hope that the security they once had can be rebuilt in their lifetimes.

It makes it almost impossible for me to believe, no matter what negotiators eventually might achieve at the end of the hot war, that the two sides can ever peaceably live side by side.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 38-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.