US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Washington: Within hours of the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on Thursday, President Joe Biden and his aides scrambled to design one last push for a broad de-escalation of violence in the Middle East: a cease-fire and hostage deal in the Gaza Strip, a pullback from Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, a confident declaration of victory by Israel that might allow it to forgo a major retaliation against Iran.
"It is time for this war to end," Biden said as he emerged from Air Force One when it landed outside Berlin late Thursday. He added that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and urged him to "move on" from the war and focus on building a new political landscape for the region.
Vice President Kamala Harris, carefully navigating the campaign politics of the moment, declared, "It is time for the day after to begin" -- a phrase suggesting that after three weeks in which Israel eliminated the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, its goals to defeat its adversaries had been met.
Netanyahu delivered the opposite message: "This war is not over."
The stark difference encapsulated the argument that has been the consistent theme of Biden's often angry exchanges with Netanyahu for the past year. Now, with only three months left in office, closing that huge gap will be a final diplomatic mission of his presidency.
Nothing in his face-offs with Netanyahu suggests that the Israeli prime minister will take his advice or seize the chance to turn the military victories into a lasting political accomplishment. One of Biden's senior aides said the administration's concern was that the killing of Sinwar, and before him the killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, ratifies in Netanyahu's mind his certainty that he was right to deflect US calls for de-escalation over the past few months.
But this time, more out of hope and exhaustion than evidence, administration officials suggest things might be different.
With Hamas and Hezbollah's leadership ranks so devastated, US officials have begun calling allies in the Middle East to build momentum for some kind of prisoner swap, even if there is no lasting cease-fire.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent much of Thursday, after news of Sinwar's killing spread across the region, on the phone to his counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In Germany, Blinken issued a statement Friday with the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, declaring that Sinwar "stood in the way of a cease-fire in Gaza" and that "his death can create a momentum to end the conflict."
And President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has been in open conflict with Netanyahu, called for an end to the Israeli attacks inside Lebanon. (Macron, who has also called for arms cutoffs to Israel, was quoted as telling his Cabinet, in a leaked, private meeting, that "Mr. Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a UN decision.")
One idea being widely floated, officials said, is an agreement not for a cease-fire but for a pause in the fighting to allow the last 101 hostages to be released, though intelligence agencies believe as many as a third of them may be dead. The agreement would be linked to some kind of guarantee that Hamas fighters who are holding the surviving hostages would be able to release them without being targeted by Israelis. There could also be promises of talks for a true cease-fire.
It is the kind of deal Sinwar himself rejected in his insistence on a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. But administration officials held out the possibility, however slim, that his successor or successors might agree to such a proposal, especially if the alternative was continued evisceration of the Hamas leadership by an Israeli military that believes it has redeemed itself, and is exacting retribution, from the embarrassment of failing to prevent the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack.
The question now is how Netanyahu plays the next few days and weeks. He could heed the advice that Biden gave him in April, after a first Iranian missile attack on Israel failed. "Take the win," Biden told him then, urging him not to escalate with a major counterattack. In that one instance, Netanyahu took Biden's counsel.
But this is a different moment and, for Netanyahu, a different calculus. Back in April, Israel had not yet gained an edge. The war for Gaza looked like it was bogging down, and Hamas leadership was believed to still be operating out of tunnels. Israel had not yet opened a second front against Hezbollah, whose rocket fire into northern Israel had driven tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes.
But in the month since pagers and walkie-talkies booby-trapped by the Israeli military began exploding in the hands of Hezbollah fighters, Israel has regained the element of surprise and a clear military advantage. It is unlikely that the commanders of the Israeli military and the country's intelligence agencies want to let up on the pressure now, just as they have begun to restore their reputations and just when it seems they could be on their way to achieving their goals.
"From Oct. 7 through today, Israeli leaders have been fairly consistent in what their goals have been," said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and the author of "The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present and Future in the Middle East." Israel, he said, has been determined since the terror attack a year ago "to change the rules of the game," and not live with a terror threat on its border.
"Their goal has been the destruction of Hamas," he said. "It's not impossible to destroy a terrorist organization. Whether they can do it remains still an open question."
It is possible that Netanyahu could treat Sinwar's death as such a major defeat for Hamas that he could embrace the moment. "For Netanyahu and the Israeli military, this has always been the emblem of victory," Dennis Ross, a former negotiator in the Middle East, now at the Washington Institute, said soon after Israel announced Sinwar had been killed. "When you asked back in December or January, 'What would victory look like?' the Israeli government said, 'When Sinwar and five or six other Hamas leaders are dead.'"
But Netanyahu did not sound that way, at least not Thursday. He has many reasons to keep deflecting pressure from Biden. A true cease-fire and end to the war could well mean the end of his prime ministership and the opening of investigations into why he let Israel's defensive shield fall against Hamas a year ago.
The extreme right-wing of his coalition government has been completely clear.
"We must continue with all our strength until the total victory!" Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister for national security and one of the most far-right members of the Netanyahu Cabinet, wrote on the social platform X after Sinwar's death. He did not define what "total victory" meant.
And as in any conflict, the enemy gets a vote. In this case, there are at least three -- from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Hamas may be the hardest to read. While Sinwar is presumed to have left a succession plan -- he was resigned, intelligence officials said, to the views that the Israelis would eventually kill him -- it could be weeks or months before the power center in the terror organization becomes clear.
But the early, bravado-filled indications from Hamas were not encouraging. One of Sinwar's closest deputies, Khalil al-Hayya, who is considered a potential successor, declared after his boss's death that "the hostages will not return to you without a full end to the war on our people," as well as "the freeing of our heroic prisoners from the occupation prison." It could take months, past the next presidential inauguration, before it is evident whether other Hamas leaders are looking for a way out.
Hezbollah is in similar disarray. But like Hamas, its fighters have hardly given up since Nasrallah's death. And while the administration hoped the Nasrallah killing would also create an opening, so far it has not.
The hardest question is Iran. The deaths of Nasrallah and Sinwar, both of whom Iranians armed and supported, deprive Iran of its most potent ability to wreak havoc in Israel. The two missile barrages it launched at Israeli targets largely failed -- while many missiles pierced Israel's defenses, even those that landed at military bases appear to have done little damage.
Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, noted after Sinwar's death that Iranian leaders could go one of three ways.
They could ignore Israel's recent string of military victories and focus on rebuilding their proxy forces. They could seek a broader rapprochement with the West, similar to the one that many US officials thought could emerge from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers, a deal that former President Donald Trump abandoned. That killed any last hope of a larger understanding.
Or, Zimmt wrote on X, they could decide that the only true protection from a resurgent Israel is "revising the nuclear doctrine," and trying to turn its stockpile of enriched uranium into actual weapons.
That effort, if successful, would mean that the killing of the terror leaders was a huge tactical success. But it may prompt a more existential challenge for Israel and the United States.