A strategic, diplomatic and humanitarian failure
By 
For most of you, I don’t think anything in the below analysis [free link] will seem particularly novel. But just the same it’s pretty remarkable to see it in the current top story at the New York Times website:
When Israel broke its cease-fire with Hamas in March and returned to all-out war in Gaza, the country’s leaders said that the new military campaign and blockade on food would force Hamas to release more Israeli hostages in exchange for fewer Israeli concessions.
Four months later, that campaign is now increasingly perceived, in Israel and beyond, as a strategic, diplomatic and humanitarian failure, especially as starvation rises in Gaza.
In the last four months, Israeli troops have advanced farther into Gaza, mostly recapturing areas they relinquished earlier in the war. They recovered the bodies of eight slain hostages; killed more Hamas leaders, including the group’s top military commander, Muhammad Sinwar; and destroyed more of Hamas’s underground tunnel network.
The move has come at great cost, first and foremost to Palestinian civilians, but also to Israel’s standing in the world — without a breakthrough either in the negotiations with Hamas or on the battlefield. Hamas has refused to surrender, continuing to inflict deadly attacks on Israeli soldiers.
“I have to use these words: total failure,” said Michael Milstein, an Israeli analyst and former military intelligence officer. “We are no closer to achieving our main war goal — to erase the military and the governmental capacities of Hamas — and Hamas has not become more flexible. We find ourselves right now in a total disaster.”
One American-Israeli hostage has been returned alive since the war resumed, but only through a side deal between Hamas and the United States. Hamas remains in control of key urban areas in Gaza, and has not compromised on its core demands. Mr. Sinwar was replaced by another hard-liner, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, who has maintained Hamas’s position, just as Mr. Sinwar had maintained the stance of his own predecessors.
Israel’s blockade on food from March until May led to a rise in hunger across the territory. Since ending some restrictions in late May, Israel largely reconstituted the way that food is distributed. In doing so, Israel made it more dangerous for Palestinians to get that food. Hundreds have been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers along the routes to new distribution sites.
The outcome has resulted in a rare level of censure from Israel’s allies. Key partners like Britain and Germany called for the war to end. France said it would recognize a Palestinian state. The secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, called the situation “a moral crisis that challenges the global conscience.”
Before Israel started the blockade and broke the truce, Palestinians in Gaza were already suffering some of the worst conditions in a century of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. A vast majority of the population was displaced and most of the buildings in the territory were damaged, according to the United Nations.
Then the resumption of war felt as if someone had “shut off the last source of life,” said Karam Rabah, a civil servant in central Gaza. “We thought we’d survived the worst, then it got even worse.”
The article goes on to cite the recent Times investigation showing how political considerations played a role in his decision to brutally escalate and already incredibly brutal war for no strategic gain. Seeing this stuff in the Times is an excellent illustration of how badly Israel has damaged its international reputation and how transparently indefensible its conduct of the war, particularly but by no means only in 2025, has been.
If I might be forgiven for not just taking what I can get here, though, I would like to mention one word that does not come up in the entire piece: Trump. The current president benefitted by some hard-to-quantify degree from Biden being blamed for the “chaos” happening elsewhere in the world, and there was surely some suppression of vote turnout on the left from the perception that Trump couldn’t be worse than Biden/Harris on Gaza. The candidate that Netanyahu desperately wanted to win won, after a brief politically beneficial (especially to Trump) ceasefire he has conducted the war with even less restraint and with even less strategic justification, but suddenly the role of the American government has faded into the background. And the same is true on social media. I don’t know if a rigorous content analysis would bear out my perception that there has been a lower volume of criticism of Israel now that it can’t be blamed on a Democratic president. But one thing I’m definitely sure of is that there has been far less attribution of Israel’s war crimes to “Genocide Don” or “Holocaust Hillbilly” or whatever. It’s a striking example of how media narratives are wired for Trump, particularly if Murc’s Law can be involved.