Strategic Failure in Gaza — Yossi Alpher
July 21, 2025
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. The Israeli mass media are celebrating the IDF’s ability to flatten entire Gazan towns with huge D-9 bulldozers, to move hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians into an emerging ‘humanitarian city,’ and to replace UNRWA with a mysterious mechanism that seems to kill as many Gazans as it feeds. Are these really solutions to Israel’s Gaza dilemma?
A. These and similar innovations are merely compounding Israel’s dilemma. They appear to reflect an alarming absence of strategic thinking on the part of the IDF regarding the Gaza Strip.
Q. Is this the same army that just defeated Hezbollah in Lebanon and severely damaged Iran’s strategic missile and nuclear programs? The same IDF that is currently protecting Druze in Syria’s Suwayda from Islamist attack? All those operations seem to reflect serious strategic thinking on Israel’s part.
A. Yes. The contrast in Gaza is striking. The entire Israeli strategic community seems incapable of engineering solutions for a small parcel of land--365 square kms or 141 square miles--holding two million Palestinians. Veteran readers of this Q & A may recall that for the past two decades I have been arguing that “Israel does not have a viable strategy for Gaza.” The Gaza strategy failure is endemic.
Q. Obviously, the period preceding October 7, 2023 differs in terms of strategic ineptness from the past two years.
A. The IDF along with some 8,000 settlers withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. By 2007, Hamas had seized power there by force. There ensued waves of Hamas rocket attacks on the kibbutzim and other communities of the Gaza periphery. The IDF responded every few years with air strikes and punishing incursions into the Strip intended to deter Hamas: operations Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, Protective Edge, etc.
The names of these operations may have had a ring to them, but they did not work: as a strategy, deterrence against Hamas in Gaza failed. To compensate for the operations’ lack of any semblance of long-term logic, they were called ‘mowing the lawn’ by Israelis familiar with Gaza. Meanwhile, efforts by Egypt and Qatar--the former ideologically opposed to Hamas’s radical Islamism, the latter actually sheltering and sponsoring Hamas and its parent movement the Muslim Brotherhood--to mediate between Israel and Gaza-based Hamas led to the evolution of a strategy of “economic peace.”
The idea of economic peace was to funnel hundreds of millions of Qatari energy dollars into the Strip, ostensibly for economic development that would obviate Hamas’s need or desire to attack Israel. In the years before October 7, a small number of Gazans actually commuted to work in Israel, bringing home salaries that supported their families.
Prime Minister Netanyahu ran for office, from 2008 on, using the slogan ‘economic peace’ and taking credit for what was at best intermittent quiet in the Strip during those years. He and those in the security community who bought into this strategy ignored the most basic facts of life concerning Hamas. For one, it is dedicated to fundamentalist principles that do not recognize the legitimacy of Israel, with which its conflict is ideological, not economic. Then too, it prioritizes armed struggle over the economic well-being of Gazans.
A lot of Qatar’s development funds went for military purposes in Gaza, not civilian economic projects. The Qataris, currently advertising themselves as global peacemakers--from the Israel-Hamas war to the Congo-M23 struggle--were perfectly aware of this back then. There is a lesson here: as long as Hamas rules Gaza, it will divert development money--whether provided by Qatar, Egypt, the United Nations, or the Trump administration--to armed struggle against Israel.
Q. How did October 7, 2023 affect Israel’s economic peace strategy for Gaza?
A. It was immediately clear that economic peace, which at least was a definable strategy albeit a flawed one, had failed and that Israel had to reoccupy Gaza and fight Hamas on a scale far larger than the doubtful interim strategy of “mowing the lawn.” But how? What strategy to adopt with regard to both the immediate and the long term in order to first defeat Hamas and then stabilize post-war Gaza?
Bearing in mind three undeniable and dominant emotional factors--the confusion and hurt caused by October 7, the dilemma of Israeli and other hostages abducted by Hamas, and the desire on the part of so many Israelis for revenge--the absence of an immediate and coherent new Israeli strategy might be understandable. Then too, the Netanyahu government that has presided over the ensuing war is notable for its lack of security professionalism and its extreme religious and ideological orientation, factors not necessarily conducive to solid strategic thinking.
Yet nearly two years have gone by and the IDF still does not have a viable strategy to defeat Hamas. Over the past two years, we have witnessed attempted implementation of a bewildering series of misconceived approaches masquerading as strategies, some even suggested by well-meaning yet equally security-unsophisticated friends of Israel like the Trump administration.
One of these misbegotten strategies is “assisted immigration,” or transfer, of most Gazans out of the Strip. It was conceived by Trump and by far-right Israeli Kahanists. A few half-empty transport planes did take off months ago from a Negev airfield to an unknown destination before this strategy died. Some Gazans may agree to leave. But no one wants to take them in.
Another strategy was geographic: slicing up the Strip with security-purposed east-west ‘axes’--the Netzarim axis, the Morag axis--and herding Gazans, first south to the Muassi oasis region, and more recently, south to a “humanitarian city.” Meanwhile, the IDF will clean out terrorists from the northern Strip and level the north’s towns (using those monstrous D9s) so there is nowhere to return to.
One problem here has been that Gazans forced to the south tend to return to the north at the first opportunity in human waves that the IDF has proven helpless to prevent. Another is that areas in the north like Jabaliya and Bet Hanoun, repeatedly cleaned of underground terrorists, witness their endless tunnels again filling with Hamas fighters the minute the IDF, always short on manpower, turns its back.
Then there was starvation: a group of retired IDF generals who fancy themselves strategists were positive that if Israel just denied food to besieged Gazans, in accordance with the best medieval siege tactics, Hamas would be forced to capitulate.
Gazans starved. Hamas kept fighting. The generals apparently had no understanding of how radical Islamists think. Neither did the international community, which was understandably appalled.
When that “strategy” failed and blackened Israel’s name as a perpetrator of genocide, without blinking Israel reversed tactics and undertook to feed Gazans. Not through UNRWA, the reputedly pro-Arab arm of the United Nations which is experienced at providing for Gazans’ welfare, but through a mysterious new body whose provenance is reportedly American Evangelical, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Here the idea is to keep the food provisions away from the hands of Hamas and deliver them only to the hands of needy Gazan civilians.
In the category of spectacular Israeli strategic failures in the Strip, GHF stands out. Distribution of food parcels has been marked by disorder and violence. Hundreds of Gazan civilians waiting for food have been killed ever since GHF entered Gaza in May. Shooting incidents, allegedly involving IDF security forces, GHF personnel, and Hamas provocateurs, are an almost daily occurrence.
Q. On an even broader scale, why are so many Gazan civilians killed in nearly every Israeli air strike and ground operation, to the extent that Israelis--in Gaza as in Tel Aviv--are becoming indifferent?
A. Yes, Hamas uses civilians as human shields. And yes, military operations in heavily populated areas inevitably count a portion of civilians among the casualties. It might be easier to justify these tragic losses if the IDF could claim to be winning. But when the same targets are attacked again and again without strategic gains? Aren’t these massive Palestinian civilian casualties the outcome of precisely a lack of strategy?
And why is only a bombed Catholic church in Gaza singled out by Israel’s friends as justification for phoning Prime Minister Netanyahu and protesting? If the PM apologizes for the church incident, which reportedly killed three, does that mean all the other civilian casualties are okay?
Netanyahu continues to speak of “total victory” and the IDF tells us it is planning to complete the occupation of the Strip when the current hostage negotiations fail or recess. And what then? What to do with the Gaza Strip? That is still not part of the plan. Incidentally, where has the IDF been for the past two years if it is only now declaring its readiness to conquer the Strip?
Q. Who thinks up these delusional strategies? How is it that Israel is so incompetent when it comes to Gaza?
A. One problem is that at the highest echelons, Israeli intelligence appears to have become infected by ideology. When the October 7 attack is explained away by messianic National Religious and Haredi government ministers as being divinely ordained, one has to be cautious about interpreting the intelligence assessments of National Religious IDF analysts.
When roughly half the ministers in Netanyahu’s government go on record supporting expulsion of Palestinians and renewed Israeli settlement in the northern Gaza Strip or even in all of the Strip, this can cloud the judgment of right-religious IDF officers--nay, any officers--in the field. When you have been raised on the assumption that you have divine rights as “lords of the land,” your understanding of the “other,” the enemy, can be clouded.
Here we might remind ourselves that intelligence is supposed to be the security establishment’s strategic compass. Where is the moral compass?
Q. The October 1973 Yom Kippur War also began with a colossal intelligence failure. But what followed then was smart IDF strategic thinking, ending in victory. How is the current strategic failure different?
A. One key difference between October 2023 and October 1973 is the enemy human factor: two million Palestinians in the tiny Gaza Strip as opposed to a relative handful of Bedouin in the huge (two and a half times the size of Israel) Sinai Peninsula. Another is the religious-ideological factors we have already noted, meaning that conceivably the Israeli intelligence capacity to assess enemy intentions and weaknesses and find ways to exploit them has, at least in the case of the Palestinians, deteriorated.
Indeed, with the IDF currently producing on a weekly basis carefully weighed and impressive assessments of its failures on October 7, it must be asked: is Israeli society as currently constituted with its growing religious-messianist composition even capable of, or interested in, digesting these assessments and altering its behavior accordingly?
One final thought--one that is admittedly far more difficult to quantify and is offered here, in closing, as no more than food for thought. Israel’s October 7 losses to Hamas through mass massacres and hostage-taking are broadly perceived by much of Israeli society as having Holocaust or biblical proportions. Without disputing this painful perception--has it simply clouded our strategic vision?
Q. Bottom line?
A. Going forward, Israel still has no viable strategy for Gaza.
