Can Israel Win in Gaza?

The deal between Israel and Hamas that was reached last week came into effect on Sunday and the first hostages were released while dozens of Palestinian prisoners were freed by Israel. The deal is a three-stage agreement, but the details of the deal beyond the first phase, and even some of the details of the first phase such as the identity of the prisoners who are to be released, have yet to be agreed upon. As many people have noted, while it’s called a ceasefire agreement, it would therefore be more accurate to call it a truce, precisely because the final terms of the deal will have to be negotiated during the first phase. There are good reasons to doubt that it will move beyond the first phase and result in the end of the war, though it’s not impossible, because the fundamental disagreement between Hamas and Israel that had prevented a ceasefire up until now still hasn’t been resolved. Hamas wants the war to end and the IDF to withdraw from Gaza, which would allow it to stay in control of the Strip or at least continue to play a role in government, whereas Israel obviously doesn’t want that and insists that it will not withdraw from Gaza as long as Hamas has not capitulated.

What the deal that just went into effect did is kick the can down the road by pushing back the resolution of that disagreement to some later point, but it will have to be resolved eventually and this can only happen if one side caves. Indeed, there is no middle ground here, either Hamas will still be in a position to govern the Strip after the war or it won’t. If Israel wants to make sure that Gaza will never fall under Hamas’s control again, it has to capitulate and surrender its weapons, because as long as this doesn’t happen before the war ends Israel can never be sure that Hamas won’t take back control by removing whoever is put in charge of the Strip when the IDF leaves eventually. For instance, if Israel agrees to let the Palestinian Authority or a multinational force to administer Gaza after the war but Hamas has not been dismantled before the IDF withdraws from the Strip, it’s likely that it will eventually get back in power. In any case, Israel has so far insisted that the Palestinian Authority wouldn’t be allowed to play any role in the governance of Gaza after the war and a multinational force is overwhelmingly unlikely unless that’s the case, so there isn’t much point in discussing that scenario at the moment. Hamas is clearly not prepared to surrender at this point, so if this deal results in the end of the war, it will be because Israel, perhaps under pressure by the US, caved and dropped that condition.

In the meantime, this will make it possible for the population in Gaza and Hamas to gain a reprieve as the fighting stops, more humanitarian aid comes into the Strip and Gazans who were displaced are allowed to return to what’s left of their homes in the North, in exchange for the release of some of the hostages that Hamas and other Palestinian groups captured on October 7. This won’t prevent Israel from resuming the war after the end of the first phase, but it will make it harder to achieve their goal if they do, because Hamas will have gained time to regroup and additional supplies that will allow it to last longer. Israeli hawks are absolutely correct when they say that and it would be silly to deny it. The question is whether, facing this formidable challenge, Israel will finally call it quits or persist in the hope that it will be able to force Hamas to surrender eventually. In practice, this will depend on how Israeli domestic politics moves during the first phase of the deal, but also and perhaps mostly on what Trump does.

If Trump tells Netanyahu that he won’t support a resumption of the war, and makes it clear that it’s not a suggestion, the war will end. If the Israelis were united behind the continuation of the war, then maybe the Israeli government would take the risk to defy Washington, but at this point it’s clear that large segments of the Israeli society, including many people in the security establishment, want the war to end. I think that, from his point of view, Netanyahu made the right decision by agreeing to that deal before Trump’s inauguration. It would have been a terrible idea to get on Trump’s wrong side by refusing to give him that win so he can brag about his role in the deal as the entire world is watching the first hostages being released and reuniting with their families, even if there is a risk that Israel won’t be able to resume the war later, because Trump would surely had taken it as a personal insult and you never know what he’s capable of doing if he thinks you tried to screw him.

A lot of people conjecture that Trump must have made assurances to Netanyahu in order to convince him to sign on that deal, and he probably did (although most of the stuff people are talking about are either things I don’t think are going to happen such as the annexation of Area C in the West Bank or things Trump was going to do anyway such as lifting sanctions on settlers), but there is no need to make such a conjecture to explain why Netanyahu agreed. Indeed, although some people have convinced themselves that the Americans couldn’t stop Israel if they wanted to, this is nonsense. If the Americans could credibly threaten to withdraw their support from Israel, the Israelis would do as they’re told because Israel is just too dependent on Washington to risk openly defying the US president if he really set his mind on ending the war. As I explained before, the problem is that in general the US president can’t credibly threaten to withdraw his support from Israel, because American domestic politics give leverage to the Israelis and, not only do they know it, but they also know that the Americans know it. The problem for Netanyahu is that Trump is not a traditional politician and, in particular, he’s much less susceptible to nagging and shaming.

In particular, if Netanyahu bruised his ego and gave him the impression that he tried to humiliate him, Trump could seriously damage the relationship between Israel and the US because he can be extremely vindictive. Even putting aside the fact that, without regular arms deliveries from the US, the IDF would have to rely on tactics that either are more costly for civilians and further degrade their image in the US without being particularly more effective or result in far more Israeli casualties, the Israelis really can’t afford to get in a public fight with Trump. A lot of Americans would side with him and the effect would be terrible on the relationship between Israel and the US. Fortunately for Netanyahu, I think Trump is nevertheless relatively easy to play because he lacks the knowledge and attention to follow the details of policy issues, but you have to make sure not to bruise his ego. So it’s quite likely that, now that he was able to get his win for the inauguration, Trump will allow Israel to resume the war after the first phase of the deal because he’ll be too busy with other issues then and Netanyahu and his allies in the US government will be able to convince him that it’s justified by somehow blaming the collapse of the deal on Hamas.

However, there is also a risk that, for whatever reason, Trump will really want to end the war and put it behind him. In that case, Netanyahu will have to cave and Hamas will effectively have won, if you can call staying in control of a wasteland a victory. According to the statement Netanyahu made last weekend, Trump has “given full backing to Israel's right to return to the fighting, if Israel reaches the conclusion that the second stage negotiations are ineffectual”. He probably did, but if by then Trump has decided that he wants the war to end, this won’t do Netanyahu any good. In my opinion, it’s more likely than not that the war will resume, but there is a risk Israel will have to give up and, while I think Netanyahu was right to judge that it was best not to deny Trump a win he badly wanted, this doesn’t change the fact that by accepting the deal he took that chance. It wouldn’t surprise me if, while letting Israel do whatever it wants in the West Bank and supporting attacks on freedom of speech in universities to suppress anti-Zionist speech, he decided that he wants the war in Gaza to end because it’s not going anywhere and unlike in Ukraine he can actually end it relatively easily. As I said above, in addition to what Trump does, what happens after the first phase of the deal will also depend on Israeli domestic politics, but that’s even harder to predict. If the deal collapses and the war resumes, will Israel eventually defeat Hamas? I doubt it.

In a nutshell, the reason why I think it’s unlikely is that Israel faces both external and internal constraints that will make it very difficult to force Hamas to capitulate. Starting with external constraints, while Israel benefits from a double standard in the US and to a lesser extent in Europe, there are limits to the brutality of the tactics it can use in Gaza before it risks losing support from the West or even facing sanctions. This makes it harder to defeat Hamas because, although the relationship between military effectiveness and brutality is not as straightforward as hawks often assume, there is still a tradeoff between them. Even domestic factors restrict the extent to which Israel can ignore international humanitarian law because, though polls show that a majority of Israelis don’t think Palestinian suffering should factor heavily into how the IDF wages the war, there are limits to how much brutality even them are prepared to accept. Moreover, although for this war the IDF has considerably relaxed its rules of engagement in a way that has resulted in a much greater tolerance for civilian casualties, various rules and traditions are drilled into IDF officers for years and there are limits to how far from them they could stray.

Israel also faces significant political and economic constraints that restrict how much resources it can allocate to the war and for how long, which makes it significantly harder for Israel to defeat Hamas. Ideally, in order to force Hamas to surrender, Israel would have to mobilize hundreds of thousands for several months. In that case, the IDF would have enough manpower to hold the areas it has cleared while it moves to the next one and destroys Hamas over there, but otherwise it has no choice but to engage in the kind of never-ending whack-a-mole game we have seen playing out in Gaza for the past 15 months, because Hamas can just leave from areas where the IDF puts too much pressure on them and come back once the IDF has left to chase them where they have gone. It would also help if the IDF were prepared to take more casualties, because that would reduce how much manpower it needs to hold areas that have been cleared while it takes care of Hamas in the rest of the Strip, but if casualties rise too much Israeli public opinion will stop supporting the war. Hence, the IDF has no choice but to adapt its tactics to the level of tolerance for casualties in Israel, which is very low as in every other rich country and perhaps even more so in a country like Israel where demographic concerns have always loomed very large.

A critical fact about Israel, which is under-appreciated due to Six-Day War memes, is that at the end of the day it's a small country, which means that fighting a war that requires a lot of manpower compels it to mobilize a relatively high proportion of its population. In the past, it was able to defeat its enemies decisively quickly in the conventional wars it fought, which has obfuscated the fact that, had this not happened, it would have been in real trouble because then it would have run into the mobilization problem I just described. This problem arises whenever it has to fight a guerrilla for a prolonged period of time, which happened in Lebanon after 1982 and is happening right now in Gaza, because this kind of war is very manpower-intensive. Mobilizing a significant proportion of the population is not only very costly economically, because Israel has to compensate reservists for the loss of their salaries and their absence from the workforce disrupts the economy, but it’s also costly politically because conscripts, reservists and even professional soldiers don’t want to fight in a war for months and if you force them to do so they and their families start complaining.

As a result, the IDF suffers from a manpower shortage, especially since it also has to keep a large number of troops in the West Bank, at the border with Lebanon and now even in Syria. The number of people that are available to serve in Gaza is completely inadequate to implement the kind of counterinsurgency warfare I described above, which requires a lot of manpower to hold the areas that have been cleared while moving on to other areas that have yet to be cleared, even if the Israelis were more tolerant of casualties among IDF soldiers. If you can’t do that, the alternative is to keep doing what the IDF has been doing for long enough, even if that means that you have to regularly go back to areas you’ve already cleared in the past to clear them again. Everyone has their limits, even Hamas militants, because even them care about their family who are getting killed or living in miserable conditions. Moreover, while they can replenish their ranks by recruiting during the war to replace their losses and have apparently done so, they don’t have infinite supplies and as long as the IDF controls the Philadelphi Corridor bringing in more of them will be very difficult. Hamas apparently has some domestic production capacity, but I can’t imagine it’s very large, especially now that inputs have presumably become harder to obtain. Thus, if Israel could keep this up for long enough, Hamas would eventually give up.

The problem is that, while at the end of the day it’s very hard to assess exactly how close from that point Hamas is, it doesn’t seem anywhere near it at the moment, so “long enough” is probably longer than how long the Israelis are prepared to keep fighting given the external and internal constraints they face. This is what I predicted would probably happen a few days after October 7 and I haven’t changed my mind since then. Now, you may think that I’m wrong and you may even be proven right eventually, but you should ask yourself if you’re as confident of that today than you were 15 months ago. I kind of doubt you are. Nevertheless, it’s certainly not true that, as many people claim, it’s impossible to defeat Hamas. Again, despite the fact that the resources allocated to the war by Israel are inadequate, Hamas would presumably capitulate if Israel kept the war going for long enough. It’s just that Israel will probably give up before Hamas. In that case, the enormous cost of the war — both for Israel and for the Palestinians — will have been largely in vain, since Hamas will remain in control of Gaza in one way or another though its capabilities will have been seriously degraded. This is precisely why I think the war is stupid.

Still, because in theory it’s possible that Israel will manage to force Hamas to surrender, I thought it might be illuminating to learn more about how Sri Lanka was able to defeat the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which might be the only case in recent history where a government won a decisive victory over a large insurgency. So I read When Counterinsurgency Wins: Sri Lanka's Defeat of the Tamil Tigers by Ahmed Hashim, a professor of security studies and a former Pentagon official, which I found very interesting. The LTTE were a Tamil armed group based in the North and East of Sri Lanka, who fought a war against the Sri Lankan government for more than 30 years and eventually created a quasi-state, before the government managed to destroy them and force them to surrender in 2009. It was a radical group that used terrorism on a large scale, including suicide attacks. In fact, although few people have even heard about the LTTE, it was the first group to use explosive belts and vests. In 2006, after a 4-year long truce and the collapse of peace talks, the Sri Lankan government launched a campaign to destroy the organization and, to the surprise of most international observers who thought it was impossible, killed the group’s leader and forced what was left of it to surrender unconditionally. Pro-Israel hawks love to bring up that episode, because it shows that even a large insurgency can be defeated.

As I have already said, I agree that it’s possible and that people who claim otherwise are wrong, but this doesn’t mean that the war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE is a good comparison. In fact, after reading Hashim’s book, I think the lessons we can draw about Gaza from that conflict are very limited because the situations are extremely different. First, while Hamas is fighting a classic insurgency by exploiting their ability to hide in the midst of the population and in tunnels, I was surprised when I read Hashim’s book by the extent to which the LTTE tried to fight a conventional war until it was no longer possible. I guess that’s probably because, in the previous war, the LTTE had showed that it was more than capable of holding its own against the Sri Lankan military. Unlike Hamas in Gaza, where it was besieged by Israel and largely depended on Israel’s good will to get supplies, the LTTE governed large parts of Sri Lanka relatively free of interference from the government in Colombo. By the time the peace talks collapsed and the war that eventually resulted in their destruction started in 2006, they even had a navy, which they used to trade with India and attack Sri Lankan ships and ports. But the Sri Lankan military learned from the mistakes it had made during the last war and the LTTE proved no match for it in conventional battles.

The Sri Lankan campaign also benefited from the fact that, prior to the beginning of the campaign, a prominent commander in the East defected from the LTTE and decided to help the government, so the Sri Lankan military fought a diminished movement and obtained a lot of priceless intelligence on the rest of the LTTE. Hamas by contrast still appears united in Gaza and it’s unlikely that anything of the sort could happen over there. Indeed, Hamas battalions have been dismantled and the groups now fights as small cells that are only linked through very loose ties, so no defector is likely to be in a position to bring with him a large number of fighters. As we shall see, Israel also doesn’t have much to offer to any would-be defectors, whereas Karuna Amman, the LTTE defector I was talking about, could look forward to both freedom and a political career. Another major difference between Sri Lanka’s campaign against the LTTE and Israel’s war against Hamas, probably the main difference, is that as we have seen Israel is a small country that can’t afford to field a large army for a very long time, whereas Sri Lanka massively and continuously expanded its armed forces during the war. According to Hashim, between 2005 and 2009, the Sri Lankan armed forces increased from 125,000 to 450,000. By contrast, the IDF has 170,000 men and women on active duty and 450,000 people in the reserve, of which only 70,000 are currently mobilized and that number will soon be reduced to 50,000 for cost-saving reasons.

So the IDF only has about half as many soldiers as Sri Lanka did at the end of the war against the LTTE, but this probably understates the IDF’s manpower deficit relative to the Sri Lankan military at the time. Indeed, not only can Israel only use a fraction of that manpower in Gaza because as I noted above it needs a large number of troops in other theaters, but only a small fraction of this manpower consists in combat troops. According to this article, back in June of last year (at the height of the Rafah offensive), Israel only had 15,000 active duty soldiers engaged in fighting and only 10,000 of them were fighting in Gaza. In addition, 26,000 reservists were mobilized in combat roles, but most of them were deployed in the West Bank. So Israel had less than 30,000 people actually fighting Hamas in Gaza. As a comparison, by my calculations that’s approximately the same relative to the population of Gaza than the number of German soldiers who were occupying the Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1941 (this includes soldiers in non-combat roles, but there are probably few of them in Gaza, so it presumably doesn’t bias the comparison much), which was already considered insufficient despite the fact that at the time resistance was still largely non-existent.

I don’t know the number of Sri Lankan soldiers in combat role during the war against the LTTE, but it was no doubt vastly greater, not only because the Sri Lankan armed forces were themselves much larger but also because the IDF is a more modern force and the ratio of combat to non-combat troops tends to increase over time. This ratio is probably even lower in the IDF than in the armed forces of other rich countries, because the IDF employs an unusually large number of women, who almost exclusively serve in non-combat roles. Thus, although it’s hard to quantify this advantage precisely, there can be no doubt that the Sri Lankan military had far more manpower to wage its war against the LTTE than the IDF has to fight Hamas in Gaza. Moreover, while the IDF constantly has to release reservists before recalling them, the Sri Lankan armed forces were continuously expanding throughout the war and the government actually them even after the end of the war to make sure the LTTE would stay dead. It was therefore able to conduct the kind of counterinsurgency warfare I described above and, as Hashim explains in his book, that’s exactly what it did, holding the areas it cleared by keeping large number of troops in them to prevent the LTTE from coming back and show to the population that the government was here to stay.

To be sure, the LTTE occupied a larger area than Gaza, but the number of Sri Lankan Tamils in the areas controlled by the LTTE was about the same as the population of Gaza and the population density was therefore much lower, which made the job of the Sri Lankan much easier other things being equal. The LTTE also didn’t have the huge network of tunnels that Hamas can use in Gaza. The kind of manpower that Israel can deploy in Gaza is obviously inadequate for the task, at least if the IDF wants to fight the kind of counterinsurgency warfare that Sri Lanka successfully used against the LTTE between 2006 and 2009, which is why it’s forced to play the whack-a-mole game I described above and hope that Hamas will grow tired of it before Israel does. But it probably won’t and, in any case, Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE doesn’t really give any reason to think it will. In order to replicate what Sri Lanka did to destroy the LTTE between 2006 and 2009, Israel would have to mobilize a much larger number of reservists for a long period of time, but as I explained above economic and political constraints make that impossible. Pro-Israel hawks often fancy themselves hard-nosed realists, but they completely ignore that kind of constraints, which results in unrealistic expectations about what Israel can achieve through force.

Another difference with Israel’s war in Gaza is that, outside of Sri Lanka, very few people cared about the government’s war against the LTTE. This gave it more latitude to use whatever tactics it wanted and indeed the war seems to have been extremely brutal although Hashim is careful to highlight that it’s very difficult to obtain reliable figures on the number of civilian casualties. Most people in the West haven’t even heard about this war, whereas everyone knows about Israel’s war in Gaza and a lot of people outside of Gaza care about it. The only country that might have significantly restricted Sri Lanka’s freedom of action is India, but the LTTE screwed up by killing Indian peacekeepers in the 1980s and assassinating the former Indian Prime Minister in 1991, so India washed its hands of the whole affair. Finally, while Sri Lankan Tamils resented the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo because it discriminated against them, the Sri Lankan government still promised them citizenship and freedom. By contrast, Israel doesn’t promise the people in Gaza anything except oppression if Hamas surrenders, which obviously can only harden the resolve of Hamas fighters and disincentivize the population of Gaza from cooperation with the IDF against Hamas, even if many of them probably resent it for launching a war that resulted in the destruction of Gazan society. So while it’s not impossible that Israel will manage to destroy Hamas if the war resumes after the first phase of the deal, I wouldn’t bet on it.