Israel’s Military Risks Being Overstretched

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Israel’s military is (already) exhausted and now faces a direct conflict with Iran, the U.S. House of Representatives unveils its long-awaited plan for Ukraine military aid, and the Pentagon deploys more weapons to the Indo-Pacific.

Tired and Stretched Thin

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finalizes his options to retaliate against Iran, some experts fear that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), exhausted from six months of urban combat in the densely packed Gaza Strip and potentially gearing up for a major operation in the southern city of Rafah, risk being stretched too thinly should a full-scale war with Hezbollah or Iran break out.

For weeks, the Israelis have been mulling a ground invasion of Rafah, where about half of Gaza’s population is currently sheltering. That operation was reportedly put on hold after Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel over the weekend, but U.S. and Israeli officials plan to hold a high-level virtual meeting on Thursday to discuss it.

Call up the reserves. The war has forced Israel into its largest mobilization of reserves since 1973, and it is now the longest one involving Israel since the 1980s. The combat tempo for Israeli troops in Gaza has dropped significantly in recent weeks, with forces having largely completed major ground operations in northern Gaza several weeks ago and the bulk of Israeli troops being withdrawn from the strip. As of early April, just one brigade (a few hundred soldiers) was reportedly left in Gaza, down from about 20 brigades (30,000-40,000 soldiers) during the height of fighting.

Yet that may not last, as the campaign to destroy Hamas is proving to be a challenge. Israeli tanks are once again moving back north as Hamas militants have managed to reorganize in some areas, including at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and the region remains an active battle zone.

The ongoing lower-level fight on Israel’s northern border against Hezbollah in Lebanon is also continuing to take its toll. That conflict has thus far mostly been confined to cross-border rocket attacks against Israel that have caused a relatively small number of casualties and Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon that have killed at least 295 suspected militants as well as more than 70 civilians in the last six months. This week, though, saw several Israeli soldiers wounded in a blast hundreds of yards inside Lebanese territory. And in late March, the IDF announced a training program in northern Israel to prepare military units for “offensive plans.”

Mission creep. Given all of this—and a potential hot war with Iran—some analysts are worried about Israel’s troops becoming overextended.

“Israel has a significant opportunity cost, and there’s a lot of risk of getting back into a tennis match right now with Iran,” said Jonathan Lord, a former U.S. defense official and congressional aide who is now the director of the Middle East security program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. “They did just call up two IDF reserve brigades, I suspect, in preparation for continuation of combat operations in Gaza focused on Rafah. So it’s not like there isn’t anything else going on.”

All eyes on Rafah. The logistics of launching a ground operation in Rafah are maddeningly complex. The United States and other Western powers have demanded that Israel show them a viable plan to move the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah out of the city but have not been satisfied with the answers they’ve gotten to this point.

But Israeli officials believe that if they can’t get the estimated 3,000 remaining Hamas fighters out of Rafah, Israel will fail in its goal of uprooting the group from Gaza. And far-right members of Netanyahu’s fragile coalition have threatened to abandon him if he doesn’t go ahead with the invasion.

The six-week cease-fire that U.S., Egyptian, and other regional negotiators have been pursuing for weeks now could buy some time and perhaps allow tensions to cool down. But so far, those negotiations have proved fruitless and seem to be at an impasse, leaving the potential for a Rafah invasion high.

Hands full. The Israeli military is also engaged in an ongoing campaign in the occupied West Bank to root out militants from Hamas and other armed groups. “The IDF is still running a couple hundred or more operations every month in the West Bank targeting militants and terrorists there,” Lord added. “So they really have their hands full.”

And then there is the rising violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which has drawn international condemnation and calls for Israeli authorities—including the military—to do more to prevent such attacks.

“They’re already up against the limit,” said David Des Roches, an associate professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies and a retired U.S. Army colonel. However, Des Roches added that troops drawn into a regional fight might be air and missile forces. “They’re not going to send a brigade of troops into Syria or Iraq.”

Still, even air and missile forces can run short on supplies. And while Iran has a limited number of missile launchers that could create a bottleneck that prevents it from firing off repeated salvos of missiles into Israeli airspace, the Israelis also face a potential bottleneck of their own: having to refill their Iron Dome and Arrow missile defense batteries from the U.S. Defense Department—and their own small defense industrial base.

“If this becomes an every other day thing or a weekly thing, I don’t know how many days of attacks Israel can do it,” Des Roches said.

Let’s Get Personnel

U.S. President Joe Biden has tapped Amanda Jacobsen to be the U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea and Christophe Andre Tocco to be the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania. Both are career foreign service officers.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Bills out. House Republicans are proposing to give Ukraine $61 billion in military aid as part of a major spending package released on Wednesday—$23 billion of which would go to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles. The $95 billion total package—a near exact match to the funding amount the Senate passed two months ago—consists of four separate bills: one for Ukraine; one that allocates $26 billion for Israel; one that sets aside $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific; and one with a raft of national security measures, including one that would ban TikTok in the United States if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t divest itself of the social media app, as well as a provision to add new sanctions on Iran.

The House will vote on the four bills separately on Saturday before combining them into a single package and sending it to the Senate. But getting them passed will require some savvy politicking by House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Ukraine aid bill is already facing opposition from the smaller faction of far-right Republicans in the House that have held up negotiations for months. “It is surrender. It is disappointing. I won’t support it,” Rep. Matt Gaetz told reporters on Capitol Hill after the bill’s release on Wednesday. It appears the far-right members such as Gaetz and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will now seek to oust Johnson from his speakership, but he could get a lifeline from Democrats, some of whom are already signaling they will vote to keep him in, in exchange for (finally) moving on Ukraine and Israel aid.

Meanwhile, NATO has agreed to convene the NATO-Ukraine Council on Friday to debate how to deal with Ukraine’s urgent air defense needs.

Deployed. The U.S. military has deployed a mid-range missile system to the Indo-Pacific, sending a Typhon ground-based missile launcher to the Philippines for military exercises. The move is significant because it’s the first time the United States has deployed this asset in the Indo-Pacific, a major signal to both allies and rival China. Deploying the mid-range capability system would have violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the United States and Russia, but the Trump administration withdrew Washington from the treaty back in 2019 after accusing Russia of violating it.

One year of crisis. This week marks the grim one-year anniversary of Sudan’s descent into civil war. The humanitarian needs of the East African country are dire—and largely ignored and underfunded as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine overshadow it. The conflict, between Sudan’s armed forces and the powerful Rapid Support Forces militia, is marked by widespread atrocities and is rapidly devolving into a proxy war as powers including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia vie for influence. Read our deep dive on how this war came about after high hopes for Sudan’s transition to democracy.

Snapshot

Protesters hold lights during a demonstration against a controversial draft bill on “foreign influence” outside the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi on April 16. Giorgi Arjevanidze/AFP via Getty Images

Stat of the Week

50,000

That’s how many Russian soldiers have been verifiably confirmed as killed in the war in Ukraine, according to a new investigation by the BBC. This number is just the dead identified by public records; the actual number is likely far higher.

Put On Your Radar

Thursday, April 18: Italy hosts a meeting of G-7 foreign ministers in Capri.

Friday, April 19: The first phase of voting begins in India’s general election. Read all about it in the Spring 2024 issue of Foreign Policy.

Rep. Mike Gallagher’s resignation from Congress is effective.

Sunday, April 21: Ecuador holds a referendum on security measures.

Wednesday, April 24: North Macedonia holds its presidential election.

Quote of the Week

Jeff Schogol, Task & Purpose reporter: “There was a fire at the Army’s ammunition plant in Scranton yesterday. At the risk of invoking Billy Joel, do we know who started the fire?”

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary: “I’d have to refer you to the Army because we didn’t start the fire.”

—The U.S. Defense Department officially responds to news of a fire at the U.S. Army’s ammunition plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with a reference to Joel’s famous 1989 song. General Dynamics, which runs the plant, said the fire was small and quickly extinguished.

This Week’s Most Read

• How Will Israel Respond to the Iranian Attack? By Daniel Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack
• The New Idea of India by Ravi Agrawal
• 3 Ways Israel Could Respond to Iran by Jack Detsch

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Friendship canceled. The Ukrainian culture ministry has denied protected status to Kyiv’s iconic friendship arch that was built in 1982 by Soviet authorities, meaning the iconic landmark in Ukraine’s capital could be torn down. “Personally I think that’s a shame,” Oliver Carroll, the Economist’s Ukraine correspondent, posted on X. “Yes, no one is friends w Russia, but architecture is stunning. The meaning can be (already has been) reappropriated.”

We’ll meet again. With Boston Dynamics retiring its famous HD Atlas robot, they’ve given us a blooper reel of all the good times. Brings a tear to our eyes. Goodbye, old friend.