The war in Gaza has been going on for almost an entire year. The Palestinian death toll has climbed to more than forty-two thousand people. More than thirteen hundred Israelis have died in the October 7th attack and the subsequent fighting. The U.S. has been pushing for a ceasefire deal that would free the remaining hostages in Gaza and some number of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, but neither Israel nor Hamas has managed to entirely agree to the proposed terms. Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, said that the Israel Defense Forces would not depart the Philadelphi Corridor, an approximately nine-mile-long strip of land near the border with Egypt. For Hamas, this is almost certain to be a non-starter for any deal.

I recently spoke by phone with Robert Blecher, the director of the Future of Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group. He was previously the head of the Israel-Palestine project and deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the I.C.G. I wanted to understand the impediments to a ceasefire and the state of the population in Gaza, where people have been living in a nearly continuous state of siege since October. We also touched on the debates within Israel’s security establishment, the real reason Netanyahu wants control of the corridor, and why the status quo in Gaza could extend for years.

Where are the majority of civilians in Gaza currently living?

Physically, the population of Gaza right now is squeezed into about eleven per cent of the Strip. About eleven per cent of the Strip is not under evacuation orders by the Israeli military. This encompasses the al-Mawasi zone, which is a coastal strip that stretches from the border with Egypt up to the center of Gaza.

Part of that zone is next to Rafah, and part is next to Khan Yunis. The population is mainly concentrated near Khan Yunis, with some also in Khan Yunis itself, if they’re able to find shelter there. Maybe a couple hundred thousand are in Gaza City itself. Nobody really knows. Those are the main areas.

What do we know so far about this polio-vaccination drive, which has led not exactly to a total stoppage in fighting and Israeli military activity, but more calm?

Well, the humanitarian crisis since the beginning has been pretty consistent, although it’s taken different forms and there have been different priorities. Right now, one of the biggest concerns is disease—polio being a big one. Hepatitis is also a really big one. There have been stoppages of fighting in certain areas at certain times. But the fighting hasn’t totally stopped, and, in fact, on Monday there were evacuation orders issued for a place in the north where the third stage of the vaccination campaign was supposed to start.

Polio is something that is of more interest to Israel than some of the other humanitarian crises that are faced by Gazans. So they’ve agreed to certain partial cessations of fire in order to get the vaccine.

Why are they more concerned about it?

Because it can spread. And they have a problem with a portion of their population. A portion of the ultra-Orthodox population does not like vaccines, so they have a part of their population that is unvaccinated as well.

The major humanitarian issue, other than the war itself and the bombing campaign, for a long time, was food. What do we know about the state of getting food into Gaza right now and the hunger crisis there?

We know that it’s bad, but we don’t know enough. The reason we know it’s bad is that people still don’t have enough food. One of our people talked to somebody in Gaza City this week who said that they’re eating one meal a day and the quality of the food that they can find is not very good. The situation in the south is better. Food is extremely expensive, but at least you can find it.

The reason we don’t have enough good information is that Israel just has limited the access of investigative units that typically go into war zones and research this type of stuff. Like in Sudan right now, where there’s a war, they’ve done food assessments or food-insecurity evaluations. In Israel, that hasn’t been allowed as much. And so we have some information, but, in terms of gold-standard stuff that you would want in order to really pin this down, the information is just not as solid.

What do you make of some of the reports that the World Food Programme has put together?

What’s important to know is that it seems that Israel reads these reports as carefully as anybody else does. When the I.P.C. report came out in March, Israel let more trucks into Gaza. It wasn’t enough, but it was definitely more. In the last couple of months, those numbers have gone down again. So I think the I.P.C. finds itself in a moral hazard: when they say that things are not looking good, then, O.K., Israel lets in more. But then if the I.P.C. comes back and says, Actually, things are not as bad, that leads to a reduction in what’s allowed in. The U.N. reported that the number of missions to the north dropped by nearly half from July to August. And it seems like those fluctuations track the public discourse on how bad things are.

I want to turn now to the Philadelphi Corridor. Can you explain exactly what it is?

It’s the stretch of land that goes right by the border with Egypt and Gaza. What Netanyahu is saying now is that, in order for Israel to be secure, Israel needs to be in control of that corridor because it needs to be able to stop all weaponry from coming in, and from Hamas resupplying that way. The reason that has become so contested at this moment is that in July it seemed like there was an agreement in principle between the two sides for a ceasefire. An earlier Israeli proposal had been rejected by Hamas because it was insisting that the ceasefire be immediate and permanent. In July, Hamas backtracked and said, O.K., we can make a deal without a permanent ceasefire, a permanent end of the war. We can wait until later for that. What happened subsequently is that Netanyahu basically pocketed the Hamas concession and said, Now we also want control of the Philadelphi Corridor.

And Hamas said, No, that wasn’t part of the deal. It’s essentially been stuck there ever since. In the last week or so, the U.S. has started saying, No, actually it’s both sides. Hamas is also being difficult because there’s problems with who will be in the prisoner swap, but these are problems of two different orders. The issue of political prisoners was always known to be part of the negotiation, and that the identities and the numbers of the prisoners would have to be worked out, and it was planned that at a certain point in negotiation that they would get to that issue. The Philadelphi Corridor is different. That was introduced as a poison pill very late to the game. Hamas has said, No, we’re not going to accept that.

Right, and my understanding is that taking control of this corridor was not part of the initial war aims, and is not something that’s really been seen as crucial for Israel for most of the war. And so I think there was skepticism. You had Thomas Friedman, who is not generally seen as too pro-Palestinian, claim that it was a “fraud” by Netanyahu. So why is this coming up now?

Two reasons. The first is that, I think, there is some truth to the accusation that Netanyahu and his coalition partners are not interested in a deal, and this is a way to make sure that you don’t get one. Because it’s essentially saying that Israel will not withdraw fully from Gaza, and that is a core condition for Hamas. The second reason has to do with Israel’s long-term objectives here. Israel wants to control the gates to Gaza. They want to control that entire corridor, above ground and below, to make sure that no weaponry enters Gaza. But if you control the entry door you also control the exit door.

In the past eleven months, Gazan society has been decimated—the physical infrastructure has been decimated. This has been total war. A lot of times it gets compared to the U.S. in Iraq, but we need to think about other comparisons, like Chechnya. Israeli military doctrine provides for going after civilian infrastructure when that civilian infrastructure is deemed hostile. That’s part of the Dahiya Doctrine, which was coined for the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut, a neighborhood that was bombed heavily by Israel.

So, for Israel, all of Gaza is hostile, right? Hamas is everywhere. And Israel has now spent a year grinding down both Hamas’s military and the territory. I don’t know if you were going to ask me about Israel’s endgame, but you’re seeing it. I would not expect that there’s going to be an end to the war and a rebuild the next day. Israel has spent a year and spent considerable money and political capital grinding down Gaza. Netanyahu has been quite clear that he wants Israel to remain in control. There doesn’t seem to be any electoral chance of replacing him. And so you’re going to have a gradual drip, drip, drip of population displacement, and we’re already looking at the day after.

Yeah, and we should say that Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, the defense minister and the former member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, respectively, who are slightly more moderate than Netanyahu, have both said that keeping troops in the Philadelphi Corridor was not a military necessity.

The two names that you mentioned are representatives of the security establishment in Israel. And the security establishment believes that the conduct of the war is compromising Israel’s national security in that it is threatening relations with the United States. It has created a situation where there is sometimes a lack of the proper kinds of command and control. The establishment thinks that it would be advantageous to reach an agreement to get the Palestinian Authority into Gaza, to have a partner in controlling the territory, and to also make nice with the United States, which is interested in pushing things in the direction of peace.

Now, whether that would actually happen—I think it’s unlikely. We are not living in a time of solutions. We’re not looking at any kind of major peace agenda at this point. What’s happened over the course of the last couple of years is that the establishment is increasingly being threatened by the rise of the far right, and the two names that are commonly associated with this are Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who represent parties that have influence with the government beyond their weight because of the crucial role that they play in Netanyahu’s coalition. They have a lot less respect for the integrity of state structures.

It was this logic that was behind the judicial coup, as they call it in Israel—the undermining of the judicial system. Since October 7th, and especially more recently with what’s been happening in the West Bank, with the rise of settler violence and the increase in collusion between settlers and the rank and file in the Army, is that you have damage to the integrity of state institutions.

What has been Egypt’s role in the discussions of a ceasefire and the corridor? What are they pushing for right now?

They want to see the P.A. come back. When Israel took over the Rafah crossing, Egypt closed the crossing and said that they would not open it until Israel withdrew. And they have been true to that. They have not reopened it. They do not want to be seen as collaborating with Israel. And they also want to make sure that there is a stable authority, to the extent possible, in Gaza that’s not going to leave Egypt in the position of absorbing the Palestinian population outflow.

Everything you have talked about, from the humanitarian situation to why the Netanyahu government may not want to agree to a ceasefire, why it also may want to maintain some control in Gaza—it seems to me that this war could just go on the way it’s been going on for one or two or however many more years.

I think that’s correct, and I’ll reinforce it by pointing to what’s going on with Hamas in Gaza. There has been a lot of attention during the war to Hamas’s military wing—those battalions that you hear about that have been destroyed. That is the military wing which Hamas considers its external wing, and it’s the wing that confronts Israel. But there’s a second set of security bodies in Gaza, which are their domestic bodies, which, before the war and still now, are organized through the Ministry of Interior.

Those were internal-facing, not external-facing. And there’s no indication that Hamas’s internal security apparatus is broken down. In fact, the Ministry of Interior seems to be functioning. They’ve even added some new units.

Have you heard the story about the guy who had twins born and then went to get the birth certificates, and his twins and wife were killed while he was getting the birth certificates? They had the guy on television. The most important thing is the tragedy that he suffered. But in his hands, he’s holding two new birth certificates, color birth certificates. So as all this is going on, the Ministry of Interior is still together enough that they’re able to produce official documents.

Several months back, both Israel and the P.A. tried to stir up opposition to Hamas among the families.

You’re talking about powerful families in Gaza?

Yes, and it was a failure, because when anyone steps out of line, Hamas threatens them. They have carrots and they have sticks, and they quashed this. Hamas is in control. And what that means is that the situation is just going to limp on, as you said.

They are even getting new volunteers for the military wing. They’re organized enough to be able to take in volunteers. Of course, these new people are not going to be as capable as the hardened people who have been killed already. Although it doesn’t take that much training to shoot a gun and participate in a war on the streets. So it’s very easy to imagine how, security-wise, this situation limps on. But the rest of the Gaza government is not functioning the way that the Ministry of Interior is, and that is going to cause enormous hardship. It’s basically going to be humanitarian agencies that are left to pick up the mess.

So the Hamas government in Gaza is still functioning enough to keep the status quo humming along. Is that what you’re saying?

On the security front, yes. On the bureaucratic front, yes. Ninety per cent of schools have been damaged or destroyed. School would’ve started this week in Gaza. So they’re not educating the kids. This is going to be the second year that they’re out.

I don’t know what Netanyahu’s ultimate aims are, but it would seem possible that one advantage of setting a basically unreachable goal for the war—the total elimination of Hamas—is that you keep the P.A. out and you keep the fighting going on as long as you want.

I think that’s correct. I think Netanyahu himself has talked about maintaining permanent security control. He did not use the term “From the river to the sea,” but that was effectively the map that he showed. [In his speech about the Philadelphi Corridor, Netanyahu displayed a map that showed the West Bank annexed by Israel.] He said that Israel needs to remain in security control.

When the war started, the Israeli cabinet set four war aims: return of the hostages, destroy Hamas’s military capacity, destroy its governing capacity, and end all threats emanating from Gaza to Israel. Even ending Hamas’s military and governing capacity has not been accomplished, although the military capacity has been damaged quite severely. Obviously, the hostages are not all back. You don’t have the same kind of threat emerging from Gaza today as you did on October 7th. I mean, even on October 8th, you would not have had the same threat possible. But within fairly short order one could imagine a threat rematerializing.

So they have not met the war goals, and I think Netanyahu himself has been a little slippery in saying, We want to meet these goals as specified by the cabinet and the goal is to destroy Hamas. Because those four aims that I listed are not the same thing as destroying Hamas. Hamas is a political movement with probably thousands of members. And when Netanyahu said, shortly after October 7th, that “every Hamas member is a dead man,” he later stressed that he wasn’t talking about harming civilians.

There are some people who say, How are you supposed to get rid of Hamas, because Hamas is an idea? To which the response is often, Well, Nazism was an idea. I think that’s the wrong comparison. It’s not that Hamas is an idea; Hamas is a political party. The idea for people who are under occupation is liberation. It’s not that all Palestinians agree with Hamas. Far from it, especially in Gaza, especially in the wake of October 7th. But because Gazans are confronted with what is perceived as enormous aggression, wiping out Hamas will not stop it. You can’t hope to crush Hamas and therefore never again have a threat emanating from Gaza. It’s not how it works. ♦