In the last week of June alone, incendiary devices launched from the Gaza Strip started nearly 100 fires in Israel. Such devices, often created from balloons, have destroyed thousands of acres of forest and farmland. After visiting communities in southern Israel most affected by these attacks, and seeing both the weapons and the damage they cause firsthand, Matthew Aiesi concludes that they are violations of the laws of war:

These fire balloons are cheap, simple to mass-produce, and effective in their design and destructiveness. They consist of a bomblet made of a small bag holding an accelerant-soaked roll of gauze (or other absorbent material), connected to a homemade fuse and tied with a string to a balloon (or a condom used as a balloon). The natural and constant breeze off the Mediterranean Sea, which blows from Gaza to Israel, carries these incendiary devices into the civilian communities in Israel, some just a few-hundred meters (or less) away from the border with Gaza. The fuse eventually burns the string that connects the bomblet to the balloon, dropping the bag and remainder of the fuse to start a fire wherever it lands. Not all the fuses stay lit, and sometimes the balloons deflate or get caught in trees. Sometimes they land harmlessly on concrete, but at other times they damage or destroy buildings or acres of farmland, and they can require significant resources to extinguish.

As Hamas has been using them, these incendiary balloon attacks violate numerous rules and customs of warfare—principally concerning the targeting of civilians and the use of indiscriminate weapons. . . . [T]he Israeli communities in the Gaza envelope are purely civilian communities, surrounded by agricultural land. There are no static IDF bases or outposts in the area—certainly not within range of these devices.

By promising to end these attacks [in its negotiations with Israel], Hamas, the de-facto authority in Gaza, demonstrated that it had both knowledge of, and effective control over, the individuals making the incendiary weapons and illegally attacking civilians. This makes the attacks attributable to Hamas and not mere Palestinian civilians or protestors.

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”