Israel’s war with Hamas has no end in sight

Israel has sworn to destroy Hamas as a significant military and political force. Hamas is committed to the long-term goal of erasing the Israeli state.

The irreconcilable stakes are existential for both. And that means that even if a cease-fire halts the current round of fighting in Gaza, the struggle between Israel and Hamas will continue.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said his country would continue its current war in Gaza until it achieves Hamas’s complete destruction. “There is no substitute for total victory over our enemies," Netanyahu said Thursday.

The Israeli military’s limited progress so far in eliminating Hamas in the enclave is increasingly sowing doubt in Israel about whether Netanyahu’s stated goal is achievable any time soon.

International pressure is rising for a lengthy cease-fire that would allow the freeing of more than 100 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza, as well as increased deliveries of humanitarian aid for the enclave’s civilian population.

The cease-fire terms demanded by Israel and Hamas remain far apart, and a deal is uncertain. So too is whether a prolonged cease-fire would mark the end of the current war or merely a pause.

If there is no cease-fire, senior Israeli officers say the military is likely to keep fighting Hamas in Gaza for many months, possibly for the rest of this year, until it has taken full control.

At that point, Israel would face a dilemma. If Israeli forces maintain a lengthy occupation of Gaza—which Netanyahu has said won’t happen—they could become the target of a prolonged insurgency.

If Israel quickly leaves Gaza, Hamas could regenerate itself and return as the enclave’s de facto controlling force. Preventing such an outcome would require a new governing entity, introduced quickly with support from Gaza’s population as well as Israel and outside players. That scenario looks distant.

In recent decades, the regular armies of advanced industrial countries have struggled to fully suppress irregular insurgent forces that have a fraction of their resources. Most recently, the U.S. and its Western allies failed to suppress the Taliban and build a stable alternative government in Afghanistan despite 20 years of trying.

Hamas has some advantages in Gaza that other irregular militant groups in recent times lacked, say analysts.

“Hamas enjoyed a high degree of independence for almost 20 years to develop its capabilities in a highly defined territory and population that was entirely under its control," said Ofer Fridman, a war-studies scholar at King’s College London.

Hamas prepared itself for war knowing exactly where the fighting would take place, and that it could use its tunnel network as well as its power to control and coerce Gaza’s population to its advantage, Fridman said. “All this makes the goal (of destroying Hamas) more difficult from a military perspective," he said.

Other experts agree that Israel’s central war aim will be hard to achieve soon, even if Israeli forces conquer all of Gaza’s surface area.

“Unless the people of Gaza are obliterated or expelled, it is extremely likely that Hamas will survive in one way or another," said Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf states Institute, a think tank in Washington.

“If Hamas were a list of individuals or equipment, that can be destroyed," Ibish said. But Hamas is a political brand that can replace its fighters and leaders and reconstitute itself, he said.

The Islamist group’s long-term goal of replacing Israel with a Palestinian state spanning the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea looks even more far-fetched. Hamas itself tacitly acknowledged as much when it revised its charter in 2017, dropping its overt call for Israel’s destruction and instead demanding a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

However, Hamas’s top leader in Gaza and mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Yahya Sinwar, has said an agreement on the coexistence of two states along 1967 borders wouldn’t be the ultimate historical solution. Rather, Sinwar has said, it would be an interim stage, lasting perhaps a generation or more but giving way eventually to a Palestinian state covering the entire land.

For Sinwar, armed struggle against Israel is aimed at strengthening the Palestinians’ bargaining position for future negotiations, while making Hamas the leader of the Palestinian national cause.

For most Israelis, however, the gruesomeness of the Oct. 7 attack has shattered any belief that Hamas could become a pragmatic actor open to a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Fundamentally, they are not looking for a settlement with us, they’re looking to kick us out," said Eyal Hulata, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council. “And if they need to slaughter all of us for that, they will do it."

Hulata said he hoped more pragmatic figures might rise and take over Hamas if the present leadership around Sinwar can be eliminated. So far, Israeli forces haven’t managed to find or kill Hamas’s top leaders in Gaza.

Hamas, which was estimated to have around 30,000 fighters and several thousand rockets before the war, is too weak to threaten the existence of the state of Israel, which remains the strongest military power in the Middle East.

However, the wider struggle against Hamas and other groups opposed to Israel, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamist regime in Iran that supports them, is seen as existential in Israel because their arsenals and radical aims threaten Israel’s ability to offer its own population a secure way of life.

That view reinforces Israeli determination to keep up a long struggle against Hamas and other foes, even at a painful cost to Israel in casualties and economic damage. In a country still traumatized by the brutality of Oct. 7, a clear majority of public opinion remains supportive of the war in Gaza, even as worries grow that it’s in danger of becoming a quagmire.

On Monday, Israel suffered its deadliest day since the invasion began: 24 soldiers died, including 21 when two buildings collapsed on them. The incident raised the death toll of Israeli soldiers in Gaza to at least 221, representing around 10% of the total number of Israeli troops killed in the enclave.

Hamas killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. More than 25,000 people, the majority women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of Israel’s bombardment and invasion, according to Palestinian authorities. That figure doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Israeli forces have inflicted significant casualties on Hamas’s army. But U.S. intelligence agencies doubt Israel’s claim that it has killed 9,000 militants and think Israel remains far short of its goal of crushing Hamas’s military forces.

Despite Israeli tactical victories against Hamas in Gaza City, Khan Younis and elsewhere, the group’s fighters are proving harder to stamp out than Israel hoped when it launched the invasion in October.

Extensive aerial bombardment of the northern part of the Gaza Strip destroyed large urban areas, killed many thousands of civilians and displaced most of the population. Israel says it dismantled Hamas’s battalions in the north as organized military units.

Pockets of resistance continue in Gaza City and other parts of the north. Small groups of Hamas fighters continue to ambush Israeli troops, using their elaborate network of tunnels to maneuver and hide. To the Israelis’ frustration, they also continue to fire rockets at Israel, albeit sporadically.

As Israel has withdrawn army brigades from northern Gaza, Hamas has begun to re-emerge in the area. In southern Gaza, Israel’s military mission is even more difficult because nearly two million displaced civilians are crowded into that part of the Gaza Strip.

Complicating Israel’s effort in Gaza is the sheer scale of Hamas’s tunnel network. Israeli forces are finding it difficult to truly clean out Hamas from any of the urban areas that Israel has taken at ground level. The tunnels are proving so numerous, long and intricate that Israel’s best efforts to blow them up, flood them or fight in them have so far made no more than partial progress.

Even killing Sinwar or other Hamas leaders in Gaza is unlikely to eliminate the group as a military threat, because it has a diffuse power structure that isn’t focused on any individual, according to Tahani Mustafa, a senior analyst at International Crisis Group.

Previous assassinations, including the recent targeted killing of Hamas’s deputy political leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut, have failed to disrupt the group’s operations, and Hamas is emerging politically strengthened among Palestinians as a result of the conflict, she said.

Mustafa said Hamas doesn’t define victory in military terms, but rather in terms of the diplomatic and political consequences of the war. “And in that sense, I think Hamas is doing very well," she said.

Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com and Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com