As perilous ground war looms in Gaza, Israelis brace for sacrifice

In Israel’s conflict-ridden 75 years, there have been countless military raids and operations, but only eight campaigns were officially considered a war.

The current one between the Jewish state and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is the ninth, immediately declared as such after the Palestinian militant group’s devastating Oct. 7 cross-border assault into southern Israel.

After nearly three weeks of retaliatory airstrikes and shelling on Gaza, and ahead of a threatened ground operation, Israeli military officials, analysts, and even the general public maintain this war will be drastically different from almost all that have come before.

In many respects, it already is. For the first time in decades, Israel is actively countenancing a prolonged campaign and is signaling to both its foes and citizens that it is willing to pay a heavy price to achieve its stated objective: the destruction of Hamas as a military and governing force in Gaza.

The messaging from the government doesn’t mince words.

“Victory will take time; there will be difficult moments. ... Sacrifice will be required,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week in parliament.

And for now, the Israeli public seems unflinching. A snap poll taken in the wake of the Hamas attack by Agam Research, an Israeli firm, showed over 92% of Israeli Jews supporting a ground offensive into Gaza against Hamas.

Israeli media have, for weeks now, been airing morale-boosting interviews with soldiers and reservists in staging grounds all across the country. The message from them is uniform: “This is a battle for our home.”

A society only recently described as brittle as a “spider’s web,” in the words of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, now appears ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.

“For years it did seem like Israeli society put the idea of quality of life over the collective,” says Danny Orbach, a professor of military history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “Israel was richer, more Western, more liberal.”

All of that has apparently changed after Oct. 7, he adds.

The shift, Israeli officials and analysts explain, is due to both the scale of the death toll suffered on that fateful “Black Saturday,” as Israelis now call it, and the barbarity of the Hamas atrocities committed.

The initial Hamas attack inflicted the heaviest loss of life, certainly in a single day, in Israel’s history: 1,400 killed, the vast majority civilians, and over 220 taken captive back to Gaza including children, women, and older people.

According to government health officials in Gaza, some 7,000 Palestinians have been killed inside Gaza, making this war, on both sides, the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948.

“Oct. 7 was an earthquake,” says Meir Elran, a retired Israeli brigadier general and expert on civil-military relations at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. In a matter of weeks “Israeli society has undergone a major psychological change – it’s furious, it wants revenge ... and the public is saying, ‘Whatever it takes.’”

Yet the ground invasion by the massed Israeli armor and infantry divisions that in the first days of the war appeared imminent has yet to materialize. The reasons for the delay are multifaceted, according to several Israeli and U.S. sources with knowledge of the matter.

The Biden administration has requested that Israel provide it more time to deploy American military assets to the Middle East in anticipation of a possible regionwide escalation with Iran and its allied militias, including Hezbollah.

The United States has also urged Israel to allow more time for the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the exit of foreign nationals (including U.S. citizens) from the besieged territory, and the possibility of additional hostage releases, beyond the four women so far.

Complicating matters, Israel has yet to finalize a coherent “exit strategy” and postwar plan for Gaza, a key U.S. request and the topic of frenetic Israeli deliberations both inside and outside official bodies.

The Israeli military has in the interim continued preparing its troops, especially rusty reservists, training them for the urban battles to come after years spent on policing and counterterror duties in the West Bank, according to one person familiar with Israeli thinking. And one Israeli military officer, when pressed at a briefing on the delayed ground invasion, insisted that “the air force is striking [Hamas] hard and preparing the ground for our land forces” when the time comes.

But Israeli officials including Mr. Netanyahu have been clear: A major ground offensive is coming, with the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, saying this week that the military was “ready for the [ground] maneuver, and we will make a decision with the political echelon regarding the shape and timing of the next stage.”

Even Israeli officials and officers admit that taking on a well-equipped and dug-in foe like Hamas would be extremely time-consuming and bloody – including to Israeli forces.

“This war was imposed on us and is already a huge wound in Israel society,” adds Mr. Elran, the retired brigadier. “Military fatalities are not the primary thing [the public] are thinking about.”

Already among the Israeli dead are more than 300 soldiers and some 50 police personnel, including some two dozen from fighting after Oct. 7 – around Gaza, in the West Bank, and against Hezbollah on the Israel-Lebanon frontier.

This war’s toll has already outstripped the monthlong 2006 campaign against Hezbollah, in which 121 soldiers fell. Israel’s previous military occupation of a “security zone” in southern Lebanon claimed the lives of some 400 soldiers – over the course of 15 years.

A grassroots movement by mothers of soldiers ultimately pushed the government to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000.

According to Professor Orbach, societies are ready to “invest crazily” if they believe a goal is both worthwhile and achievable. The late stages of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, he says, met neither criterion, and therefore the public turned against the slow drip of “our boys” coming home in body bags.

Now, with Hamas in Gaza, things are diametrically different, he adds.

“Israelis truly believe that destroying Hamas is an objective that can be met, and that it’s essential for the future of the state. That’s why they’re willing to sacrifice fatalities,” Professor Orbach says.

Mr. Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials have said the war is necessary not only to eliminate the threat of Hamas and allow traumatized survivors to return to their shattered communities in southern Israel, but also to send a message to the wider Middle East.

“Iran has created a ‘ring of encirclement’ around Israel” via its allied militias and proxies “from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond,” Professor Orbach says. “You’ve already had the depopulation of entire regions” on the Gaza and Lebanon borders. “If you don’t deal with Hamas now, you’ll then have to deal with the rest of the ‘ring.’ Israeli society intuitively understands this.”

And, over the course of the last three weeks, Israeli society has responded. Over 300,000 military reservists have mobilized, with one recent Bangkok-to-Tel Aviv flight allowing passengers – mostly military-age males – to sit and sleep in the aisles. Some Israel Defense Forces reserve units have recorded over a 100% response rate for duty, according to Israeli military officers.  

“I have no problem dying,” said one baby-faced paratrooper last week to Channel 12’s “Uvda” program, the Israeli version of “60 Minutes.”

“You know why? Because they’ll do it again, when? Another time, another few years?” he continued. “I don’t want to die, I love life. ... But if it’s for this objective, and to make history, then I’ll fight.”

Mr. Elran rejects comparisons between the nation’s current move and that which existed during prior military campaigns.

“There has never been a war like this,” Mr. Elran says. “It started differently, and will be conducted differently.”