When Israeli forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza last week, many inside and outside of Israel hoped it could be the moment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would declare a victory and scale back the Gaza operation in hopes of securing a ceasefire and hostage release deal.
A week after Sinwar’s death, it is increasingly clear they have been wrong.
Netanyahu, who celebrated his 75th birthday on Monday, is Israel’s longest serving prime minister, steering his country through its longest ever war.
Israel’s international allies, as well as many inside the country, are pressuring Netanyahu to end that war now, pointing out that Sinwar’s killing came off the back of other military successes, most notably the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
But instead, Netanyahu has vowed to continue to fight, leaving the world guessing what his ultimate goal might be.
He has hinted that his ambitions might go well beyond crushing Hamas and Hezbollah, the two most immediate threats Israel is facing. He said Nasrallah’s killing was “a necessary step” toward changing “the balance of power in the region for years to come,” raising concerns about his willingness to plunge Israel into a direct confrontation with Iran.
Israel and Iran are dangerously close to yet another major escalation after Iran launched a massive ballistic missile attack against Israel on October 1.
Netanyahu immediately promised retaliation, but three weeks later, the world is still waiting to see what Israel will do next. The US and other allies have urged Netanyahu to exercise restrain and avoid striking Iran’s nuclear and oil assets, but it is unclear whether they succeeded.
Netanyahu has publicly stated that he wants his military to eliminate Iran’s proxies that pose the most immediate threat to Israel: Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But it is increasingly obvious that might be impossible to achieve.
The current situation in northern Gaza shows why. The Israeli military has already withdrawn from the area twice after saying, both times, that it had crushed Hamas there. Yet earlier this month, the IDF went in again after seeing what it said were signs of Hamas re-emerging in the area.
Northern Gaza is now once again one of the epicenters of the war, with the IDF bringing immense amount of suffering on people who had returned to what was left of their homes after the last Israeli withdrawal.
Similarly, weeks into Israel’s operation in Lebanon, Hezbollah continues to strike. A drone fired over the weekend slipped through Israeli air defenses and struck Netanyahu’s beach house some 50 miles from the Lebanese border. On Monday, a drone fired launched Lebanon managed to get through Israeli’s air defences and strike Netanyahu’s beach house in the coastal city of Caesarea, some 50 miles from the border of Lebanon.
Netanyahu’s reluctance to strike a ceasefire deal, even now after securing several military victories, has angered many in Israel. Weekly mass protests against him and his government are back on, demanding an agreement with Hamas that would secure the release of the 101 hostages still held in Gaza.
Aviv Bushinsky, a former Netanyahu adviser and spokesperson who is now a political analyst, said the fate of the hostages – dozens of whom are still believed to be alive – is crucial for Netanyahu’s future legacy.
“If Netanyahu is not able to release any more hostages, either by military means or by diplomatic means, (people) are going to say he failed, and they will always remember what they call ‘The Netanyahu proposal’ in July where they said Netanyahu, at the last minute, added (a) few more conditions to a ceasefire agreement that effectively terminated the deal,” he said.
Bushinsky told CNN that if the war ends without any more hostages or bodies being released or rescued, it is possible some people could eventually start questioning the decision to kill Sinwar – something that was almost universally welcomed across Israel last week.
“And this is my greatest fear, that people will say, ‘oh, you see, we made a mistake by eliminating the single individual you could negotiate with … who knows what would have happened, but at least you had some kind of door to knock on’,” he added.
‘No incentive to end the war’
Netanyahu is playing a complicated game, trying to balance the contradictory demands of the many allies he cannot afford to lose.
His government relies on the support of far-right figures such as Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who make no secret of the fact that they want Israel to continue occupying Gaza and are even suggesting building Jewish settlements there.
Netanyahu’s approval ratings have improved over the last year, but not enough for him to be able to call a new election and win. So, he is stuck.
“Ending the Gaza war and the Lebanon war is not an option for his political partners in the coalition. They want to go all the way, so he cannot finish the war with the current coalition,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“The usual Netanyahu that we’ve seen for the last 15 years would have probably gone for a national unity government and a big (ceasefire) agreement with the support of the US. But this is not the political situation we are actually in, so politically, with this coalition, he has no incentive to end the war,” she added.
Talshir explained that a broader national unity government is not an option for Netanyahu as it would likely mean a public inquiry, headed by a judge, into the failures that led to the October 7 attacks.
On top of that, Netanyahu is still on trial for several charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery. He is scheduled to begin testifying in December – the first sitting Israeli prime minister to appear in court as a defendant.
Before the October 7 terror attacks, Netanyahu and his government tried to push through a controversial judicial reform which would give much more power over courts to the government – potentially enabling Netanyahu to influence his own trial. A national unity government would not allow that, Talshir said.
Netanyahu’s legacy
At the same time, Netanyahu needs to consider the demands from the US. The Biden administration has made it very clear it wants Israel to work towards a deal that would end the war.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on Tuesday, urging Netanyahu and his government to do more to cool the tensions.
But Netanyahu seems to have grown increasingly immune towards the pressures from the US – Blinken’s trip this week is his 11th visit to the Middle East in a year, yet like the previous trips, it seems to have achieved little.
Tensions between Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden are well documented, but they are likely to get a lot worse in the near future.
With the US election looking to be on a knife edge, Biden has to carefully calibrate his approach to Israel so as not to hurt Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of winning. He needs to be seen as taking a tough stance on the horrific humanitarian situation in Gaza to stop Arab-Americans and progressives from ditching his party over the war Israel is waging there. Yet he must also continue to support Israel in order not to anger moderate and Jewish voters who expect the US to stand by the Jewish state no matter what.
“The American elections play a dramatic role in how Netanyahu perceives what’s going to happen,” Talshir told CNN. “He has a window of opportunity because there’s very little chance that Biden can restrain Netanyahu now. But after November 5, things are going to change,” she added.
She said that regardless of who wins, the Biden administration may exert a lot more pressure on Israel to end the war in the two months between the election and the inauguration of the new US president.
Biden has already hinted he might increase the pressure – warning Israel the US may stop supplying Israel with weapons unless the humanitarian situation in Gaza improves.
“Netanyahu knows that there is no bigger picture of victory afterwards, because both Sinwar and Nasrallah are dead. So the question is whether what he wants is to wait for (former President Donald) Trump (to get re-elected) and to get some sort of big defense alliance between the US, Saudi and Israel, which would be, from his perspective, probably more likely under Trump,” Talshir said, adding that striking such a deal would give Netanyahu a huge political boost at home.
“He is the head of state of Israel at the most devastating point since the state was established so the farther away he gets from October 7, and the more military victories that he gets under his belt, the more likely he is to reemerge as victorious,” she said.
For Netanyahu, establishing a legacy as the prime minister who saved his country is the dream, Bushinsky said, adding that if he managed that, he might even consider stepping down.
“Most people think that he won’t, but I worked with him and I have seen him once, in 2001, passing on the opportunity of being prime minister. Maybe he has changed, but I think that if he is able to end up as a big hero, someone who has done some kind of Churchillian act for the State of Israel, he would say to himself, enough is enough,” he said.
“And then his mission would be to strike some kind of a deal with the prosecution, maybe they’ll let him go and he will be able to go abroad, give lectures as the one who defeated terror … and if he won’t have any criminal record, he’ll be able to sit in all kinds of advisory boards and earn lots of money, which he feels that he’s lacking.”