More than 100 hostages are free. At least 5,000 Hamas fighters are dead. Some 500 tunnel shafts have been destroyed. The Israeli military controls two thirds of northern Gaza. It’s a third of the way to its goal — destroying Hamas — and is launched on the next phase of bombing the south.
Eight weeks into its war on Hamas and days since a weeklong cease-fire ended, that’s the Israeli government’s assessment of where things stand in its longest war since the 1948 War of Independence. It’s bearing down on the city of Khan Younis where it says the Hamas leadership is entrenched deep inside tunnels, telling Palestinian civilians to move to a set of nearby "no-target” zones.
To much of the world, all of that sounds too tidy when more than 15,000 Gazans — according to the Hamas-run health ministry — have been killed, large sections of Gaza City have been reduced to rubble and 80% of the 2.2 million inhabitants, most of them poor, are displaced. Numerous governments want Israel to end the war — which began on Oct. 7 when several thousand Hamas operatives killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis — by declaring a permanent cease-fire.