Israel’s Assault on Gaza City Stifles Hope of Diplomatic Resolution to War

As Israeli troops launched a ground assault aimed at taking control of Gaza City, experts said the operation showed that diplomatic efforts to end the war appear severely diminished, if not moribund.

What is clear after nearly two years of intense fighting that has left much of the Gaza Strip in ruins is that neither side intends to back down from its longstanding objectives.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said from the outset of the war that he had two priorities: to bring home the hostages captured by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attacks and to destroy Hamas.

But the goal of eradicating Hamas has been a challenge for Mr. Netanyahu to define. Even if Israel vanquishes the group, its ideology will most likely survive the war. And the objective itself raises questions. Once Israel declares success, who will govern Gaza? Mr. Netanyahu has suggested unspecified “Arab forces,” but his additional requirements, like keeping the Palestinian Authority out of power in Gaza, make the idea a nonstarter in Arab countries.

For their part, leaders of Hamas have long sought to eliminate the state of Israel and had hoped the 2023 attacks would force the world to reckon with Palestinian statehood. As well as killing about 1,200 people, the group and its allies also took about 250 hostages as leverage against a ground war with Israel. Hamas had calculated that to free those captives, the Israeli military must pull out of Gaza — an outcome that would leave the group fundamentally intact and claiming victory. That thinking, of course, has not worked out in the ways Hamas would have hoped. Whatever leverage Hamas had with the hostages appears gone, and the war has badly damaged Hamas’s fighting capabilities.

The intransigence on both sides is a steep barrier for any negotiations toward a cease-fire or a peace deal. Neither Hamas nor Mr. Netanyahu has shown interest in giving up political power or influence in exchange for peace. For Mr. Netanyahu, that means ensuring his government does not fall. Hamas has not demonstrated a willingness to surrender its weapons or to loosen its grip on Gaza.

An Israeli airstrike on Sept. 9 that targeted Hamas officials in Qatar, which has served as an intermediary between Israel and Hamas, undermined existing diplomatic efforts. Officials from Qatar and other Arab countries denounced the strike as an insult to Qatar’s efforts to negotiate peace.

“We have two stubborn enemies,” said Prof. Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza who was displaced during the war and now lives in Cairo. “Israel is trying to eliminate Hamas and Hamas is trying to survive. They have completely divergent goals.”

“Diplomacy is dead,” Mr. Abusada added.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled a similarly dim conclusion on Tuesday, saying that “time is running out” for any prospects of ending the war. He spoke just before leaving Israel for Qatar and as Israeli forces began their assault on Gaza City, which Israel sees as a major Hamas stronghold. It was unclear whether he knew at the time that the offensive had begun.

While in Israel, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that any chance of diplomacy to halt the war soon was unlikely. It was a sobering assessment that captured the reality of the moment: Mediation efforts by the Trump administration, Qatar and Egypt have so far failed.

Neither side in the war has shown any signs of backing down despite steep costs for both.

Hamas’s leadership and its remaining fighters have refused to relent in the face of enormous destruction in Gaza and the deaths of more than 60,000 Palestinians, a total that comes from Gazan health officials, who don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Israel has endured military casualties, internal anger over the government’s refusal to stop the war to free the remaining hostages, harm to its image around the world and accusations of genocide, which it has denied.

Still, Mr. Netanyahu and his political allies persist in Gaza, even over some objections from the country’s military establishment. In some ways, the Israeli government appeared to be doubling down.

“Gaza is burning,” its defense minister, Israel Katz, wrote Tuesday on social media. He said that the Israeli military intended both to defeat Hamas and to force the group to return the remaining Israeli hostages, adding, “We will not relent or turn back — until the mission is completed.”

Those two goals have always been at odds.

Israeli military operations targeting Hamas militants run the risk of inadvertently killing Israeli hostages or prompting Hamas to kill them as Israeli forces close in. Israel believes about 20 living hostages are still in Gaza.

Conversely, Hamas has demanded a cease-fire in exchange for agreeing to return hostages. That would give the organization time to regroup and strengthen itself, thus undermining Israel’s goal to destroy it.

“If you destroy Hamas, how will you get your hostages back?” said Shira Efron, an expert in Israeli and Middle Eastern affairs at RAND Corporation, which studies security matters and other issues.

Mr. Katz has said that the war will not stop until “Hamas’s defeat is clear and absolute.” Experts have questioned what that means. Israeli tank shells and missiles cannot eradicate Hamas’s deep ties to the land, nor obliterate its members’ beliefs. Though the United States and its allies crippled Al Qaeda’s leadership and operations, for example, the organization still exists in a weakened form, attracting followers and fomenting violence.

Killing Hamas’s current leader in Gaza, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, would probably not end the fighting in the enclave. It is unlikely Hamas would expose all its fighters in a direct confrontation with superior Israeli forces. Such evasion has been a familiar Hamas tactic in the war — one that ensures the group still has enough personnel and firepower to fight another day and to remain politically relevant. The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it estimated that at least 2,000 Hamas militants remained in Gaza City.

Yet diplomacy has paid off in previous conflicts between the two sides. Israel and Hamas agreed to cease-fires after intense fighting in 2014 and 2021. Since the war started, they have hashed out two pauses in hostilities that included the release of scores of hostages.

“The partial deals made us all think that we could bridge both sides toward the implementation of a more durable agreement,” Ms. Efron said.

In recent weeks, an intensive diplomatic push unfolded. Mediators met in Doha, the Qatari capital, to hammer out a deal. President Trump said on Sept. 7 that the Israelis had accepted a set of terms, including a possible proposal to exchange all remaining hostages for Palestinian prisoners and end the war. He called on Hamas to do the same.

Hamas acknowledged it had received “some ideas from the American side” and was ready to begin talks.

But two days later, the Israeli airstrike on Hamas officials in Qatar killed the son of a leading figure involved in the planning of the Oct. 7 attacks. Four others associated with the militant group were also killed. Qatari officials have said they hosted the Hamas officials at the request of the United States.

Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, accused Israel of “sabotaging” the cease-fire and hostage-release negotiations.

As a possible offramp for both sides, Ms. Efron pointed to a French-Saudi proposal supporting a two-state solution that would recognize Palestine. It calls for an immediate cease-fire, the release of all the hostages and disarmament of Hamas and its exclusion from any government.

The French-Saudi plan, however, seems to have little hope of becoming reality. The Trump administration has dismissed it and opposed a resolution to endorse the proposal that passed the United Nations General Assembly on Friday. Hamas and Israel have also each rejected the broad outlines as an unacceptable victory for the other side.

Ms. Efron said any progress toward a cease-fire or truce requires flexibility.

“There is a way out,” she said, “but not one with these two maximalist approaches.”