Bibi plays tense game of brinkmanship in Rafah

Israeli forces in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

In Gaza the focus of the conflict has shifted from the battlefield to the negotiating table, but the situation remains just as confusing as if this shift had not occurred.

Hamas has claimed to have accepted a ceasefire deal, while Israel says the deal it accepted isn’t the one Israel offered.

US President Joe Biden has warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against entering Rafah. Netanyahu has vowed to invade Rafah whether there is a ceasefire agreement or not. With leaflet drops advising Palestinians in the Rafah area to relocate and the deployment of Israeli armoured vehicles to the Egypt-Gaza border crossing, the Israel Defence Forces appear to be conducting the types of preliminary operations that would precede a larger military offensive.

Israel has vowed to continue its military operations until its aims are achieved, including the destruction of Hamas, its removal from governance in Gaza and the recovery of the hostages.

The art of negotiating is always to have the other party believe your threats will be carried out. Hence it is difficult to determine whether the current military activity is the prelude to a broader campaign in the south of Gaza, whether it is simply a much more targeted and limited operation, or whether it is largely designed to appease Netanyahu’s domestic audience and pressure Hamas to agree to a ceasefire deal more amenable to Israeli wishes.

Netanyahu will understand that the most successful hostage recovery to date came about through negotiation. And he faces significant international pressure to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people through achieving a negotiated ceasefire. The Saudi Foreign Ministry even released a statement warning Israel against targeting Rafah “in light of the lack of safe zones after the massive destruction caused by the Israeli war machine”.

But Netanyahu is also beholden to the far-right elements of his own government for whom it is anathema to make any agreement with Hamas before Rafah is invaded. One minister even criticised the idea that Rafah should not be invaded in favour of a ceasefire agreement that delivered freedom for some hostages, saying Israeli soldiers had sacrificed so much to achieve the government’s goals and “now we’re throwing it all away to save 22 or 33 people or I don’t know how many”.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden

Clearly the value of hostages’ lives means different things to different people.

For Israel, the ability to achieve its stated aims has always been problematic. Hamas won’t be destroyed because it is an impossible military task. Severely degraded for sure, but not destroyed.

Israel’s creation of buffer zones within Gaza, as a countermeasure to the corridor between Gaza and Egypt from which it had been excluded, is designed to ensure the degradation is as long-term as possible. Tactical victory on the battlefield without denying Hamas freedom of action in the future would represent strategic failure.

Strategic failure still may result unless Israel is able to get the international community to pay for the rebuilding of Gaza and regional states to provide support for a governance structure in Gaza that excludes Hamas or anything that simply will be or become Hamas 2.0.

This is where the Netanyahu government’s focus on its own domestic political constituency at the cost of outreach to the region tells against Israel’s strategic interests. There is much water to pass under the bridge on this issue and Netanyahu may not survive a future political post-mortem.

So it is entirely possible that a post-Netanyahu Israeli government will have much more political room to move to establish a durable post-Gaza political solution that will justify Israel’s Gazan operation and prevent another October 7 style terrorist attack from happening again.

If the destruction of Hamas is a virtually impossible task, the recovery of all the hostages is much more achievable.

Palestinian civil defence and local residents evacuate a wounded man from the destroyed al-Qadri house which was struck by Israeli bombardment in Rafah.

But military might alone cannot hope to achieve it. This will come about only through a negotiated outcome. And that represents an internal domestic political challenge for Netanyahu. Whether he rises to that challenge remains in the balance.

The one country that has the power to shape Netanyahu’s decision-making in this regard of course is the US. Yet the Biden administration has been reluctant to use much leverage to alter Netanyahu’s behaviour other than rhetoric and symbolism.

It is a domestically divisive issue for Biden and, six months out from an election, he needs to tread warily to ensure that the focus for the campaign remains on domestic issues.

That having been said, recent media reports claim there has been a slowdown in the delivery of some arms to Israel. A not-so-subtle sign perhaps, but given Israel’s overwhelming superiority in arms and technology over Hamas it will have no practical effect.

Whether a full-scale attack against Rafah will be the last act in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza or whether the threat of it will be what forces a ceasefire remains to be seen. For the sakes of the hostages held by Hamas and the civilian population of Gaza, the world hopes it will be the latter.

Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst and former army officer.