To Take a City: The Battle for Gaza

Israel’s decision to occupy Gaza and press a ground offensive into Gaza City represents a watershed moment in a war that has already redrawn the region’s political and military landscape. What began in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks as a campaign of reprisal has evolved into an explicit project of territorial seizure and conquest, framed by Israeli leadership as a necessary guarantee of security. This escalation is not simply a continuation of armed hostilities; it is a deliberate redefinition of the state’s strategic horizon, one that recasts Gaza not as a besieged enclave but as an arena for long-term military governance.

The gravity of this decision is measured not only by the operational scale, tens of thousands of reservists mobilized, entire brigades arrayed for encirclement, but also by the political and humanitarian stakes it generates. For Israel, the move signals an attempt to reassert deterrence and permanence after years of oscillation between punitive strikes and reluctant ceasefires. For Palestinians, however, the prospect of renewed occupation evokes historical traumas of displacement, the unraveling of fragile civilian infrastructure, and the specter of a protracted urban insurgency within one of the world’s most densely populated environments.

The question, then, is not whether Israel can seize Gaza City; its overwhelming military capacity makes such an outcome likely, but whether it can sustain, justify, and ultimately benefit from such a conquest. The transformation of a city into a battlefield imposes legal obligations under the law of occupation, invites scrutiny from international actors, and risks entangling Israel in a grinding war of attrition. At stake is more than tactical victory: the very legitimacy of military force as a solution to political problems, the resilience of international norms on civilian protection, and the long-term stability of a region already destabilized by cycles of reprisal and collapse.

The trajectory toward Israel’s decision to reoccupy Gaza cannot be disentangled from the long arc of Hamas’s governance since 2007, when the Islamist movement consolidated control of the enclave following a brief but bloody conflict with Fatah. Gaza’s geography, densely populated, impoverished, and hemmed in by Israel and Egypt, has produced a volatile social and political landscape in which cycles of escalation have become recurrent. The structural fragility of Gaza’s infrastructure, exacerbated by years of blockade and intermittent bombardment, has heightened the enclave’s susceptibility to crisis, ensuring that any outbreak of violence carries the potential for catastrophic civilian consequences. This background is essential to understanding why Israel’s current campaign, and its declared intent to occupy Gaza City, represents not merely another military operation but a departure in both scale and ambition.

The events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas operatives breached Israeli defenses and carried out an unprecedented attack that left over a thousand Israelis dead and dozens taken hostage, redefined the conflict’s parameters. For Israel, the attack was not only a human tragedy but a symbolic collapse of deterrence, prompting a public demand for decisive action that would ensure such a failure could never be repeated. The political reverberations inside Israel were immediate: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already embattled domestically, found his survival tied to the promise of total victory over Hamas. This linkage between political legitimacy and maximalist military goals laid the groundwork for a policy trajectory that increasingly sidelined restraint and elevated occupation as a viable strategic endpoint.

From late 2023 through 2025, Israel’s campaign evolved from intensive airstrikes to a grinding ground incursion that systematically dismantled Hamas’s defensive networks in the north and central parts of Gaza. What began as an effort to degrade Hamas’s military capacity transformed into a strategy of territorial control, with the IDF progressively asserting dominance over approximately three-quarters of the Strip. As the operation deepened, Gaza City, densely packed, symbolically resonant, and the site of Hamas’s political and military command apparatus, emerged as both the operational centerpiece and the ultimate prize. The decision to seize it reflected a conviction that Israel’s security could not be guaranteed without the destruction of Hamas’s urban strongholds, even at extraordinary military and humanitarian cost.

The shift from containment to conquest illustrates a broader transformation in Israeli strategic thought, one that rejects the logic of periodic containment in favor of outright occupation. Historically, Israeli policymakers viewed full-scale reoccupation as unsustainable, citing the heavy costs of the First and Second Intifadas and the rationale behind the 2005 disengagement. Yet post–Oct. 7 realities disrupted this consensus, fostering a willingness to embrace strategies once deemed untenable. In this sense, the decision to take Gaza City is both a return to earlier modes of territorial occupation and an unprecedented escalation, insofar as it openly links occupation with demographic and political engineering. Thus, Israel’s present course is not simply a military maneuver but a profound recalibration of the conflict’s trajectory, setting the stage for debates that transcend tactics and force the region to confront enduring questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and survival.

Israel’s declared objective in its Gaza City campaign is nothing short of transformative. The dismantling of Hamas as a coherent military and political entity, coupled with the imposition of a durable security regime that prevents any comparable adversary from reconstituting itself in the enclave. Officials have framed the occupation as a necessary corrective to the failures of past deterrence strategies, emphasizing that only physical control over Gaza’s principal urban center can guarantee Israel’s long-term security. This articulation of goals reveals the magnitude of the gamble. It substitutes temporary punitive measures with a maximalist vision of conquest and sustained presence, thereby committing Israel not only to battlefield victory but also to the far more complex task of administering and policing a hostile territory.

To execute this ambition, the IDF have mobilized tens of thousands of reservists and prepared for a campaign that will stretch existing manpower and logistical capacity. The scale of the mobilization suggests recognition that occupation entails more than combat, it requires continuous troop rotations, secure supply chains, and the establishment of forward operating bases in an environment that offers little depth and constant exposure to guerrilla harassment. The concentration of forces for this operation has drawn comparisons to past large-scale urban engagements, where overwhelming numbers were employed to offset the defensive advantages that dense urban terrain confers on insurgent actors. Yet the commitment of such resources simultaneously exposes Israel to protracted attrition and the political vulnerabilities inherent in sustaining large deployments over time.

The operational environment in Gaza City presents challenges that are both acute and unique. The IDF confronts a labyrinthine battlespace characterized by dense vertical development, narrow streets, and an extensive subterranean infrastructure deliberately constructed to negate Israel’s technological superiority. Hamas has embedded its command, control, and logistics within these tunnels and among civilian structures, ensuring that every engagement will blur the line between combatant and noncombatant space. Even with advanced surveillance, precision munitions, and specialized engineering units, the probability of significant civilian harm and collateral destruction is extraordinarily high. These conditions transform each tactical victory into a potential strategic liability, as images of devastation broadcast globally can erode international legitimacy faster than military progress can consolidate control.

Sustaining an occupation under such conditions will demand capabilities that extend far beyond conventional warfare. It will require a fusion of counterinsurgency doctrine, civil-military administration, and constant adaptation to asymmetric tactics designed to exploit the occupier’s vulnerabilities. The IDF’s prior experiences in Jenin, Nablus, and earlier Gaza operations offer cautionary lessons: tactical success does not equate to strategic stability when insurgents can disperse, reconstitute, and wage long-term resistance. Thus, the military dimension of Israel’s Gaza City campaign is inseparable from the political and humanitarian dimensions that accompany it. The more the IDF entrenches itself in the city, the more it must reckon with the paradox that occupation itself may generate the very instability it is intended to suppress.

The offensive to seize Gaza City is producing immediate humanitarian repercussions of staggering scale. Civilian displacement has accelerated as Israeli forces encircle and penetrate densely inhabited neighborhoods, collapsing what remains of the already fragile infrastructure. Casualty figures, drawn from both local health authorities and international monitors, reveal not only the sheer lethality of sustained bombardment but also the disproportionate toll exacted on women, children, and the elderly. In an environment where hospitals are rendered inoperative by bombardment or fuel shortages, the civilian population is subjected to a concatenation of harms, direct violence, loss of shelter, and deprivation of essential medical services, underscoring the extent to which the humanitarian crisis is structurally embedded within the conduct of the war.

Encirclement and siege further exacerbate these conditions by constricting humanitarian access to food, water, and medicine. As various humanitarian actors have repeatedly emphasized, urban sieges in modern warfare generate conditions of collective punishment, eroding the distinction between combatants and civilians that underpins the laws of armed conflict. In Gaza, the dense population density, combined with a limited number of safe corridors, ensures that evacuation orders amount to a coercive displacement rather than a viable protection mechanism. The social cost is compounded by the destruction of schools, mosques, and civic spaces, unraveling the communal fabric that sustains urban life. What emerges is not simply collateral damage but the systematic disarticulation of a society under the pressure of military encirclement.

The long-term social rupture promises to be equally profound. Displacement on such a scale generates cycles of trauma, erodes economic self-sufficiency, and entrenches intergenerational grievances that will outlast the military occupation itself. The destruction of educational institutions and civic infrastructure diminishes the capacity for recovery, transforming a tactical battlefield decision into a structural impediment to future governance. Moreover, the perception among Palestinians that displacement and destruction are intentional instruments of policy reinforces narratives of dispossession and delegitimizes any future Israeli claim to stability through occupation. In this sense, the humanitarian dimension is inseparable from the political: the very manner in which Gaza City is taken may predetermine whether its occupation engenders security or merely perpetuates resistance under new, more radicalized forms.

Israel’s decision to expand its military operations into Gaza City raises fundamental questions under the international law of occupation. By definition, occupation entails the effective control of territory without the sovereign’s consent, which in turn imposes obligations on the occupying power to protect civilians, maintain public order, and ensure access to essential services. The International Committee of the Red Cross has consistently argued that urban offensives waged in densely populated areas stretch the capacity of international humanitarian law to regulate proportionality and distinction. In practice, the prospect of an Israeli garrison in Gaza would not only magnify humanitarian responsibilities but would also test the credibility of a global legal regime designed to restrain conquest in an era nominally hostile to territorial acquisition.

The humanitarian evacuation orders and widespread displacement already observed in Gaza blur the line between tactical necessity and impermissible population transfer. While Israel may argue that civilian relocations are temporary and intended to reduce exposure to combat, the coercive circumstances of siege, bombardment, and infrastructural collapse raise the specter of forced displacement prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention. International reactions, from European states warning against illegal expulsion to humanitarian organizations cataloguing evidence of mass dislocation, underscore the acute risk that operational decisions could translate into allegations of war crimes. This legal dimension is inseparable from the ethical one: an occupation strategy that materially reshapes Gaza’s demographic profile would not only erode Israel’s claims of self-defense but also corrode its legitimacy in international fora.

Equally troubling is the challenge of proportionality in an environment where militants exploit civilian cover and subterranean networks to sustain their resistance. The principle of distinction obligates belligerents to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants, yet the density of Gaza’s urban landscape makes strict compliance almost impossible without accepting operational restraint. Israel’s recourse to overwhelming firepower may achieve tactical objectives, but at the cost of significant civilian harm, harm that international law neither ignores nor justifies as collateral inevitability. The ethical contradiction, then, lies in pursuing security through methods that undermine the very legal and moral frameworks intended to safeguard civilian life, leaving open the possibility that Israel’s occupation of Gaza City will be remembered less as a military victory than as a normative failure.

The Israeli decision to seize Gaza City cannot be separated from the domestic political pressures shaping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calculus. Within his governing coalition, dominated by hardline and religious-nationalist parties, there is little tolerance for anything short of demonstrable victory. The October 7 attack fundamentally altered the Israeli political landscape, producing an atmosphere in which restraint is equated with weakness and compromise with capitulation. Netanyahu, long embattled over corruption charges and facing sustained public discontent prior to the war, has every incentive to align his personal political survival with maximalist military goals. In this sense, the Gaza offensive functions not merely as a national security strategy but as a domestic political instrument designed to shore up legitimacy in a fractious political environment.

On the Palestinian side, the ramifications of an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza City are equally profound. Hamas, though militarily degraded, continues to function as both a governing authority and an ideological actor, and the prospect of occupation threatens to catalyze a new phase of asymmetric resistance. For Gaza’s civilian population, already subject to displacement, siege, and infrastructural collapse, the return of Israeli military administration revives memories of the pre-2005 occupation and deepens the sense of dispossession. The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, remains politically paralyzed, its legitimacy eroded by years of perceived collaboration with Israel and failure to deliver statehood. The absence of a credible Palestinian political alternative risks creating a vacuum in which Hamas can claim the mantle of resistance, even as its military capabilities are curtailed.

These competing political calculations converge in a battle over narrative and legitimacy that extends far beyond the immediate battlefield. For Israel, the occupation of Gaza City must be framed domestically and internationally as a necessary step toward long-term security, even if the operational realities suggest an open-ended and costly commitment. For Palestinians, the same act becomes evidence of colonial permanence and the foreclosure of political self-determination. International audiences, confronted with dueling claims, are left to adjudicate between the language of counterterrorism and that of resistance, each reinforced by images of destruction and displacement. The outcome of this struggle over legitimacy may ultimately prove more decisive than the military confrontation itself, shaping whether Gaza’s future is determined by coercive force or by the possibility, however remote, of a negotiated political horizon.

Israel’s decision to seize and occupy Gaza City represents a profound gamble in strategic, political, and legal terms. While proponents argue that a sustained ground presence can degrade Hamas’ infrastructure, dismantle its command networks, and deliver a semblance of security for Israeli citizens, the historical record of occupations in similarly dense and hostile environments suggests otherwise. Assessments of counterinsurgency operations stress the diminishing returns of purely military approaches in urbanized, heavily populated areas; suppression may be achieved temporarily, but insurgent capacities typically regenerate in forms more diffuse and resilient. The result is often a perpetual cycle of violence, costly in both blood and legitimacy, as the occupying power becomes not a guarantor of order but a target for endless resistance.

Equally problematic is the legal and normative terrain into which Israel now wades. Under international humanitarian law, an occupying power assumes obligations toward the civilian population: ensuring access to food, water, medical care, and basic order. The ICRC has repeatedly underscored that urban sieges and encirclement tactics, when accompanied by displacement or disproportionate targeting, risk breaching the prohibitions against collective punishment and forcible transfer. Proposals for large-scale evacuation or resettlement, floated in parallel with the military campaign, only amplify these concerns. If such measures are pursued without genuine consent, they risk being classified not as security imperatives but as violations of peremptory norms, with far-reaching consequences for Israel’s international standing and its relationships with even close allies.

Yet alternative pathways are hardly straightforward. International trusteeship schemes, regional security guarantees, or the installation of a multinational administration over Gaza remain politically implausible and operationally fraught, especially given the absence of consensus among U.S., UN, and Arab actors. Even so, these imperfect options underscore the central reality. Occupation alone is not a strategy but a temporary expedient that risks creating the very conditions it seeks to resolve. Without a credible political horizon that addresses governance, reconstruction, and Palestinian self-determination, military conquest of Gaza City will likely harden animosities, deepen humanitarian crises, and erode the norms that distinguish security operations from demographic engineering. The prognosis, then, is not of decisive victory but of a costly entanglement, whose repercussions will resonate far beyond Gaza’s shattered streets.