If, moreover, the agreement proceeds to its anticipated second phase, the IDF will leave the Gaza-Egypt frontier, abandoning the Strip’s invaluable smuggling routes to Hamas, at the same time that hundreds of Hamas terrorists will be freed from Israeli jails. In return, Israel will receive an unknown number of living hostages. Thirty-three of the roughly 100 remaining hostages are set to be freed in the deal’s first phase, including women, the elderly, and very young children, but Hamas hasn’t told Israel which of the captives are still alive.

There was no military need for a ceasefire. The frontlines in Gaza are stable. Though it has lost roughly 400 soldiers in Gaza, Israel has made casualties of perhaps half of Hamas’s army, estimated at 30,000 to 40,000 strong, and was under no battlefield pressure to withdraw.

The specifics of the deal are only where the problems begin for Israel. By the end of phase one, 50 days into the ceasefire, the IDF will have abandoned every critical point inside heavily populated areas of the Strip without having recovered the bodies of the remaining dead hostages, a matter which is reserved for phase three. If, during the negotiations planned between the deal’s phases, Israel cannot convince Hamas to cede control of the Strip, it will have to re-invade Gaza, likely at great diplomatic and reputational cost. It must otherwise accept the stinging reality that the war will have ended with Hamas’s terrorists, rapists and kidnappers gazing into Israel from more or less the same positions they occupied on 6 October 2023.

The return of Donald Trump adds to the agreement’s downsides. The President-elect apparently deputized Steve Witkoff, his incoming Middle East peace envoy, to cajole Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting the Biden Administration’s ceasefire framework. By creating the illusion of a foreign policy win, Witkoff has validated a key Biden policy and undermined a popular US ally for what might be inevitably petty reasons. After all, in early 2021, Netanyahu drew Trump’s ire for stating that Biden had won the 2020 election.

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The ceasefire heralds short-term domestic problems for Netanyahu, with the seven-seat Religious Zionist party threatening to leave the government if fighting doesn’t resume after phase one, an eventuality which would leave the Prime Minister with a slim one-seat majority in the Knesset. Other divisions loom too. Overall, some 800 security personnel have been killed since October 7, meaning there is now a considerable number of Israelis who see decisive victory as the only acceptable return for the sacrifice of hundreds of young men. There have already been small protests against the ceasefire, including near West Bank settlements that have contributed a disproportionate number of war dead.

But accepting this deal is hardly an act of insanity. Aside from freeing the hostages from a living hell, the goal of this agreement, as with many of Netanyahu’s decisions over the past year, has been to create the freedom of action needed to keep fighting. Since October 7, Netanyahu has correctly gambled that a long war would ultimately advantage Israel, a socially cohesive modern state with a strong military and a robust belief in its own survival. The costs of a long war have proven more than bearable. Over a year of fighting, the Israeli economy surpassed $10 billion in foreign technological investment and set records for defense exports. Births increased by 10%, a sign that the society is far from demoralized. Relations with countries like Ireland and South Africa have foundered, but these aren’t exactly major powers. As for the International Criminal Court indictments of Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant: they now seem likelier to hurt the ICC than Israel. Italy, France and Poland have all said they won’t comply with the court’s arrest warrants, while sanctioning the court is one of the top legislative priorities of the incoming Republican-led Congress.

Netanyahu perhaps anticipated that an extended conflict, punctuated by timely concessions, might create its own unpredictable logic, leaving opportunities for the IDF to seize when the time was right.

If that really was Netanyahu’s intention, it seems to have worked. Israel didn’t invade Gaza until late October 2023, waiting until senior US advisers arrived to help plan the operation. The next month, a ceasefire agreement freed roughly half the Hamas hostages and bought Netanyahu enough credit with both Biden and liberal critics at home to keep the war going deep into the following year. By mid-2024, Netanyahu’s constant threats to invade the Gazan border city of Rafah had the effect of creating leverage over the US, which opposed the move. The US spent months bargaining with the Prime Minister in the hope of delaying him — and while waiting to invade Rafah, the IDF built up the Netzarim Corridor and escalated its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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When Israel did finally take Gaza’s border with Egypt, in the spring of 2024, it secured a strategic asset for future negotiations and completed the total encirclement of Hamas forces, creating opportunities to fight other, more threatening enemies. Israel teased a ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon for much of the summer, seizing the strategic initiative and creating another long and inevitably fruitful series of negotiations with Israel’s allies in Washington. When an invasion finally came, Hezbollah lost almost all its senior commanders, most of its elite Radwan force, and many of its missiles, alongside a plethora of subterranean fortresses and almost as many fighters as died during 13 years of civil war in Syria. Nor was Syria itself immune to this approach. The fall of the Assad regime, and Israel’s subsequent destruction of the country’s air defenses and most of its conventional military capacity, was a downstream consequence of Netanyahu’s success at keeping the fighting going.

In other words, Netanyahu has gained much by biding his time, even as he proved that both Israelis and their army can sustain a once-unimaginable blend of high-tempo operations across seven different fronts. That, indeed, is ultimately why the ceasefire might help his country: buying time both domestically and in Washington, it gives the premier space to plan and execute his next move.

In the first place, the ceasefire agreement helps resolve discontent among Israelis. Many blame Netanyahu for the suffering of the hostages, out of a misguided but understandable belief that he could have responsibly agreed to a prisoner swap much earlier. At the same time, the social strain caused by the repeated mobilization of IDF reserve units has stoked an increasingly bitter debate over the forced conscription of ultra-orthodox Israelis, largely exempt from military service. Six weeks of ceasefire will mark the first time in 14 months that Israel hasn’t been waging any large-scale ground operations, giving both army and society a much-needed rest.

The deal also fosters good will with the Trump Administration, whose Middle East policies are increasingly difficult to peg. Witkoff is a real estate developer and unknown diplomatic quantity whose company sold the Park Lane Hotel to the Qatar Investment Authority for some $623 million in 2023. Pro-Trump ideologue Tucker Carlson is no fan of the Jewish State, and for the first time in decades an influential current of grassroots Right-wingers are skeptical of the US alliance with Israel. Then there’s Elon Musk. The billionaire reportedly intervened to free Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist imprisoned in Iran. Certainly, the world’s richest man, ever unpredictable, could shake up the global order if he advises Trump to reach his own nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. As for Trump himself, the ceasefire came about in a way that suggests he prioritizes his own deal-making prowess above supporting Israel. That’s hardly ideal, but a pause does give Netanyahu crucial time to assess the confusing new terrain in Washington.

To understand why this matters, we must again return to Iran. Given that a near-nuclear Iran has been hurling ballistic missiles at his country for over a year, it seems possible that Netanyahu sees placating the Americans as an unpleasant yet necessary step on the way towards a strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

Hamas’s reaction to the ceasefire agreement, with its leaders celebrating amid devastation, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of victory. Are wars still won by the usual measures of blood and territory, or is victory now more notional and slippery, a condition existing in the mind above all? Given the sheer scale of destruction over the past year, it seems crass for either side to claim victory. And as one Israeli official told me in early 2024: “You have won when no one has to ask whether you have won or not.” At this point, the event that would do most to turn Israel into an unambiguous winner is the destruction of Iran’s key assets, and the further devastation of the regime that theorized, planned, armed, and financed the slaughter on October 7 and everything that’s come after it.

Though Tehran’s proxies and allies have been whipped on the battlefield, this is a temporary accomplishment as long as the regime can continue to arm and finance them, and Israel’s gains are especially reversible so long as Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains intact. It is possible that Netanyahu just signed away all of Israel’s achievements in Gaza. Or it could also be that, in freeing the hostages, mollifying his internal critics, and keeping Trump on his side, he’s lengthening the war enough to gain the support, the capacity, and the strategic initiative to finally pull off something truly history-changing.

But the Middle Eastern conflagration is an issue that encapsulates the weaknesses of both the Harris campaign and the administration in which she serves. Since the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden has pursued an incoherent set of policy aims calibrated to satisfy different elements of an inherently unstable Democratic Party coalition, which is split between supporters and opponents of Israel and whose foreign policy elite is often deferential or admiring towards Qatar, Iran, and political Islam more generally. Weapons transfers to Israel have been authorised and then slow-walked. The administration publicly opposed major Israeli war aims such as the seizure of the Hamas-controlled Gaza-Egypt border and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon only to shrug when Jerusalem finally lost patience and launched both operations anyway. Biden invested supreme amounts of time and diplomatic capital in a deal to free Hamas-held hostages and secure a ceasefire in Gaza, but exerted little real diplomatic pressure on Egypt, Qatar, or Hamas in order to reach one. Perhaps the height of Biden’s Middle East triangulation was the decision to greenlight an Israeli response to Iran’s most recent mass volley of ballistic missiles — but only as long as Israel didn’t attack Iran’s nuclear sites, the regime’s most valuable and dangerous strategic assets.

Harris could never clearly articulate her preferred outcome to the fighting in the Middle East. She met with members of the Uncommitted movement, reportedly telling them she would seriously consider their demands for a US arms embargo on Israel. Whether this was election season pandering or a reflection of her actual beliefs remains unclear even now. She spoke repeatedly about both the suffering of Gazans and Israel’s absolute right to self-defence, but never really discussed the strategic benefits of the US-Israel relationship, or the American national interest in an Israeli triumph over Iranian-backed jihadists. Harris named Iran as America’s most threatening adversary during the race’s closing weeks, but her top foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, is a leading proponent of detente with the Islamic Republic regime and an architect of the 2015 nuclear deal which Trump discarded. Harris neither endorsed nor repudiated Biden’s post-October 7 policies, addressing one of the most divisive issues on earth though a muddle of hard-to-reconcile platitudes that had no clear vision or purpose at their heart.

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This was the story of Harris’s entire campaign. In an October interview, she appeared to endorse the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border, thus embracing a major Trumpist objective that Democrats once widely abhorred. She ran as the change candidate despite having been the second highest-ranking official in the US government for the prior four years. On the Middle East, as on numerous other topics, she never had a compelling or coherent or politically appealing approach to undoing the mess she’d helped make, arrogantly believing her contrast with the supposedly extreme and unpresidential Donald Trump would be enough to bridge her campaign’s glaring contradictions.

Instead, Trump appeared a paragon of decisiveness and authenticity when juxtaposed with someone as simultaneously vacillating and over-managed as Harris. That Trump is imperious and perfectly legible in his motives explains how a man who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights won a plurality of votes in the Arab-American stronghold of Dearborn, Michigan in the midst of the deadliest episode in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Strict truthfulness is generally not considered one of Trump’s qualities, but unlike Harris he could at least say what he really believed free of the transparently gross and corrupting logic of Democratic-style coalition politics, which voters of all backgrounds have now come to distrust. The president-elect never seems to be balancing various warring sects and interest groups against one another, and instead operates according to a singularly Trumpian alchemy of charisma and instinct. These instincts often aren’t that mysterious, including where the Middle East is concerned.

Trump was not fixated on Israeli-Palestinian peace during his first term in office, but he discussed the topic with an almost messianic sense of his own dealmaking skills. An elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace was “the toughest of deals”, then-president Trump said in 2019, adding that he thought an agreement was possible by the end of his term in January 2021. In 2020, his administration bucked decades of precedent by releasing maps of possible territorial swaps within a US-endorsed peace framework. The so-called “Deal of the Century” was widely mocked at the time, largely because it drew wildly impractical borders between Israel and a future Palestine state, with an eye towards keeping nearly the entirety of the country’s disconnected West Bank settlements within undisputed Israeli territory. Even a generous Trump-brokered peace is highly unlikely after the October 7 slaughter, which is liable to sour several generations of Israelis on the idea of entrusting the country’s survival to any Palestinian-ruled entity. But Trump is transactionally minded, and has long believed he can solve the world’s problems through his unique force of personality —  including the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

As we learned during his first term, Trumpian charisma is often expressed by proxy through loyalists and family members. Last week, Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman and father of the husband of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, claimed he would be appointed as the incoming administration’s Lebanon envoy. Boulos told Lebanese media the president-elect will “end the destruction in Lebanon” as part of a “comprehensive regional peace agreement”, adding that “Trump is committed to ending the war before he enters the White House”.

The Israelis are more likely to listen to the president-elect than they are to an ever more disconnected Biden, given the comparatively harsh policies towards Iran that Trump pursued during his first term. Jerusalem might be willing to sacrifice its hard-won strategic initiative against Hamas and Hezbollah in exchange for positive relations at the outset of a second Trump term and a possible return to first term-style “maximum pressure” against Tehran. The Trump presidency also gives Prime Minister Netanyahu an off-ramp in Israel’s successful yet grinding year-long war: so long as the Iranian regime is no longer receiving US-brokered cash transfers and safety assurances, as it did under Biden and Harris, there is less immediate or long-term danger in reducing the pace or scope of operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond. But even Trump’s opposition to the Iranian regime could be up for negotiation. As president, Trump did nothing to stop American funding for the Lebanese Armed Forces and other Hezbollah-infiltrated state institutions. Boulos even claimed that Trump will “set the stage for a nuclear deal with Iran”.

Since October 7, Netahyahu has grown almost freakishly adept at manoeuvring within the limits that an often-oppositional US administration set for him. It is unlikely the Prime Minister will ever miss Joe Biden, or curse his bad luck at not having Kamala Harris as his counterpart. Yet there is an added challenge to a Trump presidency from Israel’s perspective. Over the past year of war, Israel has gained a critical degree of strategic independence from Washington, diversifying its defence supply chains and launching major operations with little coordination or prior warning to its top ally. Under Trump, who was perhaps the most pro-Israel president in US history, a dynamic of dependency could quickly reassert itself. If conflicts between Jerusalem and Washington arise — if Netanyahu and Trump disagree over the necessity of bombing Iranian nuclear sites, for instance — Trump’s second term could be a test of whether Israelis have truly internalised the post-October 7 reality that their survival depends on their freedom to ignore or openly defy the United States, regardless of who’s in the White House.

Speculating about Sinwar’s motives became an analytical cottage industry after October 7. Observers of the resulting conflagration have been told that Sinwar ordered his invasion and kidnapping spree because he wanted to derail Israeli-Saudi normalisation; put “the Palestinian question” back on the table; bait Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war; bleed his enemy through an insurgency; fracture Israeli society; or undermine Fatah’s rival claims to leadership of the Palestinian struggle. There’s a category error behind every one of these claims. If Sinwar had been a normal warlord in pursuit of mundane objectives, he could have pursued a less spectacular course that would have greatly improved his chances of remaining the uncontested theocratic dictator of a Mediterranean coastal enclave with two million subjects. More than that, he could have retained a local military-industrial complex, extensive foreign relations, and subsidies from friendly regional governments and the UN. But Sinwar operated beyond the limiting realm of normative politics. He is arguably the first Palestinian leader who ever thought to test the proposition that his people could decisively settle their conflict with the Jews of the Middle East solely through violent means. 

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A significant body of facts suggests that Sinwar believed he would succeed in destroying the state of Israel on or about October 7, 2023. A few years before the attacks, he co-sponsored a conference at a Gaza City hotel entitled “Promise of the Hereafter: Post-Liberation Palestine” — and in which participants discussed topics such as the enslavement of educated Jews and the mass execution of alleged Arab collaborators in the aftermath of Israel’s imminent violent destruction. “We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh,” read Sinwar’s contribution to the event, which was delivered by a senior colleague in the Hamas political bureau. Sinwar added that “the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river” was “the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision”. 

He meant this all literally. Documents recovered by the IDF in Gaza showed that Hamas planners anticipated the October 7 attack would reach much further into Israel than it actually did. In recent weeks, IDF units in Lebanon have discovered extensive evidence that Hezbollah’s Radwan forces had pre-positioned weapons and attack teams for an invasion of the Galilee in the months before the October massacre. Sinwar, for his part, had a plausible theory of victory, especially in light of the disarray of Israel’s initial response. If Gaza’s Hamas fighters could make it 30 miles across the desert to their comrades in the West Bank, they could bisect Israel while their Hezbollah allies struck from the north. All the while, he envisaged Arab-Israelis rioting, in a repeat of the country’s 2021 unrest, while Iran lobbed ballistic missiles, and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and maybe even Turkey joined in too — and the cherished dream of the Muslim conquest of Palestine became dazzlingly real. 

Sinwar was a committed ideologue, a man of unwavering and sinister integrity. We are not used to world events being driven by figures whose motives are as pure and uncomplicated as his. Sinwar was reportedly furious at the 2011 deal that freed him after more than 20 years in an Israeli prison: he thought Hamas should have accepted nothing less than the release of all of its prisoners in exchange for the kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. While in prison for the alleged strangling of Palestinian informants, Sinwar promised one of his Israeli interrogators that the tables would eventually turn — that one day he would be Sinwar’s prisoner, and that the now-jailed Hamas leader would be grilling him instead. 

To put it differently, Sinwar had the quasi-Napoleonic notion of a total social inversion, one he would personally bring into being. Yassir Arafat, who came to deploy a clever interplay of violence and diplomacy, and who turned the Palestine Liberation Organization into a patronage system that was entirely dependent on his leadership, was a corrupt gradualist compared to Sinwar, who represented the total rejection of all pragmatism. Human beings were abstractions to him, the raw material for the new world he would single-handedly forge.

The execution, though, was off. Sinwar turned out to have a poor understanding of both his friends and his enemies. We might never understand why Hezbollah didn’t launch its own ground offensive against Israel on October 7, despite being fully prepared and deployed. Hamas and Hezbollah’s Iranian sponsors clearly knew Sinwar’s war plans, but didn’t fully commit themselves to the fight when the moment came. Israel, meanwhile, proved it could sustain an unprecedentedly long and difficult urban war without losing all international support. Surely Sinwar wasn’t counting on the Israeli-developed Trophy system neutralising Hamas’s anti-tank weaponry, nor on his enemy’s remarkable willingness to send its soldiers and combat engineers into Hamas tunnels. Hamas, meanwhile, fought the IDF with a distinct lack of skill and courage. Its fighters fled from frontal confrontations with the IDF, and failed to protect its infrastructure or halt the Israeli advance through the Strip. All the while, it lost any ability to fire rockets at Israel, and suffered an estimated 19,000 combat deaths since October 7. That’s six times more than all the Palestinian fighters lost in the Second Intifada, and the previous four Gaza Wars combined. A year ago, Hamas had 40,000 combatants, and ran the longest-tenured Sunni Islamist governing project in modern history. Now, though, they’re a glorified protection racket, far more capable of terrorising displaced Gazans than they are of threatening Israelis.

Sinwar’s continued rejection of US-brokered ceasefire agreements, any one of which would have saved his life, only makes sense if he believed his recalcitrance could eventually force Hezbollah and Iran’s other proxies to escalate the war on his behalf. He believed a longer and bloodier conflict favoured him. This was wildly incorrect. A long war actually favoured Israel, which learned how to fight him. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s limited participation in the conflict dragged on long enough for Jerusalem to lose patience and wipe out the group’s entire high command, along with a reported two-thirds of its missile arsenal.

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Sinwar’s loss will still be deeply felt. He killed more Israelis on Israeli territory than anyone else in history, and on October 7 he gave his people an exhilarating taste of what a divinely ordained final victory would look and feel like. Pragmatism may seem lame or even dishonourable in light of that righteous blood orgy, a proof of concept for some future, final cleansing of the land. And he’ll have a potential afterlife as a leading 21st-century theoretician of violent revolution, having pioneered the idea of war as mass protest and an expression of popular rage. The “Tufan Al-Aqsa System” — the Hamasnik phrase for the October 7 attacks — is people power focused towards militant ends, an unstoppable, raging human flood. Sinwar understood that he had the backing of a global and increasingly important institutional Left, an elite constituency in Western countries that rapidly embraced his cause after October 7. “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians,” Sinwar told Vice News in 2021, anticipating the thesis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2024 book The Message. 

But it wasn’t just Leftists who provided cover for Sinwar’s agenda. The surviving senior Hamas leadership is now based in Qatar, a US ally which is home to the largest American military base in the Middle East. Hamas leaders have been feted in Turkey, Russia, and South Africa over the past year. Hamas’s moral legitimacy and international standing arguably grew after October 7. Sinwar showed that raping and butchering Israelis did not automatically make you an enemy of civilisation — not even for the United States, which long opposed any Israeli operation in Rafah, where Sinwar was killed, and spent nearly a year pushing for a ceasefire that would have preserved Hamas’s rule in the Strip. Sinwar’s career may have shown that it is self-destructive in the near term for a Palestinian leader to provoke a full-on war with Israel. But he will have inspired a future generation of extremists to dream big. 

When Rwanda’s Tutsis were being slaughtered 30 years ago this month, it was anything but obvious that, just two years later, they’d be leading a semi-successful multinational campaign of conquest in neighbouring Zaire, then the second-largest country in Africa. The Syrian Civil War looked far different in July 2012, when a suicide bomber assassinated the country’s defence minister and Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, than it did in September 2015, when Russian forces arrived to rescue Assad’s crumbling regime. And when the most recent Israeli campaign in Gaza concluded in May 2021, the country’s leading strategists, along with many in the US, believed Hamas wanted nothing more than a long stretch of quiet in order to consolidate its rule over the coastal strip. Operation Guardian of the Walls was the Israeli success that would finally allow the country to address bigger and more dangerous threats than those irritating Islamist militants in the south.

For both the Israelis and Palestinians, this proved to be a grave misunderstanding of reality. The Israelis believed they had reduced Hamas to strategic insignificance. Meanwhile, the people who turned out to be the most meaningful Palestinian decision-makers, namely Gaza-based Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his inner circle, were caught in the climax of what the political scientist Shany Mor has described as the “ecstasy-amnesia cycle”, convinced against all prior experience that the violent destruction of the Zionist entity was close at hand.

After six months of war, it makes less sense to assess who’s currently winning than it does to ask which current premises are in greatest danger of being exposed. Even identifying the next shattered certainty is difficult, as shown by the Iranian attack on Israel last weekend and Israel’s muted reply five days later.

Prior to last Sunday morning, any declared inter-state barrage of scores of armed drones and 130 ballistic missiles with a combined explosive payload of over 60 tons — the largest drone attack in history — enough to shut down much of the Middle East’s airspace and to mobilise a half-dozen militaries, would have been considered a reckless escalation, or even a history-making assault on global peace. Instead, by the logic of the current hostilities, the strike and its far limper Israeli sequel appear more like an American-managed climb-down, or a semiotic act of mutual face-saving after repeated Israeli successes against senior Iranian personnel in Syria. Or perhaps the episode was Tehran’s test of how much it can do without provoking a significant US-approved Israeli response, something more than a pro-forma, low-firepower strike on non-strategic targets. In any case, we can now retire the worn-out idea that an assault of scores of ballistic missiles can automatically be classed as a serious act of war.

Identifying the next assumption to crumble will require facing the often-ignored reality that much of what’s happened since October 7 is without any real precedent in this conflict. We are deep into the unknown, and were there long before this past week. The sides have notched accomplishments that are both novel and gruesome enough to demand real analytic humility, even and especially from those who, like myself, have covered the crisis on the ground.

Let’s begin with the Israelis, who pulled all but a single combat division out of the Gaza Strip just days after the IDF’s accidental bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy earlier this month, a blunder that clinched the Biden administration’s growing opposition to the anti-Hamas campaign. On paper, and by the standards of nearly any other conflict, Israel’s war with Hamas looks like one of the most lopsided military engagements in modern history.

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Israel has lost 665 security personnel since October 7, including a number of relatively senior combat officers. Still, most of Gaza City fell within two months of Israel’s invasion of Gaza; by contrast, the US-supported siege of Mosul, the Islamic State’s Iraqi redoubt, took well over a year. Within six months, Israel claimed to have killed 14,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza and Israel, along with 420 terrorists in the West Bank and 330 in Lebanon. These numbers don’t have to be anywhere near accurate to be of historic proportions: By comparison, Palestinian militants groups lost a little under 2,000 fighters in the 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 Gaza wars combined, and around 1,200 fighters during the five-year period of the Second Intifada.

This time around, the Hamas dead include Saleh al-Arouri, the founding commander of the al-Qassam Brigades and deputy head of the Hamas political bureau; Marwan Issa, Hamas’s third-ranking Gaza-based military leader; Faik Mabhouh, the head of Hamas internal security in the Strip; and Murad abu Murad, the group’s aerial operations chief. Israel claims it has killed five Hamas brigade commanders, 20 battalion commanders, and roughly 100 company commanders. As of late January, between 20% and 40% of Hamas’s estimated 500 kilometres of tunnels had been destroyed or rendered inoperable. In the central Gaza stronghold of Khan Younis, the number might be as high as 85%.

It is conceivable that the sheer scope and seniority of the losses, along with the IDF’s ongoing destruction of tunnels, arms stocks and rocket facilities will have no long-term impact on Palestinian militancy, but it is just as possible that the armed resistance will spend years struggling to recover its prior capabilities. They will operate with far less freedom, and under a far more active Israeli threat, than before October 7, the former era of delusion in which most Israelis failed to view Hamas as an existential danger.

Hamas, meanwhile, have notched no battlefield victories against Israel in Gaza. Instead, they have lost nearly all of their ability to strike inside Israel and have also shown no real capacity to fight the IDF inside Gaza itself. Of the 260 Israeli soldiers killed in the Strip, 41 were killed in friendly fire incidents, while dozens of others fell outside of direct fighting, from tunnel bombs, booby-trapped structures, and other pre-set explosives. Actual frontal combat ended in overwhelming Israeli victories: IDF losses tallied in the low single-digits during a two-week operation at Shifa Hospital in March, an effort in which the Hamas commander in charge of recruitment and procurement, a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad political bureau, and 700 other alleged terrorists were captured or killed. Meanwhile the newly deployed Trophy system, an Israeli-developed countermeasure for anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, has vied with Hamas’s tunnels as the major battlefield innovation of the war.

Just as Israel wagered that the horrors of October 7 gave them the legitimacy to finally go after Hamas positions inside of hospitals, mosques, and other sensitive civilian infrastructure, it has leapt over former guard-rails in Lebanon and Syria with equally significant results: the IDF killed 16 Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel in a single March 26th attack in Syria. A week later, It eliminated Mohamed Reza Zehedi, the long-time Iranian commander in Syria and Lebanon, as well as two other IRGC generals in a strike on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Damascus. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has admitted more than 260 losses in its ranks since October 7 — which exceeds the acknowledged death toll during its 2006 war with Israel, an event that militia leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly regretted. This time around, the Hezbollah dead include several senior officers of its Radwan special operations unit, as well as the deputy commander of its rocket and missile forces. The attacks haven’t stopped Hezbollah from bombing northern Israel every day for months on end, but they haven’t triggered a regional war either, hinting that Tehran’s deterrence has frayed.

With Israel emboldened by its battlefield gains and newly aware of its true security needs, a Haaretz analysis in late March found that the IDF was attempting to establish buffer zones and long-term military corridors that amount to as much as 16% of Gaza’s territory. An extended Israeli presence anywhere inside the Strip would reverse decades of precedent: Since the early Nineties, Israel has unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza and southern Lebanon, ceded civil control over major cities in the West Bank to the previously Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Organisation, given up farmland on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, and conceded on many of Hezbollah’s demands in the demarcation of the Israel-Lebanon maritime border in 2022.

For over 30 years, Israeli policy has gone entirely in one direction, guided by a strategic concept in which the security benefits stemming from the actual control of territory isn’t worth the attendant costs in blood, treasure and international status. The creation of a buffer zone in Gaza, however small or narrow, would thus push against the current of the conflict. Much like the destruction of south Beirut, about which defence minister Yoav Gallant hypothesised in January, the Israeli reoccupation of some part of south Lebanon is far less unthinkable now than it was six months ago.

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And yet, the near-term neutralisation of Hamas as a security threat, the massive numbers of enemy dead, and, crucially, Israel’s ability to sustain high-tempo military operations in several theaters without a crippling economic, political or social crisis, have not amounted to anything like victory. These developments do not mean Israeli policy since October 7 has been more effective than other alternatives. But their novelty will set the future parameters of the conflict, for better and worse.

Here, the Iranian attack presages other unknowable changes. For decades, a direct Islamic Republic strike on Israel was a regional doomsday scenario. But thanks to a multi-layered aerial defence system — whose performance so far may turn out to be another one of the war’s major developments — the help of allied militaries, and the dismal state of Iranian hardware, the Israelis, along with everyone else, have now discovered that even a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles is perfectly manageable, or at least not an automatic spark for a wider war. At the same time, Iran now knows that if it lobs dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel, its adversary will still meekly obey American demands not to meaninfully respond. This knowledge could prove dangerous to the entire region: everything that’s happened since October 7 and after has stemmed from the mistaken belief that raising the threshold for acceptable chaos is a sign of strategic wisdom, or keeps anyone safe in the long run.

In the north of Israel, it’s clear the Iranians and their proxies have already dictated a major shift in what Israeli leaders — and their allies in Washington — have shown themselves willing to live with. Israel ordered the evacuation of all civilians within five kilometres of the Lebanese border shortly after October 7, out of fear Hezbollah would join the war at their full capability and duplicate Hamas’s slaughter. Prior Israeli planning had allowed for the short-term mass evacuation of civilians in order to free up infrastructure during a possible invasion of Lebanon. Ordering tens of thousands of people from their homes for months on end, creating an exclusion zone in which the state either can’t or won’t protect its citizens, was never a part of the country’s defence strategy. Wars have a momentum of their own, though: Hezbollah has fired over 3,100 rockets and missiles into northern Israel since October 7. Dozens of communities remain uninhabited.

This depopulation of the Israeli borderlands is the Iran-led resistance bloc’s major battlefield achievement over the past half year. Washington’s answer to the impasse has been special envoy Amos Hochstein’s shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Beirut, relaying American demands that the parties refrain from expanding the scope of the war — something they’ve largely obeyed even after the Iranian strike. Israel must now choose between a costly invasion that will likely trigger a long and unknowably destructive barrage from Hezbollah and create a fresh set of crises with Washington, or accept that the Iran-led bloc now holds the power of life and death within the Jewish state’s own territory.

The latter scenario has proven remarkably durable, and it is not the only area where the Islamic Republic has inflicted a new status quo. Tehran has given its Yemeni proxy the arms and training needed to shut down shipping in the Red Sea, while, in yet another first, Iranian drones launched by Iraqi militants and missiles fired from Yemen have both made it into Israeli airspace. The Iranian attack last weekend resulted in a nationwide lockdown in Israel, a total airspace closure, and the resource-intensive use of scores of interceptors and fighter jets, something Tehran had never inflicted on the Jewish state before. (The Israeli reprisal was significantly less disruptive to life in Iran, but it did show that Israel could hit specific targets, some of them adjacent to the regime’s nuclear sites, without crossing into Iranian airspace or encountering any serious operational difficulties.)

Though Hamas has lost a generation of fighters in Gaza, their sacrifice was hardly in vain: in staving off a total collapse of their statelet, the Hamas dead bought their comrades enough time to shift diplomatic conditions in the terrorists’ favour. Negotiations over the fate of the 230 people Palestinian militants kidnapped on October 7 always advantaged Hamas: it put the US in the position of forcing additional concessions out of their Israeli allies in order to keep the Palestinians talking at all.

When Hamas is simply too rejectionist for talks to take place, the Americans and the Israelis have instead negotiated with one another, with the US demanding a gradually more limited scope of Israeli operations against Hamas in exchange for continued support. In time, American conditions on an Israeli invasion of Rafah, the final Hamas stronghold in the Strip, have become so onerous and nonsensical that the US has emerged, intentionally or not, as Israel’s single greatest obstacle to the group’s destruction. Looming potential crises stemming from Iran’s new willingness to directly attack Israel have likely made a Rafah operation an even lower priority, and thus an even fainter prospect.

In late January, Axios reported that the US was “reviewing options” for the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, an entity that would almost certainly include Hamas members in its leadership, given the organisation’s popularity and the fecklessness of the Fatah apparatchiks who run the Palestinian Authority. Whether the US actually extends such recognition is less important than the introduction of a new source of leverage into the US-Israel relationship. In future moments of tension, an American administration merely has to raise the spectre of a Washington-approved State of Palestine to enforce more manageable Israeli behaviour.

Those cynics who claimed that an act of spectacular violence had vaulted Hamas to respectability and reframed the conflict around their hard-line grievances seem unfortunately vindicated. Hamas raped, murdered, and kidnapped its way to new heights, and it has now survived the largest military mobilisation in Israel’s history. They have proven that no amount of depravity can jeopardise their long-term existence, and with Iran’s help they have wheedled their way under the US protective umbrella despite having taken five American citizens hostage on October 7 — or maybe because of it. Their broader network of Iranian-supported allies have successfully battled the US military in the Red Sea, ejected tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes, and launched a major state-declared aerial assault without any immediate consequences. The Iranian navy’s capture of a Portuguese cargo ship last weekend is an act of brigandage now so routine, and so tolerated by all applicable international actors, that it barely registered.

Suggested reading

The realist case for Israel

By Philip Cunliffe

Taken in their entirety, the post-October 7 catalogue of novelties raises unsettling questions about the very nature of war. In recent years, the prior, supposedly discredited concept of war as a struggle over resources, territory and human lives appeared to be making a comeback. Azerbaijan settled the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by creating conditions under which all Armenians fled the besieged territory; Russia is gradually pushing its way forward in Ukraine due to old-fashioned advantages in manpower and ammunition.

Yet events since October 7 suggest that other conflicts are not won on the ground, but in the murkier realm of perception. A war in which one side has lost 670 fighters and the other has lost as many as 15,000, along with much of their pre-conflict safe haven and military infrastructure, should not invite abstract discussions about the nature and meaning of victory. That such debates are possible, and even necessary, marks another achievement for the resistance bloc.

In the absence of any real clarity, we are left facing an alarming new frontier, where both sides have discovered what they are capable of. Israel has shown that it can sustain a very long war, and pursue its enemies in places that were once considered off-limits. These enemies have shown that they can impose potentially ruinous strategic choices on the Jewish state even as their fighters and commanders suffer steep losses in the field, while also demonstrating that they enjoy near-limitless reserves of goodwill, moral legitimacy and diplomatic protection, including from Israel’s putative allies.

Perhaps the grim innovations of the past six months will threaten the full collapse of one or more of the conflict’s various parties, leading to a strategic stasis which will seed the conditions for a surprisingly durable period of calm. It is just as possible that everyone is gaining a new understanding of what they can achieve by force. Years of targeted strikes met with a predictable volume of rocket-fire, or the occasional drone and missile wave, are just as possible as a punctuated, world-changing regional war. Perhaps the most important reality of the post-October 7 conflict is that we may never know.