‘Israel has failed to realize that carnage in Gaza has only made Hamas stronger’
TEHRAN - In an article published on June 21, Foreign Affairs analyzed “why Israel’s failing strategy makes its enemy stronger”.
The American magazine compares Hamas fighters resisting Israeli forces with Viet Cong guerillas fighting the United States during the Vietnam War.
Following is a summary of the article titled “Hamas is winning”:
Nine months of Israeli air and ground combat operations in Gaza have not defeated Hamas, nor is Israel close to vanquishing the group. To the contrary, according to the measures that matter, Hamas is stronger today than it was on October 7.
Since Hamas’s attack last October, Israel has invaded northern and southern Gaza with approximately 40,000 combat troops, forcibly displaced 80 percent of the population, killed over 37,000 people, dropped at least 70,000 tons of bombs on the territory (surpassing the combined weight of bombs dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg in all of World War II), destroyed or damaged over half of all buildings in Gaza, and limited the territory’s access to water, food, and electricity, leaving the entire population on the brink of famine.
Although many observers have highlighted the immorality of Israel’s conduct, Israeli leaders have consistently claimed that the goal of defeating Hamas and weakening its ability to launch new attacks against Israel must take precedence over any concerns about Palestinian lives. The punishment of the population of Gaza must be accepted as necessary to destroy the power of Hamas.
But thanks to Israel’s assault, Hamas’s power is actually growing. Just as the Viet Cong grew stronger during the massive “search and destroy” operations that ravaged much of South Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 when the United States poured troops into the country in an ultimately futile bid to turn the war in its favor, Hamas remains intractable and has evolved into a tenacious and deadly guerrilla force in Gaza—with lethal operations restarting in the northern regions that were supposedly cleared by Israel only a few months ago.
The central flaw in Israel’s strategy is not a failure of tactics or the imposition of constraints on military force—just as the failure of the United States’ military strategy in Vietnam had little to do with the technical proficiency of its troops or political and moral limits on the uses of military power. Rather, the overarching failure has been a gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas’s power. To its great detriment, Israel has failed to realize that the carnage and devastation it has unleashed in Gaza has only made its enemy stronger.
“Israel’s overarching failure has been a gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas’s power.”
For months, governments and analysts have fixated on the number of Hamas fighters killed by Israel’s forces as if this statistic were the most important measure of the success of Israel’s campaign against the group. To be sure, many Hamas fighters have been killed. Israel says 14,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters Hamas had before the war are now dead, while Hamas insists it has lost only 6,000 to 8,000 fighters. U.S. intelligence sources indicate the real number of Hamas dead is around 10,000.
A focus on these numbers, however, makes it hard to truly assess Hamas’s power. Despite its losses, Hamas remains in de facto control of large swaths of Gaza, including those areas where the territory’s civilians are now concentrated. The group still enjoys tremendous support from Gazans. According to a recent Israeli assessment, Hamas now has more fighters in the northern areas of Gaza, which the Israeli army seized in the fall at the cost of hundreds of soldiers, than it does in Rafah in the south.
Hamas is now waging a guerrilla war, involving ambushes and improvised bombs (often made from unexploded ordnance or captured IDF weapons), protracted operations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser recently said could last through the end of 2024 at least. It could still strike in Israel; Hamas likely has some 15,000 mobilized fighters—roughly ten times the number of fighters who carried out the October 7 attacks. Further, more than 80 percent of the group’s underground tunnel network remains usable for planning, storing weapons, and evading Israeli surveillance, capture, and attacks. Most of Hamas’s top leadership in Gaza remains intact. In sum, Israel’s fast-moving offensive in the fall has given way to a grinding war of attrition that would leave Hamas with the ability to attack Israelis even if the IDF presses ahead with its campaign in southern Gaza.
Failed counterinsurgencies in the past often fixated on enemy body counts. The IDF is now engaged in the familiar game of whack-a-mole that bogged down U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years. Slavish attention to body counts tends to confuse tactical and strategic success and ignore the key measures that would show whether the strategic power of the opponent is growing even as the group’s immediate losses mount. For a group, the key source of power is not the size of its current generation of fighters but its potential to gain supporters from the local community in the future.
The power of an armed group such as Hamas does not come from the typical material factors that analysts use to judge the might of states—including the size of their economy, the technological sophistication of their militaries, how much external support they enjoy, and the strength of their educational systems. Rather, the most crucial source of power of Hamas and the like are likely to die for the cause. And that ability to recruit is rooted, ultimately, in a single factor: the scale and intensity of support a group derives from its community.
Armed groups are walk-in volunteers, often either angry over the loss of family members or friends or more generally enraged at a powerful state’s use of heavy military force.
Hezbollah flourished with growing popular support among Shiites during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 1999, evolving from a small armed group into a mainstream political party with an armed wing of around 40,000 fighters today.
These dynamics help account for Hamas’s staying power in its resistance against Israel. To assess the group’s true strength, analysts should consider the various dimensions of its support among Palestinians.
Five surveys by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) from June 2023 to the most recent, completed in June 2024, present a striking finding: on virtually every measure, Hamas has more support among Palestinians today than before October 7.
“Israel strengthening the bonds between Hamas and the local community.”
Political support for Hamas has grown, especially compared with its competitors. For instance, although Hamas and its main rival, Fatah, enjoyed roughly equivalent levels of support in June 2023, by June 2024 twice as many Palestinians supported Hamas (40 percent compared with 20 percent for Fatah).
Israel’s bombing and ground invasion of Gaza has neither dampened Palestinian support for attacks against Israelis inside Israel nor markedly depressed support for the October 7 attack itself. In March 2024, 73 percent of Palestinians believed Hamas was right to launch the October 7 attack. These numbers are extremely high, not only after the attacks spurred Israel’s brutal campaign but also in light of the fact that a lower number, 53 percent, of Palestinians supported armed attacks on Israelis in September 2023.
Hamas is enjoying a “rally round the flag” moment, helping explain why Gazans are not providing more intelligence to Israeli forces about the whereabouts of Hamas leaders and Israeli hostages. Support for armed attacks against Israelis appears to have risen especially among Palestinians in the West Bank, which is now rightly on par with the consistently high levels of support for these attacks in Gaza, showing that Hamas has made extensive gains across Palestinian society since October 7.
The survey data also shows how Israel’s military campaign has affected Palestinians. As of March 2024, the weight of the perceived price of the war on the Palestinian population is remarkably high. Sixty percent of Palestinians in Gaza report having a family member killed in the current war, while over three-quarters report having a family member killed or injured, both numbers significantly higher than in December 2023. This punishment is not having a significant deterrent effect among Palestinians, failing to reduce their support for armed attacks against Israelis and their support for Hamas.
After October 7, Palestinian support for Hamas has surged, to the detriment of Israel’s security. Yes, Israel has killed many thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza. But these losses in the current generation of fighters are already being offset by the rise in support for Hamas and the group’s consequent ability to better recruit the next generation. In the meantime, until those new recruits arrive, all signs indicate that Hamas’s current fighters are likely more eager than ever to wage protracted guerrilla warfare against any Israeli targets they can strike.
After nine months of grueling war, it is time to recognize the stark reality. The group is more than the sum of its current number of fighters. It is also more than an idea. Hamas is a political and social movement, and it is not going away any time soon.
“Hamas is neither defeated nor on the verge of defeat.”
Israel’s current strategy of heavy military operations may kill some Hamas fighters, but this strategy is only strengthening the bonds between Hamas and the local community. For nine months, Israel has pursued virtually unfettered military operations in Gaza, with little evident progress toward any of its objectives. Hamas is neither defeated nor on the verge of defeat, and its cause is more popular and stronger than before October 7. In the absence of a plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people that Palestinians might accept, the resistance fighters will keep coming back and in larger numbers.
But Israeli leaders appear no more willing to conceive of such a viable political plan than they were before October 7. There is little end in sight to the tragedy continuing to unfold in Gaza. The war will go on and on, more Palestinians will die, and the threat to Israel will only grow.
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