On Russian roulette – Steven Erlanger in NYT:

‘After weeks of delays, negotiations and distractions, Israel appeared to hint this week that its assault of Rafah — a city teeming with displaced persons above ground and riddled with Hamas tunnels below — was all but inevitable.
In what some analysts and residents of the city saw as a sign of preparations for an invasion, an Israeli military official on Tuesday gave some details that include relocating civilians to a safe zone a few miles away along the Mediterranean coast. Just a day earlier, Israeli warplanes bombed Rafah, increasing fears among some of the civilians sheltering there that a ground assault would soon follow.’

(…)

‘“We cannot support a major military operation in Rafah,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters last week while in Italy. Protecting civilians during such an operation, he added, would be “a monumental task for which we have yet to see a plan.” To that end, Israel’s proposed expansion of Al-Mawasi for use as a humanitarian zone could be viewed as an effort to placate the United States and other countries regarding civilian deaths in Rafah.
On Tuesday, Volker Turk, the United Nations’ human rights chief, said world “leaders stand united on the imperative of protecting the civilian population trapped in Rafah.” Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and a critic of the government, said, “An operation in Rafah is necessary to complete the destruction of Hamas’s major military capabilities and is probably inevitable.”’

(…)

‘Should Israel take Rafah and secure the border, the question of who will govern Gaza after the fighting ends remains unanswered. “The key to rendering Gaza safe for Israelis, and for that matter for Gazans, lies in what follows the fighting,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London.
“From the start the lack of a credible political dimension to Israel’s strategy has been its most evident flaw,” Mr. Freedman wrote in an email. Israel, he added, has failed to appreciate the impact of heavy civilian casualties on its reputation and has also failed to produce a plan for Gaza’s government and its reconstruction, “essential if Hamas is not to return to its former position.”’

Read the article here.

The invasion might just be a tactic to pressure Hamas, the invasion might happen tomorrow.

What cannot be overlooked, once again, is that Israel has no strategy, and that the Israeli leadership is not willing to admit that the pre-October 7 strategy blew up in their face.

I believed on October 8 that all the fighting will result in just one thing, a return to what was on October 6, but it might be clear by now that this is a huge defeat.

After all, Hamas managed to show that the status quo of October 6 is an embarrassment.