Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the Israeli military to seize 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, in what international observers are describing as a direct violation of the ceasefire agreement brokered earlier this year. Simultaneously, Israel struck Beirut’s capital for the first time since the Lebanon ceasefire nominally held — a “targeted strike,” Israeli officials said, against a Hezbollah command structure. In Gaza City, hospitals reported several people killed, including at least five children, in a strike that appeared to target a Hamas commander. The previous head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Odeh, had already been killed earlier this week in a separate strike alongside his wife and two children. The cumulative picture is of an Israeli government visibly accelerating, not winding down, its military campaign across two fronts.
The received wisdom
The standard progressive and European-diplomatic read is that Netanyahu’s government has become an obstacle to any lasting settlement. The International Criminal Court has issued warrants; the UN has added Israel to its blacklist for conflict-related sexual violence; the EU has sanctioned extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The argument is that a maximalist Israeli military campaign, enabled by American cover, is radicalising the broader Muslim world, straining Western alliances, and making a two-state solution — or any political horizon — structurally impossible. Ordering the seizure of 70 percent of Gazan territory goes beyond military necessity into something that looks, critics argue, like ethnic engineering: a coercive demographic outcome engineered through military force. Hezbollah’s adoption of fibre-optic drone technology learned from the Ukraine war, meanwhile, suggests the military pressure is not producing the disarmament that Israeli planners intended.
A different read
This analysis is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete in ways that matter.
Start with the strategic logic. Israel’s political and military leadership faced a genuine dilemma after the October 7 attacks: how to restore deterrence against non-state actors embedded in civilian populations, with no viable political interlocutor on the other side. Hamas has rejected every ceasefire framework that required the release of all hostages and the disarmament of its military infrastructure. Hezbollah, for its part, spent the period of the Lebanon ceasefire rearming — including, the BBC reports, with fibre-optic drones that cannot be jammed by Israeli electronic countermeasures. In this context, the Israeli military’s logic is grimly coherent: every pause buys the adversary time, and time has repeatedly been used for rearming.
The order to seize 70 percent of Gaza is more complicated than headlines convey. “Seize” in Israeli military doctrine means establish operational control — freedom of manoeuvre, the ability to suppress rocket launch sites and smuggling tunnels — not necessarily the permanent annexation that the phrase implies to a civilian reader. That distinction matters for assessing legality under international humanitarian law, though it does not eliminate the humanitarian catastrophe that follows from sustained military operations in densely populated urban terrain.
Netanyahu’s domestic situation adds a dimension the purely military analysis misses. His coalition depends on far-right parties — Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism — for which anything short of full territorial control in Gaza is ideological apostasy. The prime minister is not simply prosecuting a war; he is governing a coalition that would collapse if he moved toward any political settlement that Hamas could plausibly claim as partial victory. The ceasefire Netanyahu signed earlier this year was, from the start, politically fragile on the Israeli right — and his move this week can be read as a decision to shore up his coalition rather than a purely military calculation.
What makes this moment genuinely dangerous is the Beirut strike. Lebanon’s ceasefire was, however fraying, a line that had been roughly observed. Striking the capital directly changes the strategic geometry: it signals either that Israel has concluded Hezbollah’s rearming is now intolerable and must be pre-empted, or that Netanyahu is willing to risk a second front to consolidate his domestic position. Neither explanation is reassuring. The US-Iran truce talks taking place simultaneously add a further layer of instability — any miscalculation on the Lebanese front could unravel the Oman channel just as it approaches a deal.
What to watch
- US response: Whether the Biden-successor administration places conditions on weapons transfers or merely issues verbal criticism. Past behaviour suggests the latter.
- Hezbollah escalation calculus: Whether the Beirut strike produces a significant escalatory response or a strategic decision by Hezbollah leadership to absorb the blow for now.
- Ceasefire legal status: International Court of Justice provisional measures proceedings and whether any state sponsors a Security Council resolution — and whether the US vetoes it.
- Netanyahu coalition stability: Watch for any sign that Ben-Gvir or Smotrich signal dissatisfaction, which would explain further escalation rather than consolidation.
— J