TEL AVIV—Israel is poised to escalate its military campaign in the Gaza Strip after nearly 19 months of war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday approved plans to surge thousands of troops and expand military operations in the coming days, an Israeli official said, confirming Hebrew media reports. The security cabinet was scheduled to vote on Sunday to give final authorization to the plans.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.
A spokesman for the military confirmed that earlier this week preparations began for a large-scale mobilization of reservists to support the escalation in Gaza. Reserve commanders were called to duty and notified their brigades to prepare for deployment starting as early as next week—in some cases to Gaza and in others to replace active-duty troops who have already begun to redeploy to the strip from the West Bank and Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon.
“We were updated this morning about a [preliminary] decision by the political echelon to expand operations in the south,” a commander of the military’s Alexandroni Brigade informed the unit on Tuesday in a text message obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “As a result, for the expansion of operations in the south, the Alexandroni Brigade and additional reserve brigades received alert orders this morning to replace regular brigades that have been redeployed from the north in preparation for combat in Gaza.”
Several current and former high-ranking military officials said Israel appeared to be accelerating war plans it has been following in Gaza for the past two months. Since the collapse of a second hostage-ceasefire agreement with Hamas on March 1, Israel has sought to gradually ramp up pressure on Hamas to agree to another temporary deal. Hamas has refused to surrender or release any more hostages outside of an agreement that would guarantee a lasting end to the war.
“My understanding is that Israel will put much more pressure now on Hamas, but this is not a full-scale invasion,” Amir Avivi, a former Israeli brigadier general who has advised Israel’s government and military during the war, told the Free Beacon. “If this pressure will work, and there will be a deal, then we’ll see a ceasefire for a certain period of time as we saw before. The next step will be a full-scale invasion.”
Israel’s moves to escalate the fighting in Gaza come as the war effort puts increasing strain on Israeli society. That includes particularly reservists, many of whom have left behind families and jobs to serve hundreds of days in the past year and a half, and several hostage families, who are publicly calling on the prime minister to strike a deal that ends the war in exchange for a return of all the hostages—a bargain they believe he should at least try to strike, though national security experts have voiced skepticism that Hamas will, under any circumstances, hand over all remaining hostages.
In a meeting with reporters earlier this week, several parents of American hostages still held in Gaza called on President Donald Trump to lean on Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. “I believe the president is a very tough person, and he should be tough with the enemies, and with the friends as well. And the friends, I’m talking about Israel,” said Adi Alexander. His son, Edan Alexander, 21, is one of five Americans still held hostage by Hamas.
A survey conducted last month by Bitchonistim, a hawkish Israeli think tank headed by Avivi, shows that more than 30 percent of reservists “do not believe in [Israel’s] ability to defeat Hamas and see no purpose in continuing the war.” Only 65 percent say they will report for duty if called up, according to the survey, which included more than 1,600 respondents and did not provide a margin of error.
For his part, Netanyahu said Thursday that defeating Hamas remains the “supreme goal” of the war, while the return of the hostages is a “very important goal.”
“It’s a very important goal,” Netanyahu said. “The war has a supreme goal, and the supreme goal is victory over our enemies, and this we will achieve.”
But current and former military officers agreed that Israel cannot allow Hamas to continue dragging out the war without releasing at least some hostages.
“To call these thousands of troops and not do anything differently would be one of the stupidest things I can imagine,” an Israeli reserve colonel who was deployed to Gaza this week told the Free Beacon, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There will not be another chance to call up so many soldiers.”
A military spokesman said Israel intended to take full advantage of the troop surge, though he, like other officials, declined to provide details of the planned escalation.
“There’s a reason that we’re potentially going to call a large number of soldiers,” the spokesman, who asked not to be identified by name, told the Free Beacon. “When we’re talking about reservists, these are people who have jobs, families, etc. We wouldn’t just call them for no reason.”
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