Israel did not lose the Gaza war on the battlefield.

The IDF killed much of Hamas’s senior command, dismantled organized military formations, destroyed large parts of the tunnel network, and seized strategically important ground. It made another October 7-style invasion far less likely. Through rescue operations and negotiated agreements, it also helped bring every surviving hostage home. Israeli soldiers fought with astonishing courage and repeatedly achieved the missions they were given.

Israel lost the war where wars are finally won or lost: in politics. Its government never turned those military achievements into a durable result.

A Necessary War on a Wider Front

None of this means Israel should have stayed out of Gaza. Hamas could not be negotiated into moderation. Its charter and conduct, culminating in the deliberate atrocities of October 7, made that fantasy untenable. Its active combatants had to be captured or killed and its military infrastructure destroyed. Hamas also had to be removed from power.

Air power alone could not accomplish that. A major ground campaign was necessary.

Gaza was also part of a wider conflict. Iran had spent decades constructing a regional system of armed partners that included Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq and Syria. The United States found no evidence that Iran knew the details of October 7 in advance, but concluded that Iranian financing, weapons, and training helped make the attack possible. After October 7, Iran-supported forces opened additional fronts against Israel and international shipping. The State Department’s 2023 terrorism report describes the network and Iran’s role in enabling it.

Israel subsequently inflicted major damage on several parts of that network. Those achievements deserve recognition, but they did not answer the question of what political order would replace Hamas in Gaza.

The wider Iranian strategy only increased the need for discipline in Gaza. Israel faced several fronts with limited manpower and shrinking diplomatic capital. It needed a clear account of what it meant to accomplish there and what political arrangement the campaign was supposed to produce. Without that account, no one could judge how much time and force the objective justified, or how many lives Israel was prepared to spend.

Aims Are Not a Strategy

The government did state its war aims, a fact that any fair criticism must acknowledge.

Netanyahu repeatedly named three: return the hostages, destroy Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities, and ensure that Gaza could never again threaten Israel. By 2025, these had been expanded into five principles: disarm Hamas, return all hostages, demilitarize Gaza, retain Israeli security control, and establish a civilian administration controlled by neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. Those were the government’s stated objectives.

But a list of aims is not a strategy.

What counted as destroying Hamas’s military capacity? The elimination of its organized battalions, or of its senior commanders? Did it require finding every tunnel and weapons cache, or capturing or killing every armed member?

What would ending Hamas rule actually require? Removing its ministers would not stop Hamas from collecting taxes or controlling aid. Replacing its police would accomplish little unless another........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)