Daniel Byman
On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a devastating terrorist attack on Israel, killing almost 1,200 Israelis and seizing around 243 hostages. The scale of the attack was off the charts for a small state – the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust – and the nature of the killings, which included the deliberate killing of children and old people, as well as mass sexual violence, seared itself into Israel’s consciousness. In the months that followed, Israel waged a destructive campaign in Gaza, killing more than 34,000 people, including many children, in an attempt to destroy the terrorist group, putting all Palestinians in Gaza at grave risk of disease and starvation. The campaign continues, albeit at a slower pace than in its initial months.
Both Hamas and Israel may be losing. Each can point to quite real successes against the other, but when the fighting subsides, both are likely to be worse off than they were when the war started.
Hamas can claim to have brought pain to its enemy in a way that the Jewish state has not experienced in its history. Hamas has also restored its previously languishing ‘resistance’ credentials and, for the time being, increased its popularity among Palestinians at a time when leadership of the Palestinian national movement is in play. It has also at least temporarily stalled Israel’s regional normalisation. Yet Hamas has paid a tremendous price for these successes, and ordinary Palestinians have paid an even greater one. Hamas’s military forces and infrastructure are battered, its leadership under siege and its long-term popularity uncertain.
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