Hamas Broke the Old Order but Lost Control
Hamas succeeded in shocking Israel. But shock is not the same as strategic control.
The October 7 attack was designed to rupture an emerging regional and political equilibrium. Before that day, Israel’s working assumption was that Gaza could be contained, Hamas deterred, and regional normalization advanced without restoring the Palestinian question to the center of Middle Eastern diplomacy. A possible Israel–Saudi–U.S. arrangement threatened to marginalize Hamas strategically: Gaza would remain isolated, the Palestinian issue would be managed rather than resolved, and Arab normalization with Israel might proceed without Hamas’s consent.
In that narrow sense, Hamas achieved its immediate objective. Hamas-led attackers breached Israel’s border defenses, killed about 1,200 people, abducted 251 hostages, momentarily disoriented Israeli command and intelligence systems, and shattered the public perception that Israel had successfully contained Gaza. The attack generated psychological shock, coercive leverage, and a dramatic rupture in Israel’s deterrence image.
Yet the central strategic question is not whether Hamas produced disruption. It did. The question is whether it could govern the chain of consequences it set in motion. Here the answer is far less favorable to Hamas.
October 7 triggered a massive rebound effect. Israel’s response transformed Hamas’s offensive initiative into a struggle over the organization’s own survival, military infrastructure, leadership, weapons, and future role in Gaza. The same attack that returned Hamas to the center of regional attention also exposed it to the most destructive counter-cascade in its history. Even after the hostages were returned, the central postwar issues—Hamas’s disarmament, Gaza’s policing, Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction, and political governance—remained unresolved.
The derivative effects were equally mixed. Hamas helped return the Palestinian question to the global agenda. The war forced Arab states, the United States, Europe, international institutions, humanitarian agencies, and global public opinion to confront Gaza and the future of Palestinian politics. Yet this visibility came at catastrophic cost: Gaza’s devastation, humanitarian collapse, mass displacement, Palestinian exhaustion, and possible anger among Gazans toward the movement that initiated the chain of events. A cause may be elevated while the actor that claimed to defend it is weakened.
Hamas may also have achieved a circuitous effect by complicating Israel–Saudi normalization. It could not defeat Israel militarily, but it could disrupt a regional process that risked bypassing Palestine. Still, delaying normalization is not the same as building a durable political alternative. If a future normalization formula includes stronger demands for Palestinian statehood while excluding Hamas from Gaza’s governance, the result will be deeply paradoxical: Hamas will have helped force Palestine back onto the diplomatic agenda while reducing its own claim to represent Palestine’s political future.
The most important effect is systemic. October 7 transformed what many actors treated as a contained Gaza problem into a regionalized and internationalized crisis involving Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the United States, Arab governments, international courts, humanitarian agencies, and global protest movements. Hamas helped break the old equilibrium, but the new one is not Hamas’s to design.
That is the strategic trap Hamas built for itself. It demonstrated that the existing order was fragile. It forced the Palestinian question back onto the agenda. But it also unleashed forces that may weaken, marginalize, or transform Hamas itself.
Hamas broke the old equilibrium; it did not control the order that emerged from its destruction.