Transcript of The War That Won’t End

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From the New York Times. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is the daily Israel has been fighting Hamas in Gaza for almost a year. But despite catastrophic losses, Hamas seems no closer to declaring defeat. And despite considerable military gainshead, Israel seems no closer to declaring victory. Today my colleague Patrick Kingsley on why the war in Gaza is still going and what it would take to end it. It's Wednesday, August 28. So, Patrick, we wanted to hear from you in Israel today because we're coming up nearly on a year since October 7, and it really feels like every week you write at least one story about the ceasefire negotiations. Some weeks it looks like progress toward a ceasefire deal. Other weeks, no progress. Meanwhile, the threat of a wider war in the Middle east is deepening. Just this weekend, there was a huge exchange of rocket fire in Israel's northern border with Lebanon. You know, that doesn't seem likely to end while the war in Gaza is still going. So we all felt like it was really time to come to you and ask a basic question, which is, why can't they agree to a ceasefire? And perhaps more fundamentally, why is this war in Gaza still going on?

So these are very good questions. Both the questions come down to two men, essentially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Yahya Sinwar of Hamas. And to understand why they have such fundamentally mutually exclusive positions on the war, we have to start with the ceasefire, which is the most basic building block for stopping the war. And the two leaders have a fundamental disagreement here. Netanyahu, the israeli leader, essentially wants a temporary ceasefire. Sinwa, the leader of Hamas, wants a permanent ceasefire.

So, Patrick, explain that. Start maybe with Netanyahu. Explain that position.

So for Prime Minister Netanyahu, the professed goal of the war is to destroy Hamas, to destroy this group that invaded Israel on October 7, killed more than 1000 people and abducted roughly 250. And key members of his far right coalition will accept nothing less than Hamas total defeat. Netanyahu needs that far right coalition to stay in power. And so if the ceasefire is temporary. It will allow him to present the truce to his base as just a brief measure to free some of the roughly 100 hostages still left inside Gaza, after which Israel can easily return to the fighting and to defeating Hamas. So it will allow him to get some of the hostages back, thus placating the many Israelis whose top priority is the release of the hostages. And it will take away some of Hamas key bargaining chips. And it would allow him to say to his base that, don't worry, the war will continue and Hamas will be defeated after this brieftain pause in hostilities.

And what's the calculation for Sinwar? Walk us through his reasons for pushing through a permanent ceasefire.

Well, if he goes for a temporary one, he gives up key bargaining chips, the israeli hostages who Hamas captured on October 7. And he doesn't get much in return. He doesn't secure Hamas survival. And he leaves open the possibility that fighting will resume, that Israel will continue its campaign after a few weeks, and will continue to erode Hamas fighting capability and governing capability and eventually secure its defeat. A permanent ceasefire, by contrast, essentially allows Hamas to survive the war intact as a political movement, intact as a. A depleted but still active governing force that controls Gaza. It may not be enough to save his life. Israel will probably pursue him for the rest of his days, but it allows Hamas as a movement to survive the war.

Ok, so these sides are pretty dug in on their respective, very far apart positions, but of course, talks have been bumping along, right? And they are bumping along with the help of the United States and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. What, if anything, has the US involvement in the talks meant for this process?

The US has brought key energy at times when it feels like both the sides, Israel and Hamas, and the mediators, Egypt and Qatar, have lacked energy, political will, or desire to sit down at a negotiating table. In particular, they've been trying to bridge the gaps between the different sides. And their main approach has been a kind of constructive ambiguity in the language that is written in the draft agreements that the two sides have been haggling over.

What does that mean exactly, constructive ambiguity?

It means having enough fluidity in the language of the deal so that both sides can sell the agreement to their bases as something that achieves what those bases want.

So in other words, not be so forensic in the wording of the agreement, like keeping the language loose enough so that both sides can sell it to their populations. So this is essentially a political fix the US is trying to bring here.

Exactly. And just to give an example of how that constructive ambiguity in the language worked. At one point in the negotiation, there was a standoff over the extent to which Israel would retain a military presence along a particular thoroughfare dividing northern Gaza from southern Gaza. Israel wanted to maintain checkpoints there to stop Hamas moving weapons between those two areas. Hamas didn't and doesn't want israeli checkpoints in that location. So the way that the negotiators bridged that gap, at least at one point, was to include the principle of that idea within the draft agreement, but not the enforcement mechanism by which that plan would be enacted. And that would have allowed the israeli leadership, Netanyahu, to go back to his right wing base and say, no. The principle of preventing Gazans from moving weapons around Gaza had been maintained, and it would have allowed Hamas to argue internally that, well, yes, that principle is in there, but there is nothing mentioned in that draft agreement about an enforcement mechanism. Right?

There's no checkpoints there. What checkpoints are you talking about? We are free to move.

Exactly. But then in July, we got a window into how this constructive ambiguity doesn't quite work. While the two sides seem to have agreed on this ambiguous terminology in May, by July, 2 months later, Israel had come back with a new demand to replace that ambiguity with greater clarity. They wanted clarity on that principle of stopping Gazans from moving around the territory with guns could be enforced. And, of course, that removed the ambiguity and remains something that Hamas does not want to agree to. And it is one of many stumbling blocks that is preventing a deal between the two sides of.

Okay, so from all we can tell, the talks are not working, or at least they're proving very cumbersome as you're laying out here. But let's talk about how wars normally end, which is that one side admits it can no longer win. And in this case, that would appear to be Hamas. I mean, as of this month, 40,000 Gazans were dead, according to gazan health officials, and vast swathes of its territory are in ruins. So why doesn't all of that add up to Hamas viewing this as a defeat?

Well, that's a very reasonable question, because when you look at Gaza and you see all the astonishing destruction, more than half the house is damaged, tens of thousands of people killed, huge harm to infrastructure and to the health system. You do wonder, why doesn't Hamas surrender in most other wars? A side that is lost materially to this extent would have surrendered by this point, but this is not a normal war. The sides have very unusual thresholds for victory. Israel has a very high threshold for victory. Its leader, Netanyahu says he wants the total destruction of Hamas. Hamas has a very low threshold for victory. It just wants to survive. And neither threshold is very typical. Usually when one side so convincingly destroys another. Think of Japan. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered. Alternatively, if you look at other moments in the second world war when France realized it was losing, its leaders did not wait for the total destruction of France to either flee or give in. And what we have here is we have a side that by conventional measures is losing, but doesn't want to surrender, because its own threshold for victory is so low that it kind of thinks that it might actually be winning.

So for Hamas, as long as it has one fighter standing, essentially it's still in the war and hasn't lost the war, it's still going.

Exactly. And what makes all this doubly unconventional is the fact that the israeli army is itself not fighting in a particularly normal way. It is not holding the territory that it conquers. And what that means is they are not controlling Gaza, despite the fact that they have captured most of it by now, at some point during the last ten months. And because they haven't established control, that leads to this very bizarre form of whack a mole. Where Israel goes into an area, has a very destructive battle with Hamas, leaves, Hamas returns, forcing Israel to come back, fighting a second, sometimes a third, and a fourth time, and still then abandoning its control, retreating again to key strategic positions within Gaza or even within Israel. And the whole cycle begins again. So it leads to extraordinary destruction, but it doesn't particularly lead to a change in who actually controls Gaza on the ground.

And, Patrick, why dont they occupy the areas that theyve taken?

Well, we should say here that for a lot of Palestinians, Israel never stopped occupying Gaza. They maintained a physical presence inside Gaza between 1967 and 2005, when israeli soldiers and israeli settlers left the territory. But ever since, theyve still maintained some degree of control over trade, the airspace, the phone networks, entry and exit. The debate among Israelis is whether they should go back to maintaining a physical presence as they did until 2005. And for the moment, those opposed to that physical presence seem to have won out. Why? Because installing soldiers throughout Gaza is really difficult. It requires vast amounts of resources. It's complicated and it's also dangerous. It has to be protected by thousands of israeli soldiers. They can be killed at any time if you try and hang onto a territory the size of Gaza. And because of that, it seems like Israel's leadership does not want to entertain that possibility, at least for now. Even if there are people within government and in vast swathes of the israeli right wing public that would actually like to see Israel return to building military bases across the Gaza Strip.

So if the situation on the ground won't end the war, and a ceasefire seems improbable, at least for now, then how does the war end?

That is starting to become the key question. How do these two sides get out of this war? How do they find a way through what feels like it has become an intractable situation, and it's beginning to feel like we're going to need some kind of game changer, something maybe we haven't quite conceived of so far, a black swan event that is going to shift the tectonic plates of how this conflict is being fought.

We'll be right back.

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So, Patrick, we're at this current impasse in large part because of these two leaders and their political calculations. And it feels like maybe only something really big could change things. As you're saying, what sort of game changer are we talking about?

Well, there's a few different things that could shift the needle. One could be in the US, one could be with the Israelis, and one could be a regional war that would change the dynamic across the Middle east.

So maybe start with the United States, which is obviously coming up on a big election.

Exactly. And whoever wins that election, we will be left at the end of it with a different president. And that different president could have a slightly different focus and attitude to, if not Israel itself, then the way that Israel is prosecuting this war. And that might in turn change Benjamin Netanyahus calculations at the negotiation table.

Right. What else?

Another wild card would be the killing of Yahya Sinwar the leader of Hamas. That is perhaps Israel's top goal in Gaza right now. They've killed a several other key leaders of Hamas. Yahya Sinwar is the last man standing. Essentially, if he goes, if the leader of Hamas goes, that would allow Benjamin Netanyahu to say to his base, mission accomplished, and that in turn might allow him to agree to a ceasefire under terms that he previously hadnt agreed to.

In other words, the far right leaders in his coalition perhaps would be satisfied if Sinoir was killed.

Exactly. And on the other side of the border, it's possible that with Sinuad dead, with the most powerful leader within Hamas dead, his subordinates would be more likely to compromise, to surrender in his absence. Of course, that's a big if, and it's very possible that Sinwar's death would not actually change their thinking on a ceasefire or on the war itself all that much. But the possibility remains.

And Patrick, what about the pressure on Netanyahu and on the israeli government, on the part of the hostage families? And just on Tuesday, one hostage was actually released. So I would imagine that this type of pressure amounts to some sort of game changing dynamic for Netanyahu.

I don't think it's game changing. For a start, it's been going on for a while, and it obviously hasn't shifted his calculations thus far. And secondly, it's interesting you mentioned this hostage rescue on Tuesday, because for some, that actually supports Netanyahus argument that it's only through more military action that you can free the hostages, not a truce, but further action on the ground by the israeli military in Gaza. And while it's true that there are lots of protesters calling for Netanyahu, for the israeli government to prioritize the hostages well being and to cut a deal basically at any price, in order to get the hostages home, the people who are pushing most loudly for that deal are not Netanyahu's own supporters, his base. Their priority is Hamas defeat. And while they may care about the hostages and want them home at some point, their immediate release is not their first priority.

And Patrick, you mentioned regional war as something that could potentially really shift the dynamic here. Talk to me about that.

Well, alongside the Gaza war, we also have smaller simmering conflicts between Israel and Hamas allies across the region. Those are Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the benefactor of all those three groups, Iran. And to varying degrees, those proxies of Iran and Iran itself have been fighting this low level conflict against Israel in parallel with the Gaza war since October. Now, at any moment, all these smaller conflicts could erupt into much bigger ones. If either side. If Israel makes a mistake or a miscalculation, if Hezbollah makes a mistake or a miscalculation, Iran the same. Suddenly these conflicts could erupt into an all out regional war involving all these actors firing on full cylinders. So far, no side has appeared truly willing to do that. They've always stepped back from the brink, and on Sunday we saw Hezbollah and Israel doing exactly that. But if it does escalate into an all out regional war, then that would at the very least consume Israel's energies, draw down its resources, its munition supplies, and possibly make Israel much likelier to agree to a truce in Gaza in order to get all of these conflicts to wind down.

And how would a regional war change the calculations for Sinwar?

The feeling is that Sinoa would benefit from a regional war. A regional war would distract Israel and potentially even endanger the existence of the israeli state, depending on how long and how intense that war got. All of this benefits Hamas, and all of it benefits Sinwa, because the weaker the israeli state is, the more likely it is to compromise in ceasefire negotiations with Hamas and agree to something that Sinhoa thinks is more favorable to Hamas long term survival.

And presumably, on the most extreme scenario, the destruction of Israel is something that he's actually rowing toward. And a big regional war would raise the specter of that.

It would certainly increase its chances a notch or two. Israel is a very strong state. It has perhaps the strongest military in the Middle east, and it would take a lot to dislodge its presence in the region. But Hamas has never rescinded the call it made in its founding charter to destroy Israel. And anything that makes Israel less safe would be construed by Hamas as a step toward that goal. Now, interestingly, there are those who believe that the Israelis themselves, or some Israelis, are also seeking a regional war.

Why?

Well, by this theory, it would create the pretext by which Israel could attack Iran in a much more brazen and intense way than it ever previously has done. Prime Minister Netanyahu and many Israelis see Iran as their biggest foe, and they fear that the nuclear weapons program that Iran is working on is a much more existential threat to Israel than anything Hamas or other Palestinians might throw at the israeli population, and therefore bye this argument. Some israeli leaders, perhaps Netanyahu himself, is searching for a pretext to hit Iran hard, to destroy that nuclear capacity and perhaps even drag in the US, Israel's biggest ally, into a regional war that it doesn't seek, but would be forced to join in order to defend its key Middle eastern ally. And all of that would create the pretext and the opportunity to destroy Iran's nuclear capability. So as much as many Israelis and Palestinians are desperately looking for a way to end this war, there are people on either side who have reasons to not just continue the war, but also escalate it into an all out regional conflict.

I mean, it's remarkable. You know, we started this conversation by talking about these two men, their political ambitions, and why it's making it difficult for them to get to a ceasefire. But we're ending it in a place where it seems not only are they not wanting to get to a ceasefire, but potentially they actually want the war to get bigger. They're not going away from conflict, but running toward it.

That's a possibility. We can't know what either man is thinking exactly. We're not inside their heads. What we can say for sure, though, is that both Israel and Hamas, and by extension both Netanyahu and Sinwa, are still involved in negotiations for a ceasefire. Those negotiations do not currently seem very likely to succeed, but they do continue. There was a big meeting on Sunday between senior officials from Israel and the mediating countries. The possibility of a ceasefire very much remains, even if the chances of an all out regional war are also growing.

Patrick, thank you.

Thank you, Sabrina.

Well be right back. Heres what else you should know today. On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced plans to name his former rival, Robert F. Kennedy junior, along with former US representative Tulsi Gabbard, as honorary co chairs of his presidential transition team. The team, which includes Trump's sons as well as his running mate JD Vance, would help him select the policies and personnel for a second Trump term. The appointments were a bit by Trump to show that his support extends beyond party lines. Both Kennedy and Gabbard spent most of their public lives as progressives, and both started their presidential runs as democrats. Kennedy ended his independent campaign for president last week and endorsed Trump. Gabbard has since left the Democratic Party and rebranded herself as a celebrity among Trump. Trump's base of support and special counsel Jack Smith revised his indictment, accusing former President Donald Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election in an effort to help it survive the Supreme Court's recent ruling granting former presidents immunity for official acts in office. In its decision on immunity, the the Supreme Court ruled that a president's dealings with the Justice Department are considered official duties of his office.

Smith's revised charging documents exclude the accusations that Trump conspired with Justice Department officials to support his false claims that the election had been stolen from him. If you want more of today's top stories, go check out our other daily news show. It's called the headlines. It's the biggest stories of the day in ten minutes or less. Subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Ricky Novetsky, and Stella Tan with help from Nina Feldman. It was edited by Mark George with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Marianne Lozano and Alicia Beta, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for the daily I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.