Update on what's going on with Rafah: the basic picture hasn't changed - Israel is mulling attacking it and may or may not do it, with different elements pushing in different directions (the IDF wants more war, Bibi doesn't want to make drastic changes).
The bigger issue is that Israeli actions in Gaza are constrained, above all, by Israel's own credibility gap. This constrains Israeli COIN even more than its own unwillingness to provide care to Gazans, especially if it's in the open.
The IDF took control of Gaza City, telling Gazans to flee south, which nearly all did, ending up in Rafah. It destroyed Hamas cells in Gaza City; US and Israeli estimates are 10,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad dead, which should break any army. And even so, Hamas is starting to reestablish itself in Gaza City, because there's no alternative - nobody expects the IDF to stay in the long term, and Israel refuses to bring in the only alternative to either itself or Hamas, the Palestinian Authority.
This is where the credibility gap comes in. Israel has no way of credibly promising to reoccupy Gaza and administer it without bringing back the settlements. In the West Bank, the area directly administered by Israel, Area C, is where the settlements are, and <10% of West Bank Palestinians live there. Coalition members of Netanyahu are calling for resettling Gush Katif, and Netanyahu won't even condemn it weakly as the center does. As a result, allies refuse to back Israeli reoccupation.
Without any long-term plan, there's no alternative to Hamas reemergence in Gaza City. Thus, the IDF (which opposes resettlement) insists on treating Gaza City as an area of ongoing military operations; many (I believe hundreds) officers signed an open letter expressing their opposition to letting Gazan civilians return to Gaza City. Israel promised it would allow it in due time, but has no concrete timeline, and nobody believes it on this matter.
Separately, because of the history of the Nakba, Israel has zero credibility in offering to let Gazan civilians back into the Strip if they take refuge in Egypt; thus, Egypt won't let them in in large numbers, and also opposes Israeli plans to escalate the war to Rafah, fearing it would trigger a million or more Palestinians to flee to its territory. For the same historic reason, Israel can't offer refuge in its own territory and expect the Gazans to move back to Gaza after the war.
The anti-fascist thinker Zeev Sternhell said in 1988 that "only those who are willing to invade Ofra [an early ideological-right settlement] with tanks could stop the fascist storm threatening to drown Israeli democracy." Israel never did such a thing, and this more than anything constrains its ability to engage in any serious COIN: it will never be able to credibly offer collaborators enough as long as the resettlement threat exists. Meanwhile, Gazans are stuck in Rafah, hungry. /end
@asayeed On what, the settlements? It absolutely does, but it requires a leader who is willing to use military force against Jewish terrorists proactively, and that's not very common (the Israeli peace camp may comprise multiple IDF commanders, but it's still a peace camp).
@Alon well even less ambitiously, the dynamic where the government has no credibility because its ministers are drooling at the thought of rebuilding Gush Katif
@asayeed Ah! Yeah, that has a solution in the form of kicking out the extreme right from the coalition, as Lapid and Biden have repeatedly demanded. Were Bibi a standard right-wing leader (like Gallant), he'd do it. But he's mired in corruption and if he leaves office he's likely going to prison, so he can't form a true war cabinet because that means elections after the war. The settlers know this and are going for maximum extremism now, since Bibi can't kick them out and stay in power.
@asayeed And by "extremism," I mean "these people are worse than the Sweden Democrats and closer to power." Israel has a more extreme-right government than Sweden, Finland, and Italy these days (NL looked like it was going to beat it but now NSC is pulling out of the negotiations and I will lol if somehow the country will get a center-left-led coalition).
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