Can Israel Still Defeat Hamas?
Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas is still in its early days, but the terror organization has swiftly retaken control of Gaza’s streets and boasts of having won by not losing. Surviving at the price of utter ruin may strike reasonable observers as Pyrrhic. But Hamas is not reasonable; it sees genocide as a long game. Free to recruit from hundreds of thousands of impoverished, easily radicalized Gazan youth, and with its weapons-smuggling pipelines into Rafah restored, Hamas will welcome the prospect of a slow, patient return. Every previous clash with Israel only fortified it.
As is well known, the ceasefire unfolds in three phases. Phases 2 and 3, if implemented according to the terms that have been made public, would see Israel evacuate Gaza completely and restore the status quo ante – after releasing an unspecified number of terrorist murderers in exchange for an as-yet-unknown number of living hostages. Remarkably, the ceasefire terms neither prohibit Hamas from re-arming nor allow Israel to prevent it from doing so. Nothing in the agreement excludes Hamas from running the Strip.
The envisioned end game represents such a resounding strategic defeat for Israel that many assume the ceasefire was negotiated only for its first phase. Get the women, injured and elderly out, this thinking goes, and then Israel can resume the fight with unrestrained ferocity, delivering the final death blow to Hamas. Even the US, which strongly urged acceptance of the ceasefire, agrees that Hamas cannot return to controlling Gaza.
Time will tell.
Mechanically, it would be simple for Israel to end the ceasefire without violating its terms. It could simply announce its refusal to move beyond Phase 1. Or it could take unyielding positions on Phase 2 – refusing to release any more prisoners with blood on their hands, for example – that Hamas would not accept. With Israel’s intentions manifest by day 16 at the latest, Hamas would consider the ceasefire over and refuse to return more hostages. The domestic uproar would be seismic, as the architects of the ceasefire well understood. A significant and highly vocal fraction of the Israeli public is content to end the war on Hamas’s terms.
Most Israelis want the hostages back, Hamas out of Gaza, and know full well they can’t have both. After 15 months of inconclusive war, with the promised “total victory” no closer now than a year ago, the majority of an exhausted public may view fulfillment of all ceasefire terms as the least bad option. A resounding majority of the public supported the disastrous exchange of over a thousand terrorists for Gilad Shalit in 2011. Even those who fully recognize the massacre of October 7, 2023 as the Shalit deal’s poisoned fruit may prefer to trust the hollow assurances of the IDF brass rather than continue a seemingly unwinnable fight.
The IDF leadership, for its part, seems determined to keep the fight unwinnable. It continues to avoid responsibility for as basic a civil function as food distribution, though controlling the food supply is key to Hamas’s control of the Gazan streets. Their reluctance is understandable – fixed positions and direct engagement with civilians guarantees Israeli casualties. Yet they were ordered by the political echelon to assume this function months ago and have not complied. Defeating Hamas would require full military control of the Strip, a surge of tens of thousands of troops and responsibility for feeding a hostile population. It is inconceivable that the current IDF leadership would cooperate.
Then there is the question of US President Donald Trump. Would he support a resumption of fighting? You never really know with the mercurial Trump, and I’ll have more to say about his relationship with Israel in an upcoming post. But he styles himself the ender of wars and has ostentatiously differentiated himself from his predecessor as such. Certainly he will not be enthused at the prospect of renewed fighting.
So how can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reconcile the return of Hamas rule with his vow to oust them? With sleight of hand, probably, that both sides recognize as expedient. Hamas may be willing to cede nominal power to a “technocratic” governance committee and share control of “security” with a face-saving contingent of forces from Arab countries. Fearing defenestration, those forces will defer to Hamas as UNIFIL has to Hezbollah. Netanyahu may hope that public elation over the hostages’ return, combined with the trappings of a Potemkin victory in Gaza, will keep him in office.
It won’t. The final ceasefire terms, whatever they turn out to be, will not differ materially from what was on offer in May 2024 or, for that matter, what could have been obtained months before that. The few genuinely strategic gains of this war – control of Philadelphi and the porous Rafah crossing, a deep perimeter security zone and military presence across Gaza’s center – will disappear, mocking the sacrifices that secured them. In hindsight, this outcome became inevitable very early, when Israel’s government first ruled out reconquering and occupying Gaza. Only the fist of the IDF, deployed throughout the Strip, can defeat Hamas and prevent its resurgence. Hamas is too strong, both in brutality and as an animating ideology, for any alternative to be viable.
And it has promised to repeat the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust “again and again and again.” We’ve already seen what happens when Israel attacks and then leaves Gaza. We’ve seen it again and again and again.