Netanyahu may have ignored a dire warning. Israel ignores the deeper threat.

Israelis are still debating whether the recent report is true — whether the United Arab Emirates warned Israel of an imminent Hamas attack roughly 10 days before the Oct. 7 massacre. 

But fixating on the few days before Oct. 7 obscures a deeper flaw: The Israeli mindset, the strategic conception, remains largely unchanged. It is conflict management. Israel is a weakened and deterred Hamas ruling Gaza as an excuse to deepen the divide between Gaza and a Palestinian Authority-run West Bank. By avoiding allowing any alternative to emerge, it is sidelining the Palestinian question altogether. 

If the deadliest disaster of Jews since the Holocaust should have changed one thing, it was this. Yet, strip away the rhetoric of “total victory,” and Israel’s Gaza policy today looks quite similar, just with more bloodshed and rubble. 

In recent weeks, Israeli leaders have vowed to remain in Gaza for the long term and end Hamas’s rule once and for all. Following a string of successful assassinations of Hamas commanders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz declared: “Our message is clear: No terrorist is immune, and Hamas will not be in Gaza.”

Weakening Hamas is legitimate, and so is Israel’s demand that it relinquish control of Gaza. But Israel’s revealed preference tells a different story.

Even as Israel holds an estimated 60 percent of Gaza, Hamas still controls over 95 percent of the population. Hamas is both a terrorist organization and Gaza’s de facto government; removing the former requires an alternative for the latter. Israel refused to hand that role to the Palestinian Authority but signed on to President........

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