The Biden administration is urging Israel to rethink its plans for a major ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and instead to opt for a more “surgical” operation using aircraft and special operations forces carrying out precise, targeted raids on high-value Hamas targets and infrastructure, according to five U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials have become highly concerned about the potential repercussions of a full ground assault, the officials said, and they increasingly doubt that it would achieve Israel’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas. They also are concerned that it could derail negotiations to free nearly 200 hostages, particularly as diplomats think they have made “significant” advances in recent days to free a number of them, potentially including some Americans, one of the officials said.

[‘Surgical’ operations won’t work. Israel has tried that before, only to come back to the necessity of full-scale war again. ‘Surgical’ operations didn’t work against ISIS either, as the US should recall from recent memory, nor against Fallujah. The only way to dislodge annihilationist terrorists from ground they have seized is all-out war. Unfortunately. — Ed]