Israel just suffered “one of the most difficult days since the start of the war,” as Benjamin Netanyahu put it Tuesday.

Two-dozen Israeli soldiers were killed Monday, including 21 in a single incident, the military said. President Isaac Herzog described “an unbearably difficult morning.”

Netanyahu promised to “learn the necessary lessons,” but it wasn’t immediately clear what those lessons were. The 21 reservists were in the process of clearing structures near the border when a building collapsed on them. The IDF suggested the blast might’ve been caused by a rocket-propelled grenade fired at a tank. Who knows. The other three Israeli soldiers who lost their lives Monday were paratroopers.

Although Netanyahu reiterated his familiar pledge to keep “fighting until complete victory,” Israeli society, already riven, doesn’t abide combat deaths especially well.

Axios said Israel recently proposed a multi-phase ceasefire, the terms of which entail Hamas releasing women, elderly men and the wounded then, later, female soldiers, younger men who aren’t soldiers and the bodies of any hostages who’ve died. Although Israel wouldn’t release all Palestinians held in Israeli jails under the deal, they’d presumably need to free quite a few of them to secure a deal for every remaining hostage.

Citing Israeli officials, Axios said the proposal includes a redeployment that’d move Israeli troops “out of [Gaza’s] main population centers… allowing a gradual return of Palestinian civilians to Gaza City and the northern Gaza strip.” The same officials were clear that the deal doesn’t include an end to the war. But IDF combat operations “would be significantly smaller in scope and intensity after the two month pause in fighting,” Barak Ravid wrote.

Relatedly, The Wall Street Journal said the US, Egypt and Qatar have implored Israel and Hamas to participate in a “phased diplomatic process” predicated on the release of hostages “and, eventually, a withdrawal of Israeli forces and an end to the war.” By his own account, Netanyahu has rejected proposals from Hamas when they include an end to hostilities, and he’s been adamant over the last week that statehood for Palestinians simply won’t happen on his watch.

The IDF on Tuesday said it encircled Khan Younis in the south, killing militants, eliminating “terrorist cells” and confiscating weapons in the process. Gun battles near hospitals are reportedly an everyday occurrence in the city, where ambulances are unable to reach the wounded amid sniper fire. Israel blamed Hamas for that. Israeli soldiers are trying to “mitigate harm to uninvolved individuals,” the military insisted.

I suppose this goes without saying but: The ground campaign in Gaza is hopeless. As noted in these pages repeatedly (observe the emphasis) during the first days of the invasion, “victory” for Israel as defined by Netanyahu simply isn’t possible. Everyone who said as much was branded an anti-Semite (or worse), a smear campaign that persists to this day. Unfortunately, telling the truth about the situation (i.e., that Hamas can’t be eradicated entirely and that a post-war occupation will invariably be a blunder of historic proportions) still isn’t allowed.

We’re coming up on four months of war now, and Hamas is no closer to being “defeated.” The scare quotes are there to indicate that it isn’t clear (at all) what “defeated” even means in this context. There’s no scenario (none) in which every Hamas militant is eliminated. And there are certain places Israel simply can’t conduct assassinations without severe diplomatic blowback, which means at least some of the group’s key political figures will survive.

And let’s face it: It anyway doesn’t matter because with the possible exception of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Netanyahu has just orchestrated the single-most comprehensive radicalization campaign in the modern history of extremism.

There are tens of thousands of young men in Gaza who weren’t radicals in October, but who are radicals in January. Not because they’re enamored with Hamas’s message. Rather, because they’re watching their mothers and sisters slaughtered.

“What we will do to our enemies will reverberate with them for generations,” Netanyahu declared, on October 9. About that, at least, he was right.