For more than a month now, the Biden administration and other allies of Israel have been urging its leaders to scale back the war in Gaza. A more targeted battle plan, these allies have said, could reduce civilian casualties while still weakening Hamas. Some Israeli officials have made the same argument.
It’s now clear that Israel’s leaders have followed the advice, at least partially. The Israeli military announced a strategic shift two weeks ago. It has reduced the number of troops in northern Gaza. And the most tangible sign of the change is the decline in deaths among Gazan residents, as reported by the Hamas-controlled local government.
The number of Gazans dying each day has fallen almost in half since early December and almost two-thirds since the peak in late October. The chart here is based on a New York Times compilation of U.N. reports that rely on information from Gazan officials:
Over the past week, an average of 151 Gazans, including both Hamas fighters and civilians, have died each day.
The breakdown in deaths between fighters and civilians remains unclear — and a matter of debate. Earlier in the war, Gazan officials suggested that more than 70 percent of victims were civilians, while an analysis by an Israeli sociologist put the figure at 61 percent. It seems plausible that the share remains similar today, but also plausible that a lower percentage of deaths are among civilians now that Israel’s attacks have become more targeted and the daily toll has declined.
Is it enough?
Either way, there are at least three important caveats to mention. First, the death toll in Gaza remains high, and some of the victims continue to be civilians, including children.
“We live and witness sadness every day,” Sameer al-Kahlout told Al Jazeera last week, while standing on rubble that he said had been his sister’s home in northern Gaza. She had been hosting another brother and his family when their home exploded. “The Israelis bombed their house without any warning and killed them all,” al-Kahlout said.
Critics of Israel’s war strategy say that the recent shift has been too limited and that its military should do much more to reduce the death toll. As a point of comparison, fewer than 50 Gazans (including Hamas militants) were killed each day on average during a 50-day war in 2014.
Some of the advocates for a further reduction in fighting are Israelis, including military officials, who believe that destroying Hamas — as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to do — is unrealistic. A smarter approach, according to this view, is to wind down the war and save the lives of the more than 100 Israeli hostages whom Hamas still holds.
(My colleagues Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley explained these tensions in this recent story.)
Or too much?
The second caveat points in the opposite direction. Other Israelis, especially on the political right, believe that the scaling back of the war effort has left their country vulnerable. Last week, Hamas fired at least 25 rockets from northern Gaza toward an Israeli city during a single day. Afterward, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, described the decision to withdraw some soldiers as “a serious, grave error that will cost lives.”
As Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon — Times reporters based in Jerusalem — wrote:
The rocket barrage also underlined the competing pressures Israeli leaders faced: the widespread popular demand to crush Hamas, the calls from right-wing politicians to be more aggressive in that campaign, the pleas by families of the hostages taken by Hamas to make concessions to secure their return and the outrage across the globe over the carnage and destruction in Gaza.
And what now?
The third caveat is that the Israeli military faces a difficult decision about how to proceed in southern Gaza. Israel controls much less of the south than the north, and many Hamas fighters are hiding in the extensive tunnel network around Khan Younis, a southern city. Israel has vowed to capture or kill all Hamas leaders involved in the Oct. 7 massacre.
Above these tunnels, southern Gaza is packed with civilians, including residents and refugees. More than a million people fled to the south after Israel told them to leave the north for their own safety. In addition to using the tunnels, Hamas fighters are hiding among these civilians.
Israel will not easily be able to eliminate the fighters without killing innocent civilians. This dilemma, The Wall Street Journal recently explained:
… could culminate in a cease-fire that spares civilians but also allows Hamas to survive and recover, a strategic defeat for Israel. It also risks ending in an even greater bloodbath than in the north.
(These Times maps and satellite photos show more detail about the state of the war.)
The bottom line: Even with the caveats, the changes in Israel’s war strategy have been significant — and somewhat overlooked. Israel has responded to international pressure in ways that suggest its harshest critics are wrong to accuse it of wanting to maximize civilian deaths. Yet the war is not over. Israel continues to inflict enormous damage on Gaza, and Hamas continues to attack Israel and call for its destruction. The war’s next phase will almost certainly include further tragedy.
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Fictional reincarnation: Princess Diana is ever-present in our culture. In recent years, she has been the subject of movies, television shows and plays — including “Spencer” and “The Crown.” The former princess of Wales, Times critic Jesse Green writes, is entertainment gold: “The perfect combo of stardom, tragedy and unanswerability.”
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