Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the U.S. airwaves to make his case for carrying out his threat to attack the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. Experts have condemned the proposed operation as a catastrophe waiting to happen, endangering the lives of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the city. But in his interview, Netanyahu painted a rosier picture, saying that “total victory” over Hamas is “within reach” and indeed only “weeks away” if the attack on Rafah goes forward. His claim that Israel’s military operations will eradicate the organization responsible for the horrific attacks of Oct. 7 has been the animating logic of the Israeli government’s brutal campaign in Gaza from the start. Five months into that campaign, it is less believable today than it has ever been.
Netanyahu has been clear since October that he sees wiping Hamas “off the face of the earth” and attaining the “eternal disarmament of Gaza” as achievable war aims. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has backed that assertion, in both rhetoric and policy. Early in the conflict, Biden himself called for the elimination of Hamas. His support for the Israeli military campaign has become more measured as the human toll of the conflict has grown, but recent White House policy proposals demonstrate his administration’s stubborn faith in the idea that the Israeli military can in fact destroy the group that has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007. And the administration’s vision for a postwar Gaza shares the premise that the Palestinian Authority and its security forces will be able to step into a power vacuum left behind by a suddenly absent Hamas.
Yet assumptions that Hamas is on the brink of total destruction don’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. To the contrary, there is greater evidence by the day that the Israeli military campaign has failed to eliminate the group’s capacity for violence. By some metrics, the group’s strength has grown over the course of Israel’s war in Gaza. It is vital for policymakers to internalize this reality and understand that, despite Netanyahu’s claims, the unspeakable human cost of this war is not producing any sort of grand strategic victory for Israel. Instead, the violence is as senseless as it is brutal. A cease-fire is the only way forward.
The clearest indication of the gulf between Israeli rhetoric about Hamas’ defeat and the reality of the group’s resilience comes from northern Gaza, where the Israeli military first focused its ground invasion. In early January, Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari claimed the operation had “completed the dismantling of Hamas’s military framework in the northern Gaza Strip” and announced the withdrawal of some Israeli forces from the sector. After three months of fighting, the clearing of northern Gaza was presented as a model: Israeli operations were increasing in intensity in central and southern Gaza, and once the brutal methods applied in the north were repeated there, Hamas would be defeated for good.
Before the end of the month, however, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute—neither noted for their skepticism of the Israeli war effort—assessed that “Hamas and other Palestinian militias are likely in the early stages of reconstituting their governance and military capabilities in the northern Gaza Strip.” Militant attacks in northern Gaza continued, including ambushes of Israeli forces and a volley of some 50 rockets fired from northern Gaza at the Israeli town of Netivot in mid-January, long after the supposed “complete dismantling” of Hamas in the north. Clearly, the group can still use the area as a base from which to threaten people living across the border in Israel.
By early February, U.S. intelligence officials were telling Congress that Israel was “not close” to eliminating Hamas. By late February, over a 10-day period in a single neighborhood in Gaza City in the north, Hamas and other militias mounted at least 92 attacks against Israeli troops. The supposed dismantling simply has not taken place, even in the area where Israel’s military campaign was ostensibly successfully completed.
Despite these attacks, the Israeli government stands by its triumphalist narrative, frequently buttressing it by pointing to internal estimates of the huge numbers of Hamas fighters that Israeli forces have killed over the course of the war. This past week, in response to a request from the BBC to clarify its official estimate, the Israeli government offered three replies, one putting the number at “approximately 10,000,” another saying “more than 10,000” and a third stating “between 10,000 and 12,000.” Even at the low end, though, the claim beggars belief. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, of the over 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets and bombs in the past five months, fewer than 10,000 have been adult men. While adult men make up the majority of Hamas’ estimated 30,000 fighters, only a small proportion of Gaza’s total population of men are militants.
It is hard to predict Hamas’ future as a violent actor or governing body in Gaza. The scenario that appears extremely unlikely, however, is the one in which Hamas disappears, overrun by Israel’s military might.
Yet the Israeli government seems to be counting every adult man it has killed in Gaza as a Hamas fighter, an absurd assumption that lays bare both the dehumanizing attitude of the Israeli government toward people in Gaza and the large gaps in the Israeli intelligence community’s understanding of Hamas’ membership and capabilities. Though Hamas has clearly suffered significant losses, the likely number of Hamas fighters killed is far lower—and, by extension, the number of civilians killed far higher—than what the Israeli military has suggested.
The war also does not seem to have harmed Hamas politically. There have been few opportunities for public opinion polls in Gaza during the Israeli invasion, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, or PCPSR, was able to conduct one in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the temporary cease-fire in late November. The results make absolutely clear that months of bombing did not result in reduced support for Hamas in Gaza. To the contrary, support for Hamas as a political party was up slightly in Gaza and dramatically in the West Bank since the previous PCPSR poll in September 2023. The same is true of support for armed struggle as the best option for ending the occupation and building an independent Palestinian state.
Given their direct experience of and proximity to the ongoing violence, Palestinians in Gaza are tragically well-placed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Israeli military campaign. Among respondents in Gaza to the latest PCPSR poll, 44 percent said Israeli efforts to destroy Hamas in the strip would fail, with a mere 17 percent predicting they would succeed. Similarly, when asked who will govern Gaza in the “months after the end of the current war,” a majority of Gazans predicted it would be Hamas. None of this data suggests that the horrors the Israeli military offensive is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza are achieving the Israeli government’s stated goal. Indeed, Hamas appears to be growing stronger politically as a result of the war.
It is hard to predict Hamas’ future as a violent actor or governing body in Gaza. The group could emerge from this conflict weakened or even in similar shape compared to how it entered, but with its military wing in the ascendancy in internal power struggles, which was likely one of the goals of the Oct. 7 attacks. It could also splinter, its command and control under strain from a combination of Israeli military pressure and internal disagreements about how to respond to the violence of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. If history is any guide, some of those splinter groups could end up being more dangerous than Hamas itself.
The scenario that appears extremely unlikely, however, is the one in which Hamas disappears, overrun by Israel’s military might. Despite his claims to the contrary, Netanyahu’s war in Gaza is nowhere near destroying the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks. Instead, it has killed 30,000 people, left hundreds of thousands more on the brink of famine and pushed the Middle East to the edge of region-wide war in the name of an objective that was never attainable.
Yet policymakers in Israel and the U.S. seem to be making decisions about military strategy and the future political dispensation of both Gaza and Palestine more broadly on the basis of Netanyahu’s false pretenses. Coming to terms with the fact that Hamas will likely survive this war is crucial. In the long term, a post-conflict plan rooted in denial of Hamas’ continuing capacity for violence would likely only make the group stronger.
More immediately, the conflict is now at a crossroads, with a cease-fire agreement reportedly near and Netanyahu still vowing to go forward with a catastrophic attack on Rafah. Leaders need to be clear-eyed about the stakes of the current moment. There is no option for a quick Israeli victory on the table, only a choice between alleviating the unspeakable suffering of Gaza’s civilians or deepening it.
Sam Ratner is policy director at Win Without War. A journalist and analyst by background, he has worked on Mozambique for the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and he was a founding editor of Fellow Travelers Blog.