Amit Segal is an Israeli journalist, radio and television personality. He serves as the political commentator of Israel’s Channel 12 news (N12 News company) and anchors Israel’s highly watched “Meet the Press" show on Channel 12.
(JNS) The first visit to the Gaza Strip after Oct. 7 showed a relatively intact city, amid plumes of smoke and sounds of battle. A year later, in November 2024, Jabalya was a massive pile of rubble, stretching from horizon to horizon, with packs of dogs roaming among the ruins and garbage. On the 1,00th day of the war, nothing remained in the area. The densely populated camp looked desolate and quiet like the surface of the moon. Engineering drills searched for tunnels below ground, with D9 bulldozers operating above. In the vast majority of Gaza, nothing remained, neither above ground nor below it.
This is the situation in all the territory controlled by Israel, which makes up about two-thirds of the Strip’s territory. Rafah was wiped off the face of the earth, as were most of Khan Yunis and huge swaths of Gaza. Ninety-two percent of the tunnels have been completely destroyed; the rest will be destroyed soon.
Inside Hamas-controlled Gaza, there have been increasing reports recently of a resurgence, tunnel rehabilitation, training exercises, and an inevitable IDF operation. These reports should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Hamas is failing to genuinely rearm after its smuggling routes in the air, on land, at sea and underground were choked off. Three hundred sixty-two smuggling tunnels from Egypt were destroyed in Rafah. Training is conducted in hiding, reconstruction materials aren’t arriving, and the newly dug tunnels in the sand are barely shored up with whatever is available: sheet metal, wood scraps.
Iran bends over backward to protect Hezbollah; for Hamas, it doesn’t even pick up the phone. That’s what happens to someone who starts a war without permission and is considered a lost cause.
Perhaps this is why Hamas recently agreed to terms that include handing over all heavy weaponry, tunnel maps, production sites and weapons caches. Its leaders agreed that the weapons would be surrendered to a committee, not to Israel. The multinational force that will subsequently deploy will serve as a buffer between Hamas and Israel, and will be responsible for the collection.
Israel will withdraw only after Hamas is disarmed, the militias’ weapons are also collected, all government positions are handed over to a technocratic committee and police officers who fail a security clearance are forced to retire.
The agreements make no mention of small arms, which flood Gaza by the tens of thousands. How flooded? The divisions maneuvering in Gaza used to transport rifles to the Israeli border, where bulldozers would run them over and crush them. At a certain point, they asked to stop collecting weapons because it had become their primary activity.
“Make no mistake," says a very senior army officer, “of all the enemies we have faced, they are the most cruel, the most hateful towards us and the most uninhibited."
And this is exactly the reason why it was forbidden to stop and “fight another day," as Nitzan Alon and others suggested (during the war). From the perimeter, without this level of destruction and without isolating them from their patrons, Gaza would have recovered rapidly. By day 1,000, it would have already become a monstrous threat again, rather than a wave of rubble and despair.
Force does not solve everything.
There is something very strange about modern wars. One day, you bomb the enemy, and on the second day he calls you on WhatsApp after getting the internet working again. We tend to look at the absurdity of senior American administration officials conducting friendly conversations with the heads of a terror regime. But it is safe to assume that for the Iranians it is harder. They need to talk with the people who killed their admired leader and caused their economy hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
In the first two weeks after the signing of the agreement, there was an almost absolute consensus that Iran had won. This feeling of catastrophe was caused by a rare coalition of the regime’s mouthpieces in Tehran, the establishment media in America, and the hard feelings in Israel and within the Republican Party.
If things are so good for Iran, why did they fire at the beginning of the week in the Strait of Hormuz? The accepted approach is that the regime is simply taunting Trump out of hubris and an absolute conviction that he will not dare to attack back. But a senior American official offers an additional possibility:
“The Iranians are shooting because it turned out that they are losing. They thought they would open the strait from their side immediately, and in parallel, slow down access for Western vessels. In practice, the opposite happened. We have safe passage under ‘Project Freedom,’ without them controlling it at all.
"Meanwhile, despite the temporary suspension of the sanctions, it became clear to them that no bank in the West is willing to do business with them for two months. They are offering steep discounts but have not sold even one barrel of oil. In addition, no asset was unfrozen. The Gulf states have no desire to lift a finger for them."
Not everything is measured in oil, but also in optics. The Americans believe that what they did in the agreement is to give the moderate wing there an incentive against the extreme side, and to see what will come out of the clash between them. They see the power struggles at the top as one of the achievements of the war and believe that something good can still come out of the skirmishes.
Give us credit, the Americans ask again and again. Just as you did not believe that Hamas would give up the hostages, you also do not believe that Iran will give up its nuclear program. Force solves many things, but contrary to what the Israeli government and its leader think, it does not solve everything. The war has reached a stage in which the marginal utility of using force is steadily decreasing. We are not as naive as you think, nor are we Innocents Abroad, like the title of Mark Twain’s book about his journey to Palestine in the 19th century. (In Hebrew, by the way, the title is translated to the somewhat cynical name “A Pleasure Trip to the Holy Land.")
(Appeared in Yisrael Hayom)