JERUSALEM — Over the past year, Israel has doggedly insisted that negotiations for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip be focused solely on a phased deal that would begin with a temporary truce and see some hostages released in exchange for some Palestinian prisoners, while deferring agreement on a more permanent pact.
And yet, even as Hamas recently said it would agree to a phased deal, the Israeli government has switched gears, saying it wanted only a comprehensive deal that would free all the hostages and end the war. It is as unclear as ever how, or when, that might happen.
At the same time, Israel said it would carry out a new, expansive campaign into Gaza City to root out Hamas militants. The military is poised this week to call up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers for its advance.
Both those steps, experts say, would most likely prolong the war, not shorten it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to keep fighting until Israel has decisively defeated Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, by stripping it of its military and governing capabilities and forcing it to disarm.
Hamas has so far refused to surrender and largely rejects Israel’s terms for ending the war. Experts are skeptical that Israel could now achieve what it has not managed to achieve in the 22 months since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — whether militarily or by negotiation.
“Netanyahu has defined success as something that is unachievable,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, describing the total elimination of Hamas as an impossible goal. Success, he said, should be defined as what has already been achieved: “that Oct. 7 won’t happen again.”
The Israeli military says it already controls more than 75% of Gaza, but many analysts say that chasing down every last Hamas operative and eradicating the movement as an ideology is an unobtainable objective.
Nides and other experts say that only President Donald Trump has the power to pressure Netanyahu to end the war. But for now, the Trump administration appears to be backing Netanyahu’s war plan and appears to have also reversed course on the negotiations.
About a month ago, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in a meeting with the families of hostages that Trump wanted to see all the living hostages released at once. Israel says about 20 are still alive.
“No piecemeal deals, that doesn’t work,” Witkoff said, according to an audio recording of part of the meeting published by the Ynet Hebrew news site. He said there was a plan around shifting the negotiation toward an “all or nothing” deal.
He did not offer details and there have been no obvious signs of progress since.
The last ceasefire, reached in January, collapsed in March when Israel went back to fighting in Gaza. In the months since then, Israel and the United States, along with the other mediating countries, Qatar and Egypt, have pressed Hamas to accept a framework for another gradual deal.
That push called for a 60-day ceasefire during which about half the living hostages and the remains of several others would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Under the plan, negotiations would also start immediately for a permanent cessation of hostilities. At the time, Israeli officials described that proposal as the only offer on the table.
By mid-August, when Hamas, under pressure, had broadly accepted a deal along those lines, Israel suddenly moved the goal posts. While Netanyahu has not yet publicly ruled out a phased deal altogether, his ministers have described that approach as no longer relevant, and the government has not officially engaged with the Hamas response.
“There isn’t an option any longer for a partial deal,” Miki Zohar, a minister from Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, said on Israeli television Saturday. “The only thing on the agenda is ending the war, along with the return of all the hostages, of course, and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip,” he added.
A comprehensive deal will be much more complicated to achieve, if at all.
According to Shira Efron, an expert in Israel policy at the nonprofit RAND Corp., “It means more stalling and prolonging” of the war.
The Israeli military has already been in Gaza City, in the early months of Israel’s ground invasion of the enclave that began in 2023.
Efron said that Trump might think that this time, the military operation could be “quick and clean.” But, she added, it could also be “dirty and long.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
