“It tells a lot that they are not near raising a white flag” of surrender, says Azmi Keshawi, Gaza analyst for the International Crisis Group, contacted in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.
“Hamas is not worried,” he says. “I think they wanted the Israelis to go into the deep mud of Gaza; now they will have the advantage.”
Hamas sources inside Gaza are “no longer available,” Mr. Keshawi notes. And Hamas political officials based in Lebanon, Qatar, and elsewhere have limited contact with Hamas’ military wing in Gaza, which conducted the Oct. 7 operation.
Does Hamas believe it’s winning?
But analysts say a picture is emerging about Hamas’ thinking and expectations before it launched the raid, and about its aims during the violent aftermath.
Does Hamas believe it is winning? Did it expect such a lethal Israeli counterstrike, which might jeopardize its existence? And has the cost been worth it, purportedly to resurrect the long-festering Israeli-Palestinian issue, and demonstrate that living under an Israeli blockade was no longer sustainable for Palestinians in Gaza?
Hamas’ goal is to inflict casualties for as long as they can, as international pressure grows to end the war, Mr. Keshawi says.
“Hamas knows their capabilities, but what they are betting on is holding out for as long as they can, because every day they hold steadfast, it gets the Israelis one step closer to totally break and not recover,” he says.
The analyst says he has felt the impact of the fighting. His adult son was wounded in an Israeli airstrike near where the family had taken shelter in southern Gaza, and he lost two apartments.
He notes how a judicial overhaul plan pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government had sharply divided the Jewish state in the months before the war, creating a sense that Israel had become more vulnerable.
Hamas’ attack then shattered the conventional wisdom among Palestinians and Arab states – and Israelis themselves – of Israeli invincibility. Israeli analysts say a restoration of deterrence is one aim of this war.
Yet already Hamas has achieved some of its war aims, including a halt to budding normalization agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states, says a senior Hamas official in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan.
The Oct. 7 attacks were part of the Hamas “strategy … aimed at ending Israel’s attempts to bring an end to the Palestinian cause and to build local alliances that will remove the Palestinian people,” Mr. Hamdan told the Lebanese newspaper Al-Liwaa, according to a translation by the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
The “greatest achievement” of the Hamas operation, said Mr. Hamdan, was that it “ended Israel’s ambitions to become a natural entity in the region at the expense of the Palestinian nation.”
Blow to Israeli security
The surprise scale of the Hamas incursion has also meant a far deeper than expected impact on both sides, says Tareq Baconi, an expert on Hamas who is board president of Al-Shabaka, a network of Palestinian analysts. He says such action to disrupt the status quo was “in some ways inevitable,” after 17 years of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and Israeli actions since last spring against Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank that drew Hamas ire.
“The speed with which the [Israeli] blockade moved from being impenetrable, and from Israel being invincible, to clearly how much all of this was a house of cards, just meant that Hamas was able to be much more successful – and therefore the [Israeli] retaliation was much more brutal,” says Mr. Baconi, author of the 2018 book “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”
“Regardless of how Hamas emerges … there is no doubt that they have achieved a pretty significant blow to Israel’s sense of security, and undermined a fundamental pillar of Zionism, which is that Israel can be a safe haven for Jews, even while it maintains an apartheid system against Palestinians,” he says.
“I think Hamas has just shattered that,” says Mr. Baconi. “In some ways, Israel is in an existential battle, not militarily – because obviously it can’t be defeated militarily in this way – but discursively, I think the foundations of the state have really been shaken.”