The New York Times reported on Thursday that according to senior American officials, Israel has achieved all it can militarily in Gaza, who say the continued bombing only increases the risks to civilians while the prospects of further weakening Hamas have diminished.

As the Biden administration races to get ceasefire negotiations back on track, the newspaper quoted a growing number of national security officials across the government as saying that the Israeli military has severely hampered Hamas but will never be able to completely eliminate the group.

The newspaper claims that "in many respects, the Israeli military operation has inflicted much greater damage on Hamas than American officials anticipated when the war began last October."

Officials said Israeli forces could now move freely throughout Gaza, and that Hamas was bloodied and damaged, as Israel destroyed or seized vital supply routes from Egypt to Gaza.

The Israeli military claimed last month that about 14,000 fighters in Gaza had been killed or captured. (U.S. intelligence agencies use different, more conservative methodologies to estimate Hamas losses, though the exact number remains classified.)

The Israeli army also confirmed that it had eliminated half of the leadership of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing, including the two main leaders, Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa, although Hamas denied this.

But one of Israel’s biggest remaining goals — the return of about 115 hostages, alive and dead, still being held in Gaza after being captured in Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 — is militarily unachievable, according to current and former U.S. and Israeli officials.

Over the past 10 months, “Israel has been able to disrupt Hamas, kill a number of its leaders, and significantly reduce the threat that Hamas posed before October 7,” said Gen. Joseph Votel, the former head of U.S. Central Command. He added that Hamas is now a “weakened” organization. But he said the release of the hostages can only be secured through negotiations.

The newspaper quotes Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, in a telephone interview, saying, "The IDF and its commanders are committed to achieving the goals of the war to dismantle Hamas and return our hostages home, and will continue to work with determination to achieve these goals."

The latest U.S. assessment comes as administration officials are scrambling across the region to try to broker a cease-fire in Gaza and possibly avert a retaliatory attack by Iran and its allies in response to recent Israeli assassinations of top Iranian-backed proxy leaders, U.S. officials said.

CIA Director William Burns is scheduled to arrive in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, is also in Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, is in Lebanon. Officials are expected to deliver the message that Israel can’t do much against Hamas.

US Defense Secretary Jay Austin III spoke Tuesday with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, as the two men prepared for possible retaliatory strikes by Iran or Hezbollah in Israel, the newspaper reported.

Tensions within Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government erupted into the open again this week after media reported that Mr Galant questioned the prime minister's goal of "complete victory" over Hamas in a closed-door meeting.

Austin and other Biden administration officials share Galant’s view that a ceasefire that returns the hostages is in Israel’s interest.

Recent Israeli military operations have been seen by American analysts as a Whac-a-Mole strategy. As Israel developed intelligence about a possible regrouping of Hamas fighters, the IDF moved in to pursue them.

But American officials are skeptical that the approach will yield decisive results. To avoid targeting its fighters, Hamas has urged them to hide in the vast network of tunnels under Gaza or among civilians. American officials said Hamas’s basic strategy since the beginning of the war has been survival, and that has not changed.

Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Netanyahu's national security adviser, rejected the idea that Israel no longer had anything to gain in Gaza through force.

“Israel’s achievements in Gaza are impressive, but they are far from what they should be,” said General Amidror, now a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “If Israel withdraws its forces now, within a year Hamas will be strong again.”

He stressed that stopping the war now would be a "catastrophe" for Israel.

He added that it would take another two to three months of intense fighting in central and southern Gaza. After that stage, he said, Israel could move to intelligence-based raids and strikes for about a year to eliminate the remaining Hamas fighters and weapons infrastructure before allowing another party to take over Gaza.

U.S. officials said Israel tried to damage the tunnels but failed to destroy them. Some of the larger tunnel complexes, which Hamas used as command centers, were rendered inoperable. But the network proved far larger than Israel anticipated, and remains an effective means for Hamas to hide its leaders and move fighters.

Even as the IDF has captured territory and killed Hamas fighters from north to south of the Strip, it has repeatedly been forced to return there as Hamas fighters regroup. For example, Israel weakened Hamas’s hold on the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, but was forced to return to the area in May after the group reconstituted itself in the power vacuum.

Current and former Pentagon officials complain that Israel has yet to prove it can secure all of the territory it has taken in Gaza, especially after its forces have withdrawn. Even when Israel uses small-diameter, 250-pound bombs to destroy pockets of resistance, as U.S. officials have urged it to do, its military ends up killing civilians, as happened last weekend when a school housing displaced Gazans was hit by an airstrike.

“Hamas is a terrorist organization—and for them, survival is victory,” said Dana Stroul, a former Pentagon Middle East policy official who is now a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They will continue to reconstitute themselves and resurface after the IDF declares they have cleared an area without any subsequent plans for security and governance in Gaza.”

Despite all the destruction caused to the Strip by Israeli bombs, and all the Palestinian fighters killed, Hamas retains some military power.

“Hamas has been largely depleted but not wiped out, and the Israelis may never be able to achieve the complete annihilation of Hamas,” said Ralph Joffe, a former CIA official who served in the Middle East.

But American officials believe Israel has achieved a significant military victory. They say Hamas is no longer capable of planning or carrying out an attack on the scale of the October 7 attack, and its ability to launch smaller terror attacks on Israel is in doubt.

Hamas has been so badly damaged in the war that its officials have told international negotiators that they are willing to cede civilian control of Gaza to an independent group after a cease-fire. How long Hamas might be willing to give up some of its power will depend on what happens after a cease-fire, and what concessions Israel is willing to make, American officials said.

Despite all the destruction that has been done to Gaza by Israeli bombs, and all the Palestinian fighters that have been killed, Hamas retains some military power.

Hamas suffered a major blow in May, according to American officials, when the Israeli military invaded Rafah in southern Gaza. Officials in Washington had warned against the operation because they feared the high humanitarian cost. But Israel used its occupation of Rafah to cut off tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, a vital weapons supply route for Hamas. Israel achieved another of its invasion goals, capturing a strip of land along the southern border of the Gaza Strip in May, though it also threatened to further isolate the Palestinians. The strip, which Israel calls the Philadelphi Corridor and Egypt calls the Salah al-Din Corridor, is about 300 feet wide and stretches about eight miles from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is to the northeast, and Egypt is to the southwest. Egyptian border guards had been guarding the strip under an agreement with Israel in 2005, when Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza. Israel has accused Hamas of using the tunnels under the strip to smuggle weapons and people. But the tunnels have also been used to bring food and other goods into Gaza. Military officials say the capture of the strip has further isolated the territory, which was already facing a widespread hunger crisis. While Israel has rescued some of the hostages held above ground in complex operations, many are hiding in the tunnel network.

Biden administration officials say diplomacy is the only way Israel can likely achieve its biggest goal — getting its hostages back.

U.S. officials say that for Hamas to agree to release the hostages, it is crucial that there be incentives for the group to stay on the sidelines after a cease-fire is reached. The biggest incentive, U.S. officials said, is a meaningful path to an independent Palestinian state.

If a cease-fire does happen, Hamas will struggle to regain its strength. Analysts and officials say it will have to rearm as the flow of weapons from Iran dwindles, and it will have to begin what could be a difficult process of recruiting fighters from a war-weary Palestinian population.

The biggest unknown for both Israel and the Palestinians, American and other Western officials say, is who, or what, comes after Hamas.