The School of International and Public Affairs hosted on Thursday a panel addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the second in a series of “Rapid Response Webinars” from the Institute of Global Politics.

The webinar—moderated by Keren Yarhi-Milo, SIPA dean and former Israeli intelligence officer—featured SIPA Dean Emerita Lisa Anderson; Dave Harden, former senior advisor to President Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace; Dennis Ross, diplomat and former special Middle East coordinator for President Bill Clinton; University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami; and Kristele Younes, director of the humanitarian policy track at SIPA.

The first webinar took place last week and featured former Secretary of State and current SIPA professor Hillary Clinton, among other panelists, to discuss the violence in Israel and Gaza.

Thursday’s panel began with a discussion of the goals of President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Israel, which marked the first time in history a U.S. president has visited Israel following a declaration of war.

“I think there were three objectives that President Biden had,” Ross said. “One was to go in and try to alleviate the humanitarian conditions in Gaza. … Number two [was to] send a message to Hezbollah and Iran.”

Considering the United States’ decision to move two carrier strike groups near Israel, Ross said he believed Biden’s trip was at least in part “a deterrence message.” He also said the third objective was to “talk with Israel about what its strategy was” and “demonstrate the nature of the American commitment to Israel.” That show of American solidarity with Israel, Telhami pointed out, came with a domestic political risk for Biden.

“Biden is risking a lot of public opinion among Democrats. I think he’s taking his Democratic constituency for granted,” Telhami said. “I believe if he were now in the middle of Democratic primaries, he would be in trouble with his Democratic constituency.”

Particularly, Telhami said that in the Democratic Party, there is now “a little more sympathy with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, especially among young people.”

“In the 2021 Gaza war, half of Democratic young people opposed Biden’s posture on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Telhami said. “The early polls that we have seen doesn’t suggest a major shift.”

Telhami, who regularly conducts opinion polls in “the Arab world,” Israel, and the United States, said he plans on putting out a poll this weekend to gauge the general shift in sentiments in the United States toward the conflict.

Beyond the U.S. response to the conflict, panelists weighed in on the international community’s responsibility in mediating the conflict.

“In this particular conflict, civilians are not being spared,” Younes said. “We need to be very clear that all the parties to this conflict are bound by the same rules, and that revenge and emotions are not appropriate reasons to violate them. ... A ceasefire is the most important thing to happen right now.”

Ross, on the other hand, said “a ceasefire is not in the cards.”

He stressed the importance of “pauses, from time to time, to allow humanitarian assistance in, and certainly to allow the [International Committee of the Red Cross] to go in and see proof of life and see the hostages.” Without them, Harden said, “the days ahead could be much much more dangerous than the days we’ve seen.”

As for how they each see this conflict ending, no one on the panel seemed to have a clear predictive picture. Ross said he thinks this will only end once Hamas is “put in a position where it is not capable of resisting the effort to change what exists within Gaza.”

“If the outcome of this is, ‘It looks like Hamas has won,’ there is no prospect of doing anything on peace,” he said.

Harden said that any kind of unilateral Israeli victory over Hamas is unlikely.

“After our 9/11, we rode into Kabul with a northern alliance. We had 40 nations giving troops and resources to help us. We had unequivocal global support, and frankly we probably had at least 50 percent of the population in Afghanistan supporting us,” Harden said. “And despite all of those resources, we failed to defeat the Taliban. I worry that the Israelis’ goal of defeating Hamas is not realistic.”

However, he said an Israeli victory would “certainly not defeat ... Palestinian aspirations for freedom, independence, and statehood.”