Israeli journalist Ariel Kahana gave his take on Israel’s current war in Gaza to dozens of students packed into Maryland Hillel’s multipurpose room on Tuesday night.

In an hour-long talk riddled with Hebrew quips, the experienced reporter laid out his predictions for the Gaza Strip, insisting that Israeli forces will occupy the enclave for years, if not decades to come while dismissing the possibility of a hostage deal in the near future.

A diplomatic correspondent for the Hebrew-language daily “Israel Hayom,” Kahana visited the University of Maryland for a speaking gig organized by Terps for Israel (TFI), a campus Israel advocacy organization. The talk marked the group’s first speaker event of the semester.

Already in the DC area to cover a foreign policy summit this past weekend, Kahana reached out to TFI ahead of his trip in hopes of speaking to Jewish students at this university.

Those who attended that evening listened intently, often adding their own commentary, but they seldom pushed back against his sweeping analysis.

With a whiteboard by his side, Kahana launched into the talk by listing Israel’s four end goals in its almost year-long war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The reporter explained that the government’s first two priorities are to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and civilian governance. Third on list was securing the freedom of the 104 Israeli hostages who remain in Hamas captivity.

The fourth and final aim, said Kahana, was to bring the Gaza into a position where “it will never once again threaten Israel.” According to him, this goal is already complete — so long as Israeli troops remain in the Strip.

It was in that moment that a student raised his hand and asked: “Is this in order of importance?”

Kahana left the question unanswered, but brought it up when discussing the life-threatening danger that prolonged fighting could pose to the Israelis still in Hamas captivity. He noted the murder of six captives in southern Rafah last month.

“Once you are getting close [to the hostages], they kill them. Even if we want to do a [rescue] operation, as we did three times, we can’t anymore. The risk that they will murder them is now very realistic,” he admitted.

Nevertheless, Kahana discounted any chance that Israeli forces withdraw from Gaza. He tacitly disputed the stance of most publicly active hostage families, who have become more vehement in their demand that the Israeli government strike a hostage deal with Hamas.

With slight disdain, Kahana added that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, also believe that “we must pay every price” to bring the hostages back.

But the reporter went on to discount the notion that a deal has ever been on the table since the ascendance of Yahya Sinwar, widely acknowledged as the mastermind behind the October 7 massacre, to Hamas leadership following Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination.

“There was no point that Hamas said yes [to a deal], and Israel said no,” he said.

The reporter dismissed Israeli news stories about the additional sticking point tacked onto hostage talks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month: control over the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt.

Although the move incensed many in Netanyahu’s own cabinet, including Defense Minister Gallant, Kahana insisted that “it was not a story, not a problem.”

At other points during his talk, he implied a hostage deal that hinged on Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was possible, but foolish and dangerous.

“Our soldiers will have to be in Gaza until moshiach comes,” he said. “We will have to keep fighting in Gaza, because once we aren’t there, they will bring back the ammunition and missiles.”

“The IDF will be there, for years and years to come, there is no question about that, that is consensus in Israel,” he continued.

Though anathema to much of the international community, the prospect of maintaining a military presence in the Gaza Strip is not unpopular among Israelis, a plurality of whom support the idea.

Kahana left students with a seemingly intractable dilemma, born from the supposed impossibility of a deal and necessity of Israel’s continued presence in Gaza. Between his listed war aims — eliminating Hamas on one hand, and returning the hostages on the other — there lay a glaring contradiction.

“It’s not optimistic at all, I know,” he said to close his lecture, and hands quickly shot up from the crowd.

Ezra Geller, a freshman who attended Kahana’s talk, was impressed by how he went about addressing the crowd of undergraduates.

“I loved how he made it a discussion, he clearly knows his stuff,” Geller said, but added that Kahana’s narrow focus on military objectives ignored a larger, more complex picture.

Geller, who spent a year in Israel at mechina before entering college, told Mitzpeh that he has many friends enlisting this year in the IDF, which adds extra weight to Kahana’s assured prediction that Israel will stay in the Gaza Strip.

“I know that he has some sort of understanding of what a re-occupation of Gaza would mean, because obviously there are pros and cons to both options,” he said.