Who won if anybody the Gaza war?

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Palestinian resistance group Hamas has won the Gaza war and prevented Israel from achieving its goals, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council has said.

“This war was a disastrous Israeli failure in Gaza," Giora Eiland, a retired general, told Maariv newspaper on Sunday.

"This war was a failure for a very simple reason that Hamas did not only succeed in preventing Israel from achieving its goals, but also remained in power,” he added.

Eiland, who headed the National Security Council from 2004 to 2006, said the ceasefire deal does not prevent Hamas from rearming.

"If Hamas moves against Israel, it will be violating the agreement," he said.

Eiland was the mastermind of the so-called Generals’ Plan, which calls for imposing a blockade on northern Gaza and forcibly displacing Palestinians from the area as part of Tel Aviv’s genocidal war on the enclave.

The debate in Gaza about 7 October, when around 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage, has continued throughout the war and intensified after the ceasefire was announced.

Some defend Hamas, claiming its survival alone is enough to call it a victory, while others criticise the movement, arguing that the unprecedented price paid by Palestinians constitutes a defeat.

Mohammed Imad al-Din, a barber in Gaza City forced to flee to Khan Younis with his wife and children along with more than a million others, told the BBC: "If killing 46,000 people, displacement and destruction is a victory, then I hope the leaders of Hamas can explain the meaning of defeat.

"I'm relieved, but definitely not happy because the future is uncertain."

Meanwhile, Saifjan Al-Shami, a doctor at the Islamic University of Gaza, said on Facebook she was "surprised by any Palestinian, especially a Gazan, who does not acknowledge the victory of his country and mocks those who say we won.

"Yes, Gaza won, and Hamas won. Hey, do you know the criteria for victory before you speak? You must review yourself, your patriotism and your loyalty to Gaza. Gaza won despite the spite of the haters."

For now it is too early to judge whether the war will end after the first stage of the ceasefire agreement.

After 15 months of agony, the potential Gaza ceasefire comes as a colossal relief not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for the wider Middle East. True, the deal is narrow in size and scope. It covers a physical space scarcely bigger than Martha’s Vineyard. The actual terms of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement extend no farther than a pause in fighting, an exchange of some hostages and a partial Israeli withdrawal. Given recent precedent, the fragility of Israel's ruling coalition and the yawning gap between the belligerents, this deal is just as likely to collapse, or simply to lapse, as to foster a longer-term peace. Still, even a temporary lowering of the regional heart rate allows for useful reflection.

The modern Middle East is prone to shifting alliances and balances of power, but each turn of the kaleidoscope tends to tumble only one piece of the multicolored pattern at a go. This time, the rearrangement looks far more radical than the puny size of Gaza might have suggested. Perhaps not since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 has the regional puzzle been so swiftly and wholly transformed. In those six days Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, upending a two-decade-long status quo, shattering Arab dreams, expanding America's role, and making the Jewish State an occupying power and turning millions of Palestinians into a subject people.

By contrast the Gaza crisis has lasted far longer than any previous Arab-Israeli clash. Its cost in lives has been immensely higher, too. An epidemiological study published this month in The Lancet, Britain's top medical journal, suggests that 70,000 Gazans may have been killed so far, a grisly tally that is more than three times greater than the total number of Israelis, military and civilian, killed in all the wars and terror attacks Israel has faced since its founding in 1948. Even so, Hamas's easy breach of Israeli defenses on Oct. 7, and Israel's loss of 1,200 lives in a single day were an unprecedented shock to the Jewish State. But as in 1967 the reverberations of the war have reached beyond the immediate parties to Israel's other neighbors and even more distant countries across the region, often in unexpected ways.

How so? At a dinner party in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, a guest speaks with dark sarcasm of the singular achievements of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind behind the horrendous Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the current conflagration (an Israeli drone killed Sinwar a year later). “Isn't it amazing how one man achieved in one year what millions of people couldn't do in decades?” she asks rhetorically, ticking off the effects. “Because of him Israel destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon, and because of that the Assad regime fell in Syria, and because of that Iran's 'Axis of Resistance' collapsed.” She pauses for effect, then adds that it is to Sinwar's "genius” that we owe the prolonging of Benjamin Netanyahu's political life as Israel's prime minister, as well as the rescue of the Egyptian leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, from mounting debts and other troubles.

The sarcasm is merited. Each of these "successes” represents an own-goal for Hamas. The Palestinian Islamist group was allied to and funded by the now strategically diminished Islamic Republic of Iran. The Assad family in Syria were no special friends to Hamas, but Israel took advantage of their fall to obliterate Syria's entire arsenal of heavy weapons, putting one more potential regional adversary out of military action for perhaps a generation. Netanyahu is far more popular in Israel now than before the war and the Egyptian leader, who has viciously persecuted its parent organization, the global Muslim Brotherhood, has been reprieved by Western creditors in reward for maintaining a stony silence over Gaza.

To be fair, Sinwar at immense cost to both Israelis and Palestinians did achieve some of his real aims. He put the plight of Palestinians back in the global spotlight. He undermined efforts to widen Israel's web of treaties with Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia. He shamed Israel, first by exposing its military incompetence and then by provoking a response so violent that it has severely damaged the country's moral standing. But the people of Gaza are not the only ones in the region to ask, now, whether Sinwar's gamble was worth it.

The Hamas leader's reckless play has left Israel, as it was briefly after the 1967 war, an almost undisputed mini-hegemon in the region. Its Arab neighbours are military dwarves by comparison, and in most cases too absorbed in internal affairs to care much for the fate of the Palestinians. Iran has burned its fingers, and all that even nuclear weapons would bring is a new level of stand-off with Israel–which is in any case a rather far-off country that many ordinary Iranians do not regard as an enemy. The timely arrival in Washington of a new, even more gung-ho Israel-first administration than Joe Biden's, which bankrolled Netanyahu's Gaza offensive to the tune of $17.9 billion, simply underlines Israel's military dominance.

But as in 1967, Israel's triumph comes loaded with unwanted responsibilities. Back then, wise Israelis counseled that to remain an occupying power over an understandably angry people was not only morally repugnant, but could erode Israel's own society. That advice was ultimately ignored in favor of an undeclared policy of creeping annexation and colonization. The result is that today Israel rules over populations of Palestinians and of Jewish Israelis that are almost equal in number but disturbingly skewed in terms of rights and wealth and outlook. This is hardly a recipe for peaceful coexistence.

Yet because of unquestioning support from America and other Western backers, because of perpetual Arab disarray and because of its own rightward political drift, Israel has persisted in this direction. The temptation to dig the hole deeper is even stronger just now, with Gaza a smoldering ruin and all potential regional challengers cowed.

Hours after the ceasefire was declared on Sunday, Hamas fighters were back on Gaza’s streets. Not many, it was true, and those who appeared were armed only with Kalashnikov rifles and some rudimentary body armour, but they were there.

In Khan Younis, a handful of pickup trucks with gunmen onboard drove through cheering crowds of young men. Dozens of uniformed fighters with Hamas headbands were visible when the three Israeli hostages were handed over in Gaza City. Elsewhere, there were reports that Hamas policemen, dressed in blue police uniform, deployed in some areas after months in hiding to avoid Israeli strikes.

These were the sights that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, wanted to avoid, but no doubt knew would come. They are the images that Hamas most want to be seen – in Gaza and the West Bank, the region and the world. They do not show a large or particularly capable force, and social media has exerted its usual magnifying effect. But, as they were meant to do, the images show that Hamas has survived the Israeli onslaught of the last 15 months and that, Hamas leaders believe, is a major victory in itself.

The reality is that Hamas has suffered huge losses. On the day of the 7 October 2023 raids, Hamas fired thousands of missiles deep into Israel. Now, it can only fire the occasional projectile at targets a dozen or so kilometres away. Supply lines have been cut, ammunition stores emptied and most new bombings use recycled explosives from ordnance fired by Israel. Much of the tunnel network built under Gaza by Hamas has been destroyed.

Its top leaders in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas at the time of his death and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, are dead. So too are many experienced middle-ranking militants.

Antony Blinken, the outgoing US secretary of state, said in a speech last week that Hamas had recruited almost as many combatants as it has lost and that this was a recipe for prolonged insurgency, and so another reason for a ceasefire deal.

Israeli officials say recruit numbers are lower than Blinken suggests and that inexperienced teenagers cannot replace hardened, well-trained veterans.

This may be true, but even if seriously degraded, Hamas was still able to hurt Israeli forces right until the ceasefire. Recent fighting has been fierce in Beit Hanoun, a town in northern Gaza, with Israeli commanders underestimating the size and morale of Hamas’s forces there, as well as the extent of its tunnel-network reconstruction. Hamas inflicted significant casualties as a consequence.

On the political front, Hamas has also been weakened. It has lost control of the territory it governed for 16 years, with all the prestige, power, facilities and revenue that it brought. Many Hamas officials are dead; its network of clubs, charities and religious associations scattered. Other actors – big criminal families, for example – now compete for influence. Many in Gaza blame Hamas as well as Israel for the bloody war that has caused 47,000 deaths and so much destruction.

But for the moment, without any agreed plan for a government for Gaza, there is no one else. Aid organisations still deal with many of the same administrators they knew back in the summer of 2023. A Hamas media office functions, and is ambitiously describing a “government plan” to return Gaza to its prewar condition.

The reality is that neither side can claim an outright victory, which is one reason that this moment of fragile calm has come. Tragically, it is also why any hopes of a durable peace may be dashed.

A commander of Hamas fighters in Beit Hanun and elsewhere in northern Gaza, who was believed to have been killed in May, appeared in a video on Wednesday. Hussein Fiad apparently has a new lease on life.

He gave a short speech after reappearing in the wake of the ceasefire. Standing with several men, the gaunt Fiad, sporting a short beard, spoke about how Hamas had succeeded in Gaza.

Israel had not achieved its goals in Gaza, he said, adding that when one doesn’t achieve their goals, they lose. This is what “they call military rules: The strong one loses when he doesn’t win,” he said.

Fiad implied that the weaker side, Hamas, won simply by virtue of not losing. He was laying out clearly what the Hamas strategy was: It was not to lose.

Israel measures winning differently. Israel didn’t have a clear strategy in Gaza. Therefore, it was harder for it to win, because it didn’t seem to have a clear goal or “day after” plan.

Hamas knew this and assumed if it just waited long enough, then it would “win.” Fiad is a kind of symbol of this challenge in Gaza.

The Beit Hanoun issue
Fiad’s reappearance is an example of the problem the IDF has faced in Gaza throughout the war.

Beit Hanun is a town in northern Gaza close to the Israeli border. The outskirts of Beit Hanun are less than two kilometers from Sderot.

This area has been used to threaten Israel for years. Rockets have often been fired from Beit Hanun. The urban area has also often been heavily damaged in past rounds of conflict. Hamas always returns, however, and uses it to threaten Israel.

After the ceasefire on January 19, the IDF redeployed the Nahal Brigade, which had been fighting in Beit Hanun, to the border area to prepare for new missions. This again illustrates the challenge the IDF faced in northern Gaza.

Three months of tough fighting from October to January demonstrated how hard it was to remove Hamas completely from this area. That someone such as Fiad has not only survived but has popped up to declare victory is an example of the Hamas plan all along.

Hamas always believed all it had to do was hide in the rubble and wait. It didn’t need to confront the IDF with “battalions” of fighters. It split them up into small groups and waited.

While Hamas may have suffered thousands of casualties – according to IDF estimates, nearly 20,000 of its fighters were eliminated – the terrorist group continues to hold on to Gaza. In the absence of any other group willing to administer the area, it will continue to run things with men such as Fiad.

He makes no secret of Hamas’s strategy. The challenge Israel has faced in confronting such a strategy is that it has not come up with an effective counterstrategy.

Humanity won. An eye for an eye approach leaves both sides blind. I feel all this represents is a temporary lull in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Who knows where and when it will erupt next

They ( Israel) have created a never ending War, a Hate that will survive . Into the next epoch.....and has appeared to revel in this situation .

The Hamas fighters stood on the Gaza boundary once considered crucial for keeping them at bay.

Eight heavily armed men, wearing seemingly spotless military uniforms and Hamas' distinctive green headbands, stood atop concrete blocks at the Netzarim corridor on Monday, welcoming the tens of thousands of Gazans returning to what remained of their homes in the north. With their AK-47s strapped to their vests and their faces covered, the fighters took selfies, shook hands and handed water to passers-by.

Witnessed and recorded by an NBC News crew in Gaza, the fighters' presence at a crossing deemed vital for keeping Hamas from going into the north of Gaza raises big questions about one of Israel’s stated objectives in launching the war: eliminate the militant group behind the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to destroy Hamas after it killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage in its surprise Oct. 7, 2023, attack. More recently he softened the objective, to destroy the militants’ grip on power.

“We set three war goals: The first war goal was to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities,” he said on Sept. 4. “The second was to free our hostages. And the third was to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.”

Israel Defense Forces did not respond to requests for comment on what these sorts of appearances mean, while Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.

‘Perpetual war’
The scene at the Netzarim corridor on Saturday was similar to the one in Palestine Square in Gaza City earlier in the week, when four Israeli hostages stood atop a stage surrounded by hundreds of masked Hamas gunmen. A poster emblazoned with “Zionism will not win” hung on a platform below them.

Blanketed in Palestinian flags, the square exploded with cheers the moment the hostages were handed over. Music blared as children clambered on the stage table, where Red Cross representatives had signed handover documents just minutes before.

“It was a Hollywood production. It was very orderly,” said Gershon Baskin, an Israeli who has acted as a mediator with Hamas for decades. “It looked like there’s this group that’s really in control of everything.”

According to U.S. assessments, Hamas has recruited almost as many militants as it lost in the war.

“Each time Israel completes its military operations and pulls back, Hamas militants regroup and re-emerge, because there’s nothing else to fill the void,” former Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the Atlantic Council this month. “That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”

And just as missiles stopped whistling over Gaza on the morning of Jan. 19, the first day of the ceasefire, Hamas fighters emerged in force. With their faces concealed and waving their green flags, they thrust their rifles skyward.

“It was a message to the West Bank, that we are a national power for the Palestinian people, not just a fundamentalist group,” Ronni Shaked, a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said. “To Israel, they said, we are still at war.”

Convoys of fighters
As the ceasefire unfolds, Hamas has resumed everyday operations

Convoys of fighters made their way through Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Jan. 20, according to video shot by NBC News in Gaza that showed crowds chanting slogans, “We are your men, Mohammad Deif,” in reference to the top commander of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, who Israel says it killed in an airstrike last year.

Nearby, with his whistle and deep blue police uniform, Abdul Wahab Abdul Raouf Samour waved through traffic.

He was among the many officers who had been called back to work, he said.

“We received orders from the Ministry of Interior to wear our police uniforms and take to the streets to assist citizens and manage traffic in the area,” Samour, 40, told the NBC News crew.

Truckloads of humanitarian aid, carrying everything from food and bottled water to commercial goods, has crawled into Khan Younis. As the trucks rattled through the dusty streets, they were at times seen being escorted by convoys of gunmen, or with men standing atop the cargo to prevent stealing.

Some Qassam gunmen were also stationed in the streets to ensure the aid’s safe delivery.

Very seldom does anybody outright "win" a war. Canada won the war of 1812 because US aggression failed. The current leadership of Vietnam, or their predecessors, won the war with the US as the US was utterly routed. Even in that case, some say the US won a sort of victory, because the USSR never expected the US to hold out against great odds for as long as it did, so that going forward the USSR had greater respect for the US as an adversary.

But most wars basically continue until neither side has the will to continue. They alter the geopolitical landscape but are merely punctuating incidents within the scope of a much longer process.

As I see it, both Gaza and Israel are worse off now than before 7 October, so it would seem naïve to declare victory for either side. Israel didn't want this war (well maybe Netanyahu somehow wanted it but Israel as a country certainly didn't) and I can say gained absolutely nothing positive from it (although some people will claim that Israel is happy that an admittedly tiny fraction of the Gazan population died as a result of the combat, most being innocent civilians). But that isn't the same as saying Israel lost. I think I could say Hamas sort of lost, because I don't think they anticipated how ruthlessly Israel would retaliate. I think they'd have known if they understood Israel better, but they possibly screwed up because they didn't count on Israel prosecuting the war as they wished, with little regard for world opinion. As a consequence, their people suffered grievously. None of that suffering would have happened without the 7 October assault (again I'm disregarding the possibility that Netanyahu had something to do with it). Hamas may be celebrating, but I don't think most Gazans are. They won nothing, and yeah the war could start up again at any time and then more innocent people will suffer.

Very seldom does anybody outright "win" a war. Canada won the war of 1812 because US aggression failed.