Members of Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades fighting in Israel on October 7th, 2023. Nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attack. Image via Telegram.
“You’ll see suicide bombers, you’ll see improvised explosive devices,” said the ex-CIA director, David Petraeus. Less than two weeks after Hamas’s attack on Israel had stunned the world, the former general who served during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq delivered a grim verdict on Politico’s Powerplay podcast on the future that awaited Israel’s boots-on-the-ground reoccupation of Gaza and the grueling and bloody war that awaited. “There will be ambushes and booby traps. [Israel’s campaign] could be Mogadishu on steroids very quickly. You don't win counterinsurgencies in a year or two.”
Hamas’s brutal surprise attack on Israel, the Palestinian Islamist’s new leader Yahya Sinwar has reshaped the Middle East after his operatives committed several atrocities and seized hundreds of hostages. A grieving Israel struck back with murderous force, dropping more bombs on Gaza than the United States did in Afghanistan in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001. Within a month of the attack, eight thousand Palestinians were dead, and over twenty thousand were wounded. A year later, Gaza has consumed Israel and the Palestinians in a deepening cycle of horror and the wider region has been unable to contain the conflict. Israel now wages war in Lebanon with Hezbollah and stands on the cusp of all-out war with Iran as Netanyahu’s government continues to conduct murderous raids on Gaza, committing massacre after massacre in schools and refugee camps as it chases ghosts in the devastated strip.
Hamas’s power has been decimated and Hezbollah is reeling from a flurry of Israeli airstrikes, ground incursions, and bombings that have wiped out its leadership and terrorised Lebanon and Gaza’s population. But the damage to Israel’s reputation is now irreparable. Israel is a rogue state that is carrying out genocide and naked ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, committing flagrant crimes against humanity and war crimes. It has tortured, looted, ransacked, vandalised and butchered in Gaza, bombed embassies, destroyed and damaged almost all Gaza’s hospitals, and killed UN personnel, aid workers, and journalists in record numbers.
The Israeli army has manufactured a famine in Gaza and massacred starving men, women, and children trying to get food in the devastated strip while Israeli fanatics ransack and block aid trucks. It has leveled, damaged, and destroyed most buildings, razed mosques to the ground, and targeted churches, cemeteries, schools, and universities. The death toll of more than 40,000 is a vast undercount with thousands more missing and nearly the entire population has been displaced, chased around Gaza by Israeli bombers. Some 19,000 children have been orphaned and a further 21,000 are lost, detained, or buried in unmarked graves. Thousands more men, women, and children have disappeared into an archipelago of torture and arbitrary detention.
Where the brutality of the decades-long occupation of the Palestinians was known before Hamas’ horrific assault, the true ugliness of the political ideology of Zionism has been revealed in last year’s whirlwind of conflict, the worst ever seen in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no redemption for an ideology that not only deals with the politics of extermination but actively revels in the death, racism, and destruction it unleashes.
No one who can take part in and exploit such extreme violence can emerge without having their own humanity permanently disfigured. Israel’s war of revenge may be burning Gaza and the wider Middle East but the consequences of its own actions will return home, corroding a fractious, divided country in the generations to come. Israel’s future is that of an isolated militaristic ethnostate, eroded from the inside by authoritarian currents, and fascistic messianic settlers obsessed with creating a theocratic state and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land.
For Sinwar, Operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ achieved certain objectives almost immediately. Hamas shattered the Israeli army’s deterrents and humiliated its intelligence services, the Mossad and Shin Bet. Furthermore, it has thrust the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza back onto the agenda of Arab states seeking ‘normalisation’ with Israel and put the question of the increasingly brutal occupation of the Palestinians back onto the international stage once more. The scale of the slaughter in Gaza, and to some extent its invasion of Lebanon, has also isolated Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and made the prime minister and his allies international pariahs.
However, while Hamas has won the current round of fighting on October 7 its victory has been pyrrhic in most ways. Hamas’s sole focus now is survival and the Israeli army has systematically eliminated a string of the organisation’s top leaders including Mohammad Deif, the alleged mastermind of the October 7 attacks, and Ismail Haniyeh, who headed up Hamas’s political bureau in an extrajudicial killing in Tehran, Iran’s capital.
Gaza has been razed to the ground as Sinwar now rules but it is unlikely he will survive in the long term, relentlessly hunted by the US and Israeli intelligence services. The strip of obliterated land is the grip of a deepening humanitarian catastrophe and support for the Islamist movement is not universal across Gaza and the West Bank.
According to Byline Times, only 6 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza would like to see Sinwar’s Hamas lead a Palestinian administration when the war ends and a further 53 per cent do not believe that the group is serious about forming a unity government with its rival, the Palestinian Authority. Were Palestinian elections to be held, a meager 6 per cent would vote for Hamas. If October 7 was testimony to Hamas’s military capabilities, it has also been a damning indictment of their failings in governance since 2006.
The Israeli army is struggling to uproot Hamas from its positions in Gaza as demonstrated by a ferocious raid turned massacre at Al-Shifa hospital in March as reports emerged of small cells regrouping in the north of the strip. After fierce fighting, more than 380 bodies were discovered in four mass graves after the second raid as Israeli forces reduced Gaza’s largest hospital to a burnt-out husk. Many of the bodies found in the graves included patients.
Rockets, albeit few, continue to hit Israeli territory from Gaza and the militant group is replenishing its losses. “I think it's very easy to recruit and regenerate, simply because there are many orphans,” Joost Hiltermann, a political analyst at International Crisis Group, said in an interview with Euronews. “Groups like Hamas have always recruited those orphaned in previous Israeli attacks.” In its efforts to restore deterrence, Israel has created a new generation, perhaps several, of operatives and militants that will fight the occupation.
According to other analysts, they are also rebuilding tunnel infrastructure pummelled by Israel’s bombing campaign and remain backed and funded by Iran. It has led the Israeli army and Netanyahu’s government to adopt ever more radical steps to force Hamas fighters to surrender, including plans to force over 400,000 Palestinian residents to leave Gaza City and covert the north into a 'military zone’, a blueprint for ethnic cleansing used when Israel occupied Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 War.
Hamas rules over a graveyard and with security forces absent to police the devastated strip, it has descended into chaos with gangs and militias forming to profiteer or fight the Israeli occupation. Trapped between the anarchical collapse of law and order in Gaza and Israel’s brutal ‘military zones’ where it habitual terrorises populations under its control, the future for Palestinian civilians is dire.