Hamas benefits every day from the war while Israel has failed, failed to achieve its goals
The New York Times
🔴 Much of Gaza is in ruins, as its people have been pushed from their homes by Israeli shelling and the death toll has escalated higher than ever. On the ground, Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for 16 years, has largely disappeared, other than for its fighters to appear to attack Israeli tanks or fire rockets at Israel.
but Hamas is still reaping benefits from its surprise attack on Israel on the seventh of October . It is considered the only Palestinian faction that has been pressing and obtaining concessions from Israel for many years. He caused a blow to Israel's plans to improve relations with its Arab neighbors and returned the Palestinian issue to the agendas of world leaders.
🔴 Two months into the war, despite promises by Israeli officials to destroy Hamas, Israel has yet to kill its top leaders, free the remaining 137 hostages held by Hamas or provide convincing evidence that it can achieve its goal of eliminating Hamas at no imaginary human cost.
🔴 In the calculation of Hamas, the high cost of Israel's goals is an additional advantage. While adhering to its long-term goal of destroying the Jewish state, Hamas could declare victory as soon as it survived to fight the day after the war.
"there will always be an advantage that an unconventional power has, especially if it is as ruthless as Hamas and does not really care about the damage done to local civilians,"said Ahmed Fouad al-Khatib, a Middle East policy analyst who grew up in Gaza. "Israel will be stuck in this unwinnable war, causing widespread death and destruction ."
🔴 What exactly Israel can achieve is still an open question. But just continuing the war could, over time, hurt Israel's economy and international standing, while encouraging a new generation of Palestinians to hate Israel - all of which benefits Hamas.
🔴 The war was catastrophic for the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza. About 85 percent have fled their homes and are now facing an increasing challenge to find food, water, shelter and medical care. More than 15,000 people have been killed, more than two-thirds of them women and children, according to the territory's health authorities, which do not report the death toll of militants.
🔴 The war has affected Hamas as well. The group has largely given up governance in Gaza, although remnants of the police force still operate in the south, and medics in hospitals overseen by the Ministry of health are struggling to treat a huge number of sick and wounded. Otherwise, it increasingly leaves the people of the sector to fend for themselves.
🔴 Israel has blown up many tunnels built by Hamas over the years to secretly move around the territory, detain prisoners, manufacture weapons, plan attacks.
It is estimated that Hamas has 25,000 fighters, and Israeli officials estimate that a few thousand of them were killed in Gaza, in addition to about 1,000 inside Israel in October. Both Israel and Hamas announced the names of Hamas military figures killed in the war. On Thursday, Israel released a photo it said showed 11 Hamas leaders meeting in a hideout. Five of them were marked with red circles saying, "eliminated".
🔴 But fighters from Hamas and other armed factions continue to attack Israeli troops inside Gaza and have killed more than 90 soldiers since the beginning of the Israeli ground invasion, including the son of the former Israeli chief of staff.
🔴 Israel has yet to find and kill senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, the highest Hamas official in the territory, and Mohammed al-Deif, who leads the group's armed wing. Israel considers both men the architects of the October 7 attack and the fighting in Gaza since then.
🔴 Mr. Sinwar has not appeared in public since the war began. But one of the hostages, yochefed Lifshitz, an 85-year-old peace activist, told an Israeli newspaper after her release last month that Mr. Sinwar had come to the tunnel where she was being held. She said that she asked him if he was ashamed to do such a thing to people who supported peace. She said that Mr. Sinwar did not answer.
🔴 Coordination between Hamas members inside and outside Gaza continues, which allowed the leaders based in Qatar to negotiate the subsequent exchange of hostages. The group's media teams publish news updates, statements from commanders, videos of attacks and civilians killed in Israeli strikes. Hamas officials in Turkey and Lebanon convey their views to journalists and diplomats, and the group's leaders in Qatar regularly talk with mediators from Qatar and Egypt about a possible ceasefire and prisoner exchange.
Ahmed Abdul Hadi, a Hamas representative, told dozens of attendees that the battle represented a "qualitative shift" in the struggle against Israel, and that Hamas and the Palestinians had accepted the sacrifices necessary to keep the Palestinian cause alive.
"The Palestinian people and their resistance had to make an expensive strategic decision because the costs of liquidating the Palestinian cause and squandering Palestinian rights will be much greater,"he said.
🔴 Of course, the civilians of Gaza had no say in Hamas's decision to attack Israel, and some complained that they were paying the price, despite the great danger of speaking out against the movement.
🔴 "Why are they hiding among people?""An unidentified man covered in dust in a hospital said during an interview with Al Jazeera. "Why don't they go to hell and hide there?""
🔴 But measuring the scale of such criticism is difficult, and it pales in comparison with Palestinian anger at how Israel is fighting.
"there is a lot of horror, but despite this, Hamas is now undoubtedly the leader of Palestinian nationalism,"said Abdul-Gad Hamayel, a lecturer at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. "He is now the one who holds the pressure papers."
By carrying out such a dramatic attack and freeing 240 Palestinians from Israeli prisons in exchange for 105 people kidnapped in October, Mr. Hamayel said that Hamas overcame the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority.
🔴 While Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and other countries, the Palestinian Authority recognizes Israel's right to exist and has limited authority in parts of the West Bank. But it has come under increasing criticism from Palestinians who see the body as corrupt, undemocratic and compromised because its security forces coordinate with Israel to arrest Palestinian militants.
🔴 President Biden and other American officials fully supported Israel throughout the war. But in recent weeks, they have paired that support with concern that the massive destruction and high death toll could undermine Israel's broader goals. They also renewed calls for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians as the only path to long-term peace. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads a right-wing government.
🔴 Other observers pointed out that leaders in Israel and the West were too quick to assume that Israel could actually destroy Hamas.
🔴 One month after the war, John Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, published an analysis entitled "Israel could lose". He did not argue that Hamas would turn the tables and destroy Israel, but that a war could serve Hamas ' long-term goals by withdrawing support from the Palestinian Authority. This, in turn, will further isolate Israel from the countries of the Arab and developing world and complicate its relations with the United States and Europe.
🔴 Mr. Alterman said in an interview last week that such an outcome is still possible.
from the point of view of Hamas: "this is the first step necessary to dissipate the power that Israel gets from integration into the region and the world".
There are also scant historical examples of Israel successfully using overwhelming force to destroy its enemies.
🔴 In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, which it considered a terrorist organization. The war was long and deadly and failed to destroy P.L.O., While paving the ground for the rise of Hezbollah. (Israel signed peace agreements with P.L.O. In 1993).
🔴 In 2006, Israel again went to war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which returned stronger in the years that followed.
🔴 Israel has also fought three major wars against Hamas in Gaza since 2008, none of which has prevented the group from rearming and preparing for the October 7 attack.
Mr. Al-Khatib, a policy analyst from Gaza, pointed to the series of Hamas leaders killed by Israel by the time it left Gaza in 2004.
🔴 "All these top leaders were assassinated, so I had the impression that Hamas was a weak organization,"he said.
🔴 Mr. Al-Khatib added that he was wrong, having learned in the years that followed that Hamas considers its leaders replaceable and sees the discontent of the population in Gaza as a way to ensure recruits for the movement in the future.
🔴 "I would never have thought that Hamas would rise to such a level of power,"Mr. Al-Khatib said. "But it indicates how flexible they are, they are adaptive and one way or another they will find a way to reconfigure, even outside Gaza ."
