Israel faces agonising choices in the battle for Gaza

ARMIES CAN struggle to pursue a single war aim without being blown off course. is pursuing four of them, and they are in tension with each other. Its forces have begun what on October 28th the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, called the second stage of the war—the ground invasion of Gaza. He warned that this phase will be “difficult and long” and he is right. Israel’s leaders will continuously have to balance those four competing objectives. Striving harder for one may frustrate all the others.The first war aim is to destroy . Over the past three weeks that has come to mean eradicating the group’s military infrastructure and killing its leadership and as many of its foot soldiers as possible. Because Hamas undertook a mass-attack to kill Jews, Israelis can no longer tolerate the old stand-off in which Hamas violence was supposed to have been kept at a tolerable level by a combination of financial rewards and the threat of Israeli attack.