Israeli analysts said they believe that the war in Gaza will go on despite Israel’s killing of Hamas’s leader Sinwar. A deal to release the hostages might have been possible several months ago, but the war on Gaza has now shape-shifted, Israeli journalist and analyst Meron Rapoport told the Middle East Eye. “The elimination of Hamas and the return of the hostages was not the goal of the war in recent times,” Rapoport said. “The goal is to change the borders of the Gaza Strip and to eliminate Palestinian nationalism in Gaza and transfer as many people as possible.”
Rappaport indicated that not only is the “general’s plan” for the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza fully under way but that war has now taken on a logic of its own that neither the IDF nor even Netanyahu can constrain. “The road back from this war is very complex. A dynamic has developed that the army itself will find difficult to stop,” he said. Along with parts of the army, the powerful right-wing figures in Netanyahu’s government will “want to complete the bigger plan regarding Gaza.”
Writing in Hebrew-language website The Marker, Haaretz journalist Avi Bar-Eli analyzed comments Netanyahu made after Sinwar’s killing—comments like “the mission ahead of us has not yet been completed” and “this is the beginning of the day after Hamas”—and argued that the assassination will not end the war. “The elimination is but one stage in the campaign whose future is still ahead,” Bar-Eli wrote.
Chinese media is reporting a similar analysis. An article in the Global Times quotes Liu Zhongmin, a professor from the Middle East Studies Institute of Shanghai International Studies University: “It is noteworthy that the elimination of Sinwar will make negotiations between the parties even more challenging in the short term,” he said.
