Foreign Affairs: Hamas is winning and Israel’s strategy is a failure
The Foreign Affairs magazine published an article discussing that after 9 months of Israel air and ground war in Gaza, failed to defeat Hamas, nor is it on the verge of defeating it, on the contrary, Hamas has become stronger than it was before the October 7th attack.
The article explained that the main flaw in Israel’s strategy is not the failure of tactics or the imposition of political and moral constraints on military power, but rather a comprehensive and stark failure to understand Hamas’s sources of strength.
Israel had failed, to the detriment of its graves, to the detriment of the fact that the carnage and destruction it had unleashed in Gaza had only increased the power of Hamas.
For months, governments and analysts have focused on the number of Hamas fighters killed by the IDF as if this statistic were the most important measure of the success of Israel’s campaign against the group.
Israel says 14,000 of the 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas fighters before the war were killed, and said the group says it lost only 6,000 to 8,000 fighters, and quoted US intelligence sources as putting the real number of Hamas dead at about 10,000.
Despite its losses, the group still controls large swathes of Gaza, including areas where civilians are now concentrated, and enjoys tremendous support from Gaza’s population, allowing its fighters to access humanitarian supplies and easily return to areas previously cleared by Israeli forces.
He noted that a recent Israeli assessment confirmed that Hamas now has more fighters in the northern areas of Gaza, than in Rafah in the south.
Hamas is currently waging a guerrilla war, including ambushes and improvised bombs (often made from unexploded ordnance or IDF weapons), which could last until at least the end of 2024.
Hamas can still strike Israel, and more than 80% of its underground tunnel network is still usable to plan and store weapons, avoid Israeli surveillance, and for seizures and attacks.
Most of Hamas’s top leadership in Gaza remains intact.
In short, the rapid Israeli offensive in the fall gave way to a grinding war of attrition that would leave Hamas with the ability to attack Israeli civilians, even if the IDF continued its campaign in southern Gaza.
The strength of a movement like Hamas doesn’t come from the typical physical factors that analysts use to judge the power of states, such as the size of the economy, the technological sophistication of militaries, the amount of external support they enjoy, and the strength of educational systems.
Ultimately, this recruitment capacity is rooted in one factor: the size and intensity of the support the group draws from its community.
According to professional surveys, the support of the Palestinian community in Gaza and the West Bank is for Hamas and this support has increased over the days, and become very high.
Hamas currently enjoys a large popular rally around it, which helps explain why Gazans haven’t provided more intelligence to Israeli forces about the whereabouts of the group’s leaders and Israeli hostages.
Support for armed attacks against Israeli civilians has risen particularly among Palestinians in the West Bank and is now on par with consistently high levels of support for these attacks in Gaza, demonstrating that Hamas has made wide-ranging gains in Palestinian society.
The terrible Israeli punishment of the people of Gaza hasn’t had a significant deterrent effect among them, but has failed to reduce their support for armed attacks against Israeli civilians and their support for Hamas.
After 9 months of grueling war, it’s time to acknowledge the stark reality: the military path alone doesn’t defeat Hamas, its more than the sum of the current number of fighters, and it’s also more than just memories.
Hamas is a political and social movement that isn’t on the verge of defeat, and won’t disappear anytime soon, and its cause is more popular, and its attractiveness is stronger than it was before the seventh of October, and its fighters will continue to flow and participate in fighting in larger numbers, and its threat to Israel will increase.
