- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to destroy Hamas.
- It comes after the group launched the worst terror attack in Israel's history.
In the wake of the devastating terror attacks by militant group Hamas in Israel, the country's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to destroy the group.
"All the places that Hamas hides in, operates from, we will turn them into ruins," Netanyahu said.
Israel now appears to be preparing for a full ground assault on Gaza, the densely populated coastal strip that Hamas has governed since 2007 and from where it launched a series of attacks on Saturday that left more than 600 dead.
Netanyahu has called up 300,000 reservists, and troops are massing at the border in signs a ground attack could be imminent.
But it's a campaign that would face enormous challenges, say analysts. And even if Israel succeeds in its assault, it is unlikely to completely destroy Hamas.
The logistics are complex. Israel would have to seize control of a convoluted network of bases and underground tunnels Hamas operates within an urban environment, as previously reported by Insider's Jake Epstein.
"I don't think there's a way to overstate how extraordinarily difficult it will be," Tobias Borck, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank, told NBC News. "It's not going to just be street by street but house by house and tunnel by tunnel."
Another obstacle for Israel is the hundreds of hostages Hamas seized in Saturday's attack, including women, children, and the elderly.
Hamas threatened to murder a hostage in response to every Palestinian civilian killed in the offensive. Hamas could use the hostages as human shields, placing them at military and other sites likely to be targeted by the Israeli military.
Israel has long understood the scale of the challenge. According to a 2017 study by RAND, Israel has sought to contain Hamas, but not outright destroy it.
The report said that Israel didn't want to be responsible for Gaza in the power vacuum that could result from the group being ousted, and fears another, more extreme group could take its place.
After Israel left Gaza in 2005 and Hamas took power, Israel imposed an economic blockade on the strip and launched a series of attacks and assassinations amid outbreaks of violence by Hamas. It has mainly confined itself to airstrikes, with the last ground operation launched back in 2014.
"Israel's grand strategy became "mowing the grass" — accepting its inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable," said the report.
There are question marks over what defeating Hamas would actually entail, and whether it's possible to meaningfully destroy a movement rooted in Islamist ideology and political grievance.
"I have no doubt that through targeted killings and combat Israel can kill a large number of Hamas's fighters and destroy a lot of its military capabilities," Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Time, "but you can't destroy an idea."
A total military occupation of Gaza of the kind necessary to eliminate Hamas, or massively reduce its capabilities, would be an operation of a different magnitude to recent operations, and there are concerns over how long Israel could sustain a war.
Israel would likely have to battle not only Hamas but fighters from a myriad of other militant groups based in Gaza, who prepared to ferociously defend the territory from an Israeli attack they have long planned for.
"The last thing Israeli politicians would want would be a steady drip-drip of casualties from Gaza, where every week there's more Israeli death," Daniel Byman, of Georgetown University, told The Economist.
What, specifically, a Hamas defeat looks like even if these challenges can be overcome remains to be decided.
"Would it be sufficient to force Hamas's leadership to leave Gaza? Would they have to be killed? Or is Hamas inevitably a permanent fixture of Palestinian politics, so long as there isn't a permanent resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" wrote Anchal Vohra, a columnist for Foreign Policy.