The war in Gaza has entered a deadly new phase – but what comes next?

Whether or not this is the “something different” that an Israeli military spokesman, Lt Colonel Richard Hecht, speculated 10 days ago might be an alternative to a full-scale ground invasion, is impossible to say. And probably would be even if most of the communications between Gaza and the outside world had not now been cut.

In one sense, however, it hardly matters. What is clear is that a new phase of an already devastating Israel Defence Forces operation has begun, mainly at present in the northern Gaza Strip. Armoured ground forces backed by heavily intensified aerial bombardment and artillery have entered the territory in earnest. The already horrifying death toll, which may now count Israeli soldiers in its numbers, can only climb.

The move could yet risk a regional escalation, with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border in the front line. And it will probably intensify calls for a ceasefire already made by Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, with which Israel signed its historic “normalisation” treaty in 2020, and from Saudi Arabia, with whom it was negotiating before Hamas’s grisly and unprecedented atrocities against the 1,400 Israelis – mostly defenceless civilians – who were murdered on 7 October.

But because so much of the current international debate is over such demands for a ceasefire – not just by regional rulers, but the international aid agencies, the UN General Assembly (as opposed to the Security Council) and increasingly in the domestic politics of some of Israel’s Western allies, Britain among them – something else has got a little lost in the fog of war.

Which is that Israel had also so far even rejected the lesser calls for a “pause” which would allow the formation of a safe and workable corridor for desperately needed humanitarian aid to reach Gaza’s stricken civilian population through its southern crossing point of Rafah. Such a pause was urged last week by every member state of the EU, by the UK’s staunchly pro-Israel prime minister Rishi Sunak, and now – if after some hesitation – by the US.

Which raises several questions: how, if at all, will Israel’s hitherto largely Western allies react to this brush-off of their concerns? How long will Israel be able to sustain its argument that such a pause would only serve to allow Hamas to regroup its forces after the most sustained onslaught Gaza has ever experienced, thus delaying the achievement of its stated goal of eliminating Hamas’s military machine and its rule over Gaza? What does it mean for the fate of the 229 Israeli hostages held by Hamas, all too understandably at the front of their families’ minds, day and night?

And finally, what cost is Israel prepared to pay, if only to its international reputation, when it comes to Palestinian civilian deaths, not only from the military onslaught itself but from disease, hunger and the collapse of medical services?

Of course, it may not be possible until the war is over to know exactly how many civilians, including women and children, are among the 6,747 dead the Hamas-run health ministry has already named. Israel has questioned the reliability of this figure and suggested it and the claims of a total death toll of well over 7,000 may be an exaggeration; but in past wars, at least, there was not much discrepancy between numbers from the health ministry and those collected by agencies like the UN Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem. It seems likely, if so far unverifiable, that the civilian total runs into several thousand.

We may not know until then exactly what have been Israel’s decisions and strategy. But, from outside, for now it looks it looks rather as if Israel has been practising something like the Dahiya doctrine, named by generals after a Beirut neighbourhood and Hezbollah stronghold, much of which was pulverised in the 2006 war in Lebanon to destroy the civilian infrastructure on which the armed group depended. Two years later, threatening a repeat if Hezbollah were to resume attacks on Israel, the then IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said what happened in Dahiya would happen again everywhere it was based, adding: “We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction.”

Israeli officials have repeatedly stressed to the foreign press that their war is not with the civilian population in Gaza but with Hamas, and that while some civilian casualties are inevitable, they are taking steps to avoid them. However, two weeks ago a somewhat different stance emerged, if briefly, from a news conference in which Israel’s president Isaac Herzog expressed irritation at journalists’ pre-occupation with civilian casualties and declared: “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved… They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

This is nonsense, as Herzog must appreciate Hamas’s ability to suppress internal threats has been formidably firm. If it can – as it has over the years – see off troublesome tribal warlords and armed Salafist groups even more extreme than themselves, a mainly unarmed civilian population had zero chance of “rising up” against it. But was Herzog letting a mask slip to reveal a private view among some of those in Israel’s political elite now deciding on military strategy? Or was he merely freelancing in a fit of pique?

Either way the present direction of the war is – or should be – creating dilemmas for Israel’s allies. How many civilian deaths are acceptable? And even those most determined to see them as inevitably stemming from Israel’s right to defend itself have to ask, as presumably Joe Biden did last week, and hopefully his officials now in Israel are asking still: will they enable Israel to eradicate Hamas, at least without generating the birth of an even more violent “Hamas 2”? And will they help to bring the hostages back?

Donald Macintyre is the author of ‘Gaza: Preparing for Dawn’