It finally appears possible — though it’s not guaranteed — that Israel’s brutal two-year war in Gaza is over.
On Monday, Hamas freed the 20 living Israeli hostages it was still holding from the Oct. 7, 2022, attacks, in exchange for Israel releasing around 1,700 Palestinian prisoners.
Thorny long-term issues about the future governance of Gaza, the status of Hamas, and the presence of Israeli troops in the territory are still mainly unresolved. The fighting could still resume. Still, the return of the hostages and the halt to the bombing of Gaza allow both Israelis and Palestinians a rare moment of relief and even hope.
But the damage done over the past two years is nearly incalculable: Over two years of war — launched after Hamas invaded Israel and killed around 1,200 people — Israel has annihilated the Gaza Strip, killing more than 67,000 Palestinians, starving and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million residents, and reducing most of the territory’s buildings and infrastructure to rubble. The fate of the 251 hostages taken in the Hamas attack also wrenched Israel’s population, driving many of its citizens to join massive protests demanding a deal to end the war.
The deal that led to a ceasefire is not one Netanyahu’s government would have agreed to on its own. And yet, it’s about as close to an absolute victory for Israel as was conceivable over the past two years.
Israel fought a war so brutal it was found to have committed genocide by a UN commission and leading international scholars; its prime minister is under indictment by the International Criminal Court. And yet, it ends the war, mostly on its own terms, in a deal touted as a “GREAT DAY” by the president of the United States and fully endorsed by Arab governments.
Both Israel and the rest of the world will likely take some lessons from this. It seems likely that the Gaza War is going to deal a significant blow to the idea of “counterinsurgency” doctrine: that the best way to deal with an insurgency is to win over the local population.
David Petraeus, former commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in 2024 that Israel was repeating America’s post-9/11 mistakes by going to war in Gaza without a plan for a post-war governance structure. But, he suggested, Israel should learn from the relative success of the counterinsurgency tactics the US employed in Iraq after 2007.
“Killing and capturing terrorists and insurgents is insufficient,” Petraeus wrote in Foreign Affairs. “[T]he key to solidifying security gains and stemming the recruitment of new adversaries is holding territory, protecting civilians, and providing governance and services to them.”
This is plainly not what Israel did. Commanders weakened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants. According to some reports, more than 80 percent of those killed in Gaza may have been civilians, far higher than in other recent conflicts. More than 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings were leveled. Food aid was, at times, blocked entirely. And Israel was continually criticized throughout the war, particularly by Joe Biden’s administration, for not having a post-war governance plan for Gaza.
Israelis might point out that while the 466 soldiers they lost in combat is a very high number compared to other Israeli wars, it’s about half of America’s losses in the first year of Petraeus’s “surge” in Iraq.
Israel’s overwhelming-force strategy — practically the antithesis of Petraeus’s philosophy — was largely successful in the cold terms of achieving its goals.
Of course, there are caveats. Israel has deepened its political isolation, and while some of that may fade once the war ends, some of it won’t. As Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal writes, increasingly, “solidarity with the Palestinian cause—and hostility to Zionism—have become the political markers of a new generation.”
Nor is it hard to imagine, regardless of Hamas’s ultimate fate, a new armed Palestinian resistance movement emerging and carrying out future attacks on Israel.
And yet other countries are likely to take the lesson that crushing the enemy is worth the international opprobrium that comes with significant civilian casualties.
