As Israeli forces began entering the eastern edge of Rafah on May 6 in the southmost part of the Gaza Strip, over 100,000 Palestinians were fleeing to the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis, from which Israeli forces had withdrawn in March. Many of them were fleeing for the eighth or ninth time since the beginning of the Israeli assault last October.
Israeli officials had been insisting on invading Rafah for months despite mounting international pressure on Israel to stand down. Around 1.5 million Palestinians have been taking refuge in the endless tent cities in and around Rafah, mostly displaced from the center and north of Gaza. The UN warned of a humanitarian catastrophe if Israeli troops invaded the city.
Still, Benjamin Netanyahu has been pledging to invade Rafah for weeks. According to Israel’s Prime Minister, the invasion of Rafah is crucial to achieving the stated goals of the war, especially forcing Hamas through “military pressure” to make concessions in a prisoners’ exchange deal.
The attack on Rafah represents a consensus in Israeli politics. Netanyahu’s two main allies on the far-right, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have threatened to withdraw from the governing coalition if he doesn’t carry out the invasion, risking its collapse. But every single other Israeli official has expressed support for some kind of operation in Rafah, including opposition leader Yair Lapid, who has repeated Netanyahu’s claim that four Hamas battalions remain in Rafah.
Despite this agreement, the actual goals of the invasion appear unclear. Israel’s stated goals don’t reflect the reality on the ground, which has led analysts to conclude that the true goal of the Rafah invasion is to finish the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and perhaps presage future attacks that will attempt to restore the sense of deterrence that was forever shattered on October 7.
An invasion without clear goals
Israeli leaders say an invasion of Rafah is necessary because the last of Hamas’s remaining fighters are based there and that such a move will force Hamas into negotiations. But neither claim appears based on the reality on the ground.
Firstly, nothing indicates that Hamas’s fighting capacity has been reduced to four “remaining” battalions that have been cornered in Rafah. Resistance operations by all armed Palestinian groups, especially Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, have continued uninterrupted from the north to the south of Gaza. Two days before the Rafah invasion began, Hamas fighters targeted Israeli troops in the “Netzarim corridor,” the buffer zone that Israel has created south of Gaza City, effectively bifurcating the Gaza Strip. Israel has so far admitted that four soldiers were killed and ten more were wounded, three of them in critical condition.
Secondly, on the eve of the Rafah invasion, Hamas announced that it had agreed to a U.S.-backed deal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, which included a prisoners’ exchange. Even the families of Israeli captives preferred to take the deal rather than invade Rafah, and took to the streets of Tel Aviv that same night. Yet Netanyahu insisted on going ahead with the invasion, leaving the true objective of the attack open to speculation.
The initial invasion started on May 7 and only included the Rafah crossing connecting Gaza with Egypt and eastern Rafah. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Israel was committed to keeping the Rafah invasion limited to the eastern part of the city and to handing over control of the border crossing to a private U.S. firm. This has also left the intended scope of the invasion unknown.
‘Re-inventing’ the Zionist project
A number of analysts have offered up different explanations for the true intentions behind the Rafah invasion. Most tend to emphasize that its primary driver is Netanyahu and his right-wing allies — Netanyahu because he has an interest in prolonging the war to avoid accountability for the failures of October 7, and the right-wingers because they want all of Gaza to be leveled and ethnically cleansed. Others believe that Netanyahu is in a bind and is trying to placate both sides of his war cabinet — so he sends a negotiating team to Cairo to appease the “pragmatic” Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot while launching the invasion to satisfy hardliners like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
All of these explanations contain grains of truth, but they do not come close to explaining the true intentions behind the Rafah invasion. Most importantly, they ignore the fact that the entire Israeli political establishment is equally committed to the invasion, and that the only points of difference lie in the timetable for when it should happen and the place of a prisoner swap within it.
The real reason for Israel’s inability to back down lies in its fears that the Israeli army’s military performance in the war will determine the future of the Zionist experiment, especially in light of the devastating blow that was dealt to its deterrence on October 7.
“The Zionist entity is faced with hard choices on all sides. It has no clear vision for the war, it hasn’t been able to achieve any of its stated goals, and there are no achievable goals in Rafah.”
Khaled Odetallah
According to Khaled Odetallah, a lecturer on colonial studies and founder of Palestine’s Popular University project, the invasion of Rafah is Israel’s way of “retreating forward.”
“The Zionist entity is faced with hard choices on all sides,” Odetallah told breaking news. “It has no clear vision for the war, it hasn’t been able to achieve any of its stated goals, and there are no achievable goals in Rafah. Given the effect of the October 7 events, this has a deep effect on Zionist society altogether.”
“Netanyahu is only a small part of the picture,” Odetallah explains. “All of Zionist society is faced with a difficult reality — it has built itself in the past years around the idea that it had no serious external threats left. Even the internal divisions that had started before October 7 were part of Israel’s impulse of having achieved some sense of superiority and stability, all of which has been shattered.”
“All of this has pushed ‘Israel’ to try and reinvent itself and the entire Zionist project, similar to 1948,” Odetallah details, arguing that Israel will try to “regenerate its own society,” of which the army is a reflection, “by projecting force” onto it enemies, which in practice means “displacing large numbers of Palestinians.”
The displacement of Palestinians has been a major concern throughout the current war, particularly as the invasion of Rafah began to loom in recent weeks. Egypt has repeatedly refused to admit hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians in its territory. For its part, UNRWA announced on May 6 that it would not take part in evacuating Palestinians from Rafah.
Meanwhile, Israel has continued to refuse the return of all displaced Palestinians to the ruins of their homes in the north of the Strip, while Israeli settler groups have been pressing for resettling Gaza, with the vociferous support of Ben-Gvir.
“The displacement of Palestinians as a precursor to settling in their place, as well as the projection of military superiority over the region, are both essential parts of how ‘Israel’ defines itself,” Odetallah told breaking news. “Yet, the regional and international atmosphere seems to be unready to accept the mass displacement of Gaza’s people. In light of this new reality, and with no way out of it, the Zionist entity has no other choice but to continue the war, moving forward without a horizon.”
Meanwhile, leaked reports indicated that the proposed deal that Hamas accepted was essentially the same proposal that the U.S. had previously adopted. On Tuesday, the U.S. announced it had put a shipment of offensive arms to Israel on hold as a reaction to the invasion of Rafah.
“This moment is a challenge to the very nature of the century-long Zionist experiment. This is why it needs to reinvent itself, and why the war will not stop even if a ceasefire is actually reached in Gaza.”
Khaled Odetallah
“The U.S. seems to be more interested in putting an end to the current war in order to restore an atmosphere amenable for resuming Israeli-Arab normalization deals, especially with Saudi Arabia,” Odetallah remarks. “But this moment is a challenge to the very nature of the century-long Zionist experiment. This is why it needs to reinvent itself, and why the war will not stop even if a ceasefire is actually reached in Gaza.”
“The Zionist entity will most probably continue this war in different rounds,” Odetallah concludes. “It won’t be limited to Gaza, but will extend it to its northern front with Lebanon, and even to other parts of Palestine’s geography, like the West Bank.”
Odetallah expects that “the war might take on different forms, but all of them will be equally bloody.”
“Since it is now incapable of restoring its previous sense of security and superiority,” he says. “The entity’s only choice seems to be blood, blood, and more blood.”