Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted that Israel’s war against Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip is taking longer than expected as Israel faces growing pressure over the soaring Palestinian death toll and its ultimate objectives from the conflict.
Netanyahu told Fox News on Thursday that Israel’s more than month-long air and land offensive against Hamas was “taking a little longer than I had hoped”.
“I hope we could do it very fast, but we have battled conditions on the ground, the safety of our own forces, the hostages [held by Hamas],” Netanyahu said.
On Friday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said “far too many” Palestinians had died in the conflict, in the latest sign of the shifting tone from the White House.
Netanyahu’s comments came after US officials suggested that Israel — which has vowed to eradicate Hamas — had a limited time to conduct its operations in Gaza.
General Charles Q Brown, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters this week that the aim of destroying Hamas was “a pretty large order”.
He also acknowledged that the higher the Palestinian death toll, the greater the risk that the conflict would create the conditions to produce the next generation of militants.
“That’s something we have to pay attention to,” Gen Brown said. “That’s why when we talk about time — the faster you can get to a point where you stop the hostilities, you have less strife for the civilian population that turns into someone who now wants to be the next member of Hamas.”
Brown’s comments came after the Israeli army informed its US counterparts of a longer timeline for hostilities in Gaza City, the strip’s capital. The Israel Defense Forces now expected fighting in Gaza City to continue for weeks, and that military operations in north Gaza could continue as long as mid-December, said a person familiar with the conversations.
In addition, Israeli forces continue to use heavy bombs in Gaza, despite indicating to Washington that they would turn to more precision munitions as ground forces advanced into the city.
“There is specific [US] guidance around this that continues to be repeated,” the person said.
More than 10,800 Palestinians, including many women and children, have been killed in Gaza by Israeli air and artillery strikes since the war erupted after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, according to Palestinian health officials.
The Hamas attack killed more than 1,400 people, Israeli officials have said, The group also seized about 240 hostages, including civilians.
The Israeli military has an informal doctrine of moving quickly in conflicts to outpace international opposition and of achieving a large proportion of its battlefield goals before diplomatic pressure forces a ceasefire or pause.
In Gaza, it has been forced to move more slowly because of the threat from tunnels, and the limited impact that aerial bombardment has had in neutralising that threat. The offensive is also far larger than previous assaults against Hamas, and Israeli forces have gone deeper into the strip as Netanyahu has warned of a long war.
US president Joe Biden has previously questioned the accuracy of the death toll compiled by Palestinian health officials in besieged Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas and is home to 2.3mn people.
But Barbara Leaf, the US assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, told a congressional committee on Wednesday that the death toll in Gaza could be “even higher” than is being cited.
“We’ll know only after the guns fall silent,” she said.
The number killed in Gaza is already far higher than the combined death toll of the three previous wars Israel has fought against Hamas.
This week, UN secretary-general António Guterres said Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children”.
The White House said on Thursday that Israel had agreed to shorter four-hour humanitarian pauses each day in the fighting in northern Gaza. That was a measure Israel had already begun.
Israeli military spokesperson Richard Hecht said: “De facto, we have been doing pauses. Already in the last few days, we have been doing humanitarian pauses. If there is a shift at the political level to do something differently, we will do it.”
The current pauses were intended to allow Palestinians to flee south, he said, as Israeli forces move deeper into the strip’s north. Israel has repeatedly ordered Palestinians to relocate to the south.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said: “The fighting continues and there will be no ceasefire without the release of our hostages.”
CIA director Bill Burns held talks with David Barnea, head of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, and Qatari officials in Doha on Thursday to focus on a three-day pause to facilitate the release of 10 to 20 civilian hostages. Qatar is liaising with Hamas.
The Biden administration has so far resisted pressure from its Arab allies to call for a ceasefire and has instead urged Israel to agree to humanitarian pauses to allow more aid into the strip and improve the chances of securing the release of hostages.
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A US official based in the Middle East said American policymakers were also frustrated by Netanyahu’s focus on Israel’s domestic politics while leaving them to deal with the regional fallout.
They are particularly unhappy with Danny Danon, Israel’s former representative to the UN who is a prominent member of Netanyahu’s Likud party in the Knesset and a vocal backer of expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“Every conversation starts with Hamas, and ends with Hamas,” the person said. “It’s unclear if [the Israelis] acknowledge that their [actions] in the West Bank have broader repercussions.”
The US has also outlined a vision for postwar Gaza that differs sharply from that of Netanyahu, including the Palestinian Authority, a rival of Hamas’s, taking over the administration of Gaza, and an end to Israel’s 16-year blockade of the strip that has impoverished Palestinians without weakening Hamas.
Blinken said this week that these radical departures from current Israeli policy would depend on ending attacks on Israelis from both the West Bank and Gaza, and should build towards a two-state solution, a policy Netanyahu is ideologically opposed to.
Netanyahu told Fox News that Israel did not seek to govern Gaza, but that he had not set a timetable to achieve the objective of defeating Hamas “because it can take more time”.
“I wish it’ll take a little time, but we’re proceeding step by step, reducing our casualties in the process, trying to reduce and minimise civilian casualties and maximise the casualties of the Hamas terrorists, and so far I think it’s proceeding well,” he said.