Israel entered this war in 2023 with two objectives: the destruction of Hamas as a fighting force and its removal from the government of Gaza, but without much idea of what postwar Gaza would look like.
Maybe the current ceasefire will end this war and maybe Hamas will hand over some version of the government of Gaza to a coalition of technocrats.
But even if that happens, who has won? Let’s look at the scoresheet.
Israel has smashed Hamas’ conventional forces. Indeed the IDF has won every purely military aspect of the war, decapitating Hamas and killing thousands of its fighters, and taken the opportunity to deal with long-standing threats from Hizbullah, Iran and Yemen.
The Assad regime has fallen. There has only been token opposition to the Israeli military campaigns from the Arab states.
But Hamas has absorbed Israeli military pressure well enough to remain at the table, and they are still the only people to negotiate with
Meanwhile, Hamas fighters are already back on the streets of Gaza, settling scores and fighting local militias. They are demonstrating the difference between being a government and owning the streets. And when your enemy defines success as your destruction, survival is victory.
Of course, thousands of Hamas fighters have been killed, but Hamas has never promised its fighters either peace or long life, only conflict and martyrdom. And the brutal truth is that trigger pullers are among the most replaceable materiel of the Hamas campaign.
It won’t be easy to rebuild the ability to fire rockets at scale into Israel. It will be easy to find recruits in a small, sealed and overcrowded space that offers little gainful employment to a glut of young men.
Aside from financial and social benefits, Hamas is offering the most valuable commodity of all — a sense of purpose.
If we look beyond Gaza the picture is less clear. Hamas had two victories in this war. The first was survival; the second was the export of the idea that Israel is a uniquely cruel enemy, and armed resistance by Hamas the only alternative to it.
That second victory, for sentiment, is fragile, as such victories always are.
Hamas gained immensely from a moral panic about the war. Like other moral panics, there was an element of truth to the narrative. There is no doubt that this war, like any war, caused destruction, hardship and civilian deaths, although Gaza’s aid dependency, physical and political isolation and demographic peril all precede October 7.
But exaggerated language like "genocide" has replaced any sober analysis of the IDF campaign. A sober look is needed given how divisive and controversial this Israeli government’s policy, especially on the hostages, has been.
And the Israeli policy of excluding international journalists from Gaza has left untested claim and counterclaim about the food and aid supply, medical system or social breakdown. But the current level of popular hysteria, in which the events of Gaza overshadow domestic politics across the West, doesn’t look sustainable. It may be that the international aid industry, wary of compassion fatigue and internally competitive for resource, will want to maintain the sense of crisis in Gaza.
But an opening to the foreign press would put Gaza’s governance and the use of that aid under scrutiny. That scrutiny is likely to illuminate the gap between the Hamas agenda and its brutal government and the interests of the inhabitants of Gaza.
So what next for Hamas? Hamas needs to avoid or deflect the blame for bringing down Israeli retribution — biblical in scale and entirely predictable — on the population of Gaza by its murderous rampage on October 7, 2023.
So it must mythologise the war, focusing on the suffering of the Palestinians. It may well find it necessary to continue sending soldiers to martyrdom to keep this impression alive.
Peace and reconstruction could rapidly reduce the appeal of the Hamas brand, which is based on a monopoly of armed resistance to Israel. So Hamas has reason to keep fighting.
Yet legitimacy in Gaza itself requires being associated with a peace dividend: food, medicine, schools and maybe jobs. Hamas has always balanced armed resistance with social provision.
So Hamas needs to maintain or reassert three things: access to weaponry with control of the street; control over aid and above all over reconstruction money; and a simplified but persistent international victim narrative which continues to demonise Israel and divert attention from Hamas’ atrocities even as conditions in Gaza improve.
And for Israel? The simplest way to win the peace would be to find a way back to the Abraham Accords and normalisation with Saudi Arabia. This would, finally, redraw the map of the Middle East and offer a way to the comprehensive peace of which US President Donald Trump has spoken.
In time, along with Israel’s defeat of Iran’s proxies, such a peace would isolate Hamas and eventually render its armed resistance narrative irrelevant. Peace is always the biggest prize of war.
But no less important is the need to rebuild the belief that Israel is a safe home for Jews. The events of October 7 would have traumatised any nation.
But Israel only exists because of the belief that Jews aren’t safe anywhere else, something the recent global rise of anti-Semitism (or possibly the acceptability of previously latent anti-Semitism) has underlined.
The war was fought, in part, to rebuild that sense of a safe home, but much more will be needed. Israel went into the war in the middle of a political crisis, and the fault lines are still there.
Also, expect a brutal reckoning for the mistakes which led to October 7. Maybe even more important, Israel is in desperate need of a counter-narrative which will stop and in time reverse the haemorrhage of its support.
The future will be at least as testing as the past.
• Ian Fletcher is a former director of the GCSB, and has worked in the UK, Europe and the Middle East; Ian Baharie is an Arabic-speaking former British diplomat who has served in Jerusalem and Gaza.
