For perspective, we turn now to Aaron David Miller. He's a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department official. Welcome back to the program. In your view, are the stated goals of this upcoming military operation, the gradual takeover of Gaza City? Are they achievable?

Look, I think they're as elusive as the prime minister's earlier conception of total victory.

The reality is the Israelis have achieved a good deal.

They have hollowed out Hamas as a military organization.

They've got the Egyptians and the Qatari's involved in trying to negotiate.

And let's be clear, the 252 hostages that Hamas took amidst the willful and indiscriminate

murder of men, women, and children, the sexual predation, the mutilation, and the taking

of hostages, 100 plus have come back through negotiation.

So I think that in the prime minister's conception, frankly, he's more interested in avenging the dead and keeping the war going

than he is about redeeming the living. So I think the answer to the question is no. I don't think that a

takeover occupation, the Israelis don't want to use that word, of Gaza City, is going to somehow

magically produce the victory of ending Hamas's influence in Gaza and somehow creating a post a day after that's conducive to the prime

minister's gold. He doesn't have a strategy and he hasn't been willing, not that it's easy,

to lay out the elements of what you and I would describe as a sort of rational approach to

try and end the war, and we're two

months away from a two, marking a two-year period. And the war strikes me as no closer to ending.

It's going to expand. And this plan calls for the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of

Palestinians. What do you see as the immediate and long-term consequences

of that, the humanitarian consequences, on top of the famine that's already playing out?

Look, I think that part of the sort of unsaid objective here is not just to destroy

Moss as a military organization, but to hollow it out and deny it governing capacity.

It's still paying salaries.

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