Israel, armed with the most sophisticated surveillance and weaponry on earth, was blindsided. Technology became its prison, not its shield. Drones, satellites, and AI-fed command centers could not read intent, could not decipher silence, could not see into the minds of men willing to die. As Ehud Yaari confessed, “Israel very likely had sufficient intelligence to anticipate a Hamas attack, yet was still unprepared. Technological superiority did not mean much in this case.” This is the paradox of empires: they drown in their own hubris. They forget that power, when it rests only on machines and walls, is brittle.
The empire underground
Hamas understood what Israel refused to see, that war in Gaza is not fought on the surface. It is waged in the shadow. Beneath Gaza lies a labyrinth: 100 to 700 kilometers of tunnels that erase Israel’s supremacy in the skies.
From below, Hamas can strike, vanish, and strike again. Tunnels turn weakness into strength, just as Viet Cong tunnels in Cu Chi once turned rice paddies into graveyards for American soldiers.
As the Council for a Secure America warned, “Disinformation and tunnel warfare have given Hamas operational breathing space. Asymmetric tactics and psychological warfare are challenging Israel’s military dominance.”
The tunnels are not just geography. They are metaphors. They embody what every empire fears: the persistence of resistance, invisible, unyielding, buried beneath every missile defence system.
War as theatre
October 7 was more than an assault. It was a theatre, a bloody and brutal performance staged for the world. Khalil Jahshan put it bluntly: Hamas’s operation was “politics by other means, a well-planned military and psychological war to expose Israel’s vulnerabilities.”
The script was clear: bait Israel into overreaction. And Israel obliged with biblical ferocity. Entire neighbourhoods in Gaza were flattened. Families obliterated. Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps were reduced to rubble.
And yet, the rubble spoke louder than Israel’s bombs. The dream of normalisation with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu’s crown jewel, was incinerated. Across capitals, even among Israel’s allies, the question whispered: how can a state that claims to be a democracy, a beacon, behave as if Palestinian life is disposable?
This is asymmetric warfare in its truest sense: military weakness converted into political advantage, atrocity translated into narrative power. The weaker side bleeds. The stronger side bleeds legitimacy.
Israel’s Faustian bargain
For two decades, Israel chose cynicism over peace. Netanyahu nurtured Hamas as a foil, permitting Qatari money to flow into Gaza, weakening the Palestinian Authority, ensuring Palestinians remained divided and leaderless.
This was statecraft as theatre, too. Keep the conflict simmering, sell “stability” to Washington, reap the fruits of Gulf normalisation. But the fire Israel thought it could contain has now engulfed it.
As Marwan Muasher wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The myth that peace is possible without addressing the Palestinians under occupation has now been shattered.” Chatham House was even harsher: “The inability of global policy to address the causes of conflict has allowed Hamas to grow in the vacuum.”
In short, Israel’s Faustian bargain has collapsed. The monster it thought it could manage has risen from the darkness.
The lie of eradication
Now we hear the familiar chorus: Hamas must be destroyed. Eradication is the mantra of generals who mistake slogans for strategy. But as Gerald M. Feierstein of the Middle East Institute notes, “Eradicating Hamas is unlikely to be an achievable objective at an acceptable cost.”
It never is. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon all tell the same story. You can kill men. You cannot kill memory. You cannot kill dispossession. You cannot kill the rage of a child who grows up beneath drones and rubble. Hamas is not just fighters. It is a symptom. It is a cry against erasure.
Israel may kill thousands more. But in doing so, it breeds the next generation of militants. Every bomb dropped is a seed planted. This is the curse of empire: the belief that overwhelming violence can erase an idea.
The Reckoning
October 7 did not just alter Israel’s military calculus. It exposed the moral bankruptcy at the heart of its project. The occupation cannot be managed. The Palestinians cannot be erased. Their suffering cannot be indefinitely hidden behind propaganda and Western complicity.
The war in Gaza is not about Hamas alone. It is about the fundamental refusal of a state, backed by the world’s most powerful patrons, to grant dignity and sovereignty to the people it occupies.
Asymmetric warfare is not a tactic. It is a mirror. It reflects the desperation of the oppressed and the blindness of the powerful. Until that mirror is confronted, until Israel and its allies admit that no amount of bombs or surveillance can buy legitimacy, the cycle of massacre and reprisal will grind on. Israel may flatten Gaza, but it cannot bury its own responsibility. The occupation is the original sin. And until that sin ends, 7 October will not be the last terrible day. This is the truth, 7 October forced into the open: the empire has no clothes.
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