Israel Won the Battles and Lost the Gaza War
Israel did not lose the Gaza war on the battlefield.
The IDF killed much of Hamas’s senior command, dismantled organized military formations, destroyed large parts of the tunnel network, and seized strategically important ground. It made another October 7-style invasion far less likely. Through rescue operations and negotiated agreements, it also helped bring every surviving hostage home. Israeli soldiers fought with astonishing courage and repeatedly achieved the missions they were given.
Israel lost the war where wars are finally won or lost: in politics. Its government never turned those military achievements into a durable result.
A Necessary War on a Wider Front
None of this means Israel should have stayed out of Gaza. Hamas could not be negotiated into moderation. Its charter and conduct, culminating in the deliberate atrocities of October 7, made that fantasy untenable. Its active combatants had to be captured or killed and its military infrastructure destroyed. Hamas also had to be removed from power.
Air power alone could not accomplish that. A major ground campaign was necessary.
Gaza was also part of a wider conflict. Iran had spent decades constructing a regional system of armed partners that included Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq and Syria. The United States found no evidence that Iran knew the details of October 7 in advance, but concluded that Iranian financing, weapons, and training helped make the attack possible. After October 7, Iran-supported forces opened additional fronts against Israel and international shipping. The State Department’s 2023 terrorism report describes the network and Iran’s role in enabling it.
Israel subsequently inflicted major damage on several parts of that network. Those achievements deserve recognition, but they did not answer the question of what political order would replace Hamas in Gaza.
The wider Iranian strategy only increased the need for discipline in Gaza. Israel faced several fronts with limited manpower and shrinking diplomatic capital. It needed a clear account of what it meant to accomplish there and what political arrangement the campaign was supposed to produce. Without that account, no one could judge how much time and force the objective justified, or how many lives Israel was prepared to spend.
Aims Are Not a Strategy
The government did state its war aims, a fact that any fair criticism must acknowledge.
Netanyahu repeatedly named three: return the hostages, destroy Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities, and ensure that Gaza could never again threaten Israel. By 2025, these had been expanded into five principles: disarm Hamas, return all hostages, demilitarize Gaza, retain Israeli security control, and establish a civilian administration controlled by neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. Those were the government’s stated objectives.
But a list of aims is not a strategy.
What counted as destroying Hamas’s military capacity? The elimination of its organized battalions, or of its senior commanders? Did it require finding every tunnel and weapons cache, or capturing or killing every armed member?
What would ending Hamas rule actually require? Removing its ministers would not stop Hamas from collecting taxes or controlling aid. Replacing its police would accomplish little unless another authority could maintain order and prevent its return.
What did it mean to ensure that Gaza could “never again” threaten Israel? Perhaps it meant eliminating any capacity for another cross-border invasion. Perhaps it meant no rockets, no organized army, or no armed Palestinian group of any kind. The government never said.
Nor did it establish what would happen when its aims came into conflict. If continued military pressure endangered the hostages, which objective came first? If an agreement could return them but left Hamas partially intact, would that count as victory, defeat, or merely an intermediate stage?
These were not pedantic questions. The answers would determine the cost in lives and military resources, as well as the damage Israel was prepared to absorb abroad.
The ambiguity was politically convenient. If victory is never translated into observable conditions, failure can never be demonstrated. Every achievement means victory is approaching; every setback proves that more time and force are required.
“Total victory” turned that ambiguity into a slogan.
What Military Force Could Not Do
Israel was using military force against an enemy that was more than a military organization. The IDF could break Hamas battalions and demolish their infrastructure, killing commanders along the way. It did so with considerable success.
That success left a different problem: Hamas had governed Gaza. Removing its government required someone else to perform the functions it had controlled. If no replacement was ready, armed men could return as soon as Israeli soldiers left. They could reassert control over aid and frighten local opponents into submission. Recruitment would follow.
Even a functioning replacement would not settle the ideological question. Military defeat can strip an ideology of power and prestige, but it cannot bomb the idea itself out of existence. The United States did not eliminate every person attracted to al-Qaeda’s ideology. It crippled the organization and denied it sanctuary, then relied on alliances to prevent its return.
Netanyahu eventually offered a general postwar formula: local Palestinians unaffiliated with terrorism would administer Gaza while Israel retained security control. But he never identified the people or institutions that would govern. Nor did he explain who would protect and fund them, or how they would acquire legitimacy.
A principle is not an implementing authority.
An Agreement, Not an End State
The October 2025 agreement was a real and immense achievement. It ended full-scale fighting and secured the release of the remaining 20 living hostages. It also created a framework for Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction, and further negotiations. The last surviving hostages returned to Israel on October 13, 2025.
But returning the hostages and obtaining a ceasefire did not resolve the strategic problem. By mid-2026, Hamas still controlled part of Gaza and retained military capabilities. Israel controlled most of the territory, Hamas had not disarmed, and the final governing arrangement remained unsettled. An IDF commander acknowledged in July 2026 that Hamas remained in control on its side of the dividing line.
The agreement achieved something precious, but it did not retroactively supply the war with a coherent political strategy.
The Generals’ Indictment
This criticism did not come only from Netanyahu’s political opponents.
In May 2024, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that military action without a governing alternative allowed Hamas to regenerate and forced the IDF to return to areas it had already cleared. He rejected indefinite Israeli military government as a dangerous and costly default. The military campaign, he argued, had to be accompanied by political action. Gallant’s full statement laid out the problem while he was still directing the war.
Benny Gantz demanded a plan for who would govern Gaza and ultimately left the emergency government over the failure to produce one. His six-point proposal linked dismantling Hamas to the creation of an alternative civilian administration.
Gadi Eisenkot warned that “total victory” was a slogan and that presenting the Rafah operation as the event that would free the hostages created false expectations. He argued that suppressing Hamas would require years, not one theatrical moment of surrender. “Anyone who says that we’ll disband three battalions in Rafah and after that be able to bring back the hostages is sowing false illusions,” he said.
Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland approached the war from a much more hawkish direction. He initially advocated a far harsher siege and evacuation strategy. Yet by April 2025 he concluded that Israel had achieved none of its stated Gaza objectives. He blamed the absence of a grand strategy, especially the refusal to decide who would govern Gaza. He also believed that Israel’s goals exceeded its available capabilities. His conclusion was blunt: Israel had failed.
Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik argued that repeated raids were exhausting Israel rather than destroying Hamas. The army would clear an area, withdraw, and later return to fight Hamas members who had reestablished themselves. In his view, the government had assigned objectives that the size and condition of the IDF could not sustainably achieve. His detailed criticism began early in the campaign.
The Hostages and the Price of Delay
The testimony from Israel’s hostage command was graver still. Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, who headed the IDF effort to recover the hostages, said in July 2026 that the war could have ended at least a year earlier. He estimated that approximately 40 people abducted alive died in captivity and argued that some could have returned alive under earlier comprehensive agreements. According to Alon, the cabinet repeatedly preferred partial agreements because they allowed the fighting to continue, all while invoking a false promise of absolute victory. His account came from inside the hostage operation.
Likud answered that ending the war earlier would have amounted to surrender and sacrificed later achievements in Rafah, along the Philadelphi Corridor, and elsewhere. That argument deserves an answer. It still leaves the government to explain which later achievement justified which lost hostage, and when the additional military gain would have become sufficient to end the war and establish a durable alternative to Hamas.
Continued pressure without a defined political destination is attrition, not strategy.
By July 2026, Brig. Gen. Dror Shalom, until recently the head of the Defense Ministry’s Political-Military Bureau, summarized the record with unusual precision. Israel had achieved extraordinary operational and military successes, he said, but strategically the war was a “resounding failure.” Hamas remained standing, and Israel had obtained no decisive result. Its international standing had reached a historic low because military power had not been converted into diplomatic advantage. Shalom’s assessment is almost a clinical description of the difference between winning battles and winning wars.
Even critics who wanted Israel to fight more harshly reached a related conclusion. Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter condemned nearly three years of fighting without a decisive result. “You can’t send soldiers to a three-year war without ending it with victory,” he said.
Maj. Gen. Gershon Hacohen said that Netanyahu would pay politically for the phrase “total victory” because no cinematic scene of Hamas’s complete surrender was going to occur. Israel still had to decide how the war would end and who would govern Gaza. Hacohen reached that conclusion while advocating a more aggressive military policy.
Where the Critics Agree
These men disagreed profoundly about the remedy. Some favored an earlier comprehensive hostage agreement; others called for an Arab-supported civilian administration. Eiland wanted much harsher coercion, while Brik thought the military burden was already unsustainable. Their views of civilian protection and territorial control were often opposite.
That makes their agreement harder to dismiss. They came from Israel’s political and military establishment, and several had advocated more aggressive action than the government pursued. Yet across ideological lines they kept returning to the same failure: the operations had no attainable political end state.
Truth Is Not Enemy Propaganda
The accusation that Israel embarked on a genocide is a blood libel. Israel went to war after Hamas invaded its territory, murdered approximately 1,200 people, abducted 251, and promised to repeat the attack. Its declared purpose was to destroy Hamas’s capacity to do so, not to exterminate the Palestinian population.
The immense suffering of Gazan civilians does not prove genocidal intent. One can reject the genocide accusation without pretending that every Israeli decision was wise or humane. Crimes require investigation, and reckless policies deserve condemnation. Civilian suffering matters because we are human beings, not because Hamas and its supporters have weaponized it against Israel.
Enemy propaganda cannot decide which truths Israelis are permitted to say. Iran, Hamas, and their allies will exploit Israeli criticism. They will strip it of context and use it to support accusations far beyond the evidence.
Precision is the answer, not silence.
To say that Israel lacked a winning strategy in Gaza does not excuse Hamas or ignore Iran. It asks why Israel’s government allowed an Iranian-supported proxy attack to draw the country into years of combat without defining the conditions under which the principal campaign would be complete.
What the Soldiers Won
Israel’s soldiers repeatedly created opportunities. They destroyed major parts of Hamas’s military infrastructure, killed senior commanders, seized strategically important ground, and helped bring every surviving hostage home.
Its government repeatedly failed to decide what those opportunities were for.
Hamas did not defeat the IDF.
The IDF won the battles.
Israel’s government lost the Gaza war.
