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Gaza, Lebanon, West Bank: Why Is Israel Fighting So Many Wars?
As well as its conflict with Hamas, Israel is battling along its border with Lebanon, waging a counterinsurgency in the occupied West Bank and exchanging sporadic fire with Iran and its regional proxies.
Reporting from Jerusalem
While Israel’s devastating war with Hamas in Gaza attracts the most attention, its military has also been fighting for months on several other fronts, making this one of the most complex periods of conflict in the country’s 76-year history.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the military has been raiding and striking militant groups in several Palestinian cities, killing about 600 people since October, in the deadliest campaign in the territory for more than two decades. On Wednesday, Israel began one of its biggest maneuvers in the territory in recent months, simultaneously invading three cities to capture or kill militants.
Along the Israel-Lebanon border, Israel has been exchanging rocket and missile fire with Hezbollah, a militia allied with Hamas and backed by Iran, in fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the border and killed hundreds.
And Israel’s yearslong shadow war with Iran has burst into the open, with each side striking the other directly in April, leading to fears that a relatively contained war in Gaza might end up setting off an all-out war involving Iran, its many proxies across the Middle East and even the United States.
Why are various groups fighting Israel, why is it using force to deal with them, and why is it taking so long for these wars to end?
Why Israel is still fighting in Gaza.
Despite the destruction of much of Hamas’s military infrastructure and tens of thousands of deaths, there is no end in sight to the war in Gaza, partly because Israel has set itself a high threshold for victory: the eradication of the Hamas leadership and the rescue of roughly 100 hostages still held by the group. By contrast, Hamas has a low threshold: It seeks to survive the war intact, a modest goal that allows it to weather a level of devastation that might have caused other groups to surrender.
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Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. More about Patrick Kingsley
Our Coverage of the Middle East Crisis
An Israeli Presence Postwar?: Gaza cease-fire talks have stalled again, in part over Israel’s demand to retain a military presence in the territory, which Hamas and Egypt oppose. But the view among some Gazans on that point is less clear-cut.
Israel's Many Wars: While the war with Hamas in Gaza attracts the most attention, Israel is also battling along its border with Lebanon, waging a counterinsurgency in the occupied West Bank and exchanging sporadic fire with Iran and its regional proxies.
Netanyahu Digs In: In his first news conference since the bodies of six killed hostages were recovered, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel refused to budge on his conditions for any truce in Gaza.
Biden’s Terse Rebuke: President Biden, when asked whether Netanyahu was doing enough to secure a deal to free hostages in Gaza, responded simply: “No.”
The Hostages Still in Gaza: Dozens of hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel remain in captivity, according to the Israeli authorities. Here is what we know about them.
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