Netanyahu and Hamas know this war is unwinnable. So how does it end?

Israel is not winning. Developments of the last week make that plain.

The Hamas terrorists still hold most of the hostages they snatched from Israel seven months ago. Hamas is not only still fighting, it is regrouping. While the people of Israel still live in fear, with over 100,000 displaced from their homes.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Three-quarters of the world’s governments have just cast a sympathy vote in the UN for the Palestinians, with only 5 per cent – just nine nations – voting for Israel’s preferred position.

And the most important of these, Israel’s ultimate protector, the US, has started limiting its supply of arms, a serious failure of alliance management by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s Hamas strategy before the October 7 attack was disastrous. He not only tolerated Hamas, he gave approval for Qatar to funnel about a billion US dollars to Gaza, of which at least half went to Hamas. Why? To improve its standing and thereby undercut the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

And then he persuaded himself that Hamas was quiescent, utterly blinding himself to its preparations for the devastating October 7 assault. So perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that his strategy for dealing with it afterwards is deeply flawed, too.

Yet Hamas isn’t winning either. But if Israel is in such disarray, how can that be?

Palestinians mourn their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, at the Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza on Friday.Credit: AP

One clue: Hamas last week abandoned its long-standing demand that Israel agree to a permanent and final ceasefire in return for hostages. It was prepared to accept a temporary ceasefire.

“This major capitulation reflects a new level of political weakness, reflected by reports of deep concerns about the progress of the war among Hamas leaders earlier this year,” says Hussein Ibish, a veteran resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Palestinians in Gaza celebrated when they first heard that this Hamas concession had led to a ceasefire offer, in a proposal brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the US. And when Israel rejected this proposal, the cheering stopped.

While the Palestinians of Gaza continue to suffer dreadfully at the hands of Israel, they’re not exactly thanking Hamas for the experience.

Opinion polls show that Hamas was not popular as a political entity among Gazans before the war. Its popularity picked up when it attacked Israel, but its support since has fallen back to, or below, pre-war levels.

In the case of one well-established survey series, by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, for example, support for Hamas was 38 per cent last September, increased to 42 per cent in December and by March was down to 34 per cent.

The same poll showed that 80 per cent of Gazans said a family member had been killed in the fighting. Which probably helps explain why Gazan support for a diplomatic “two-state solution” surged, from 35 per cent to 62 per cent, between December and March. They want an end to the war.

Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan theatrically inserted a miniature copy of the UN charter into a transparent paper shredder after three-quarters of the world’s governments have just cast a sympathy vote for the Palestinians at the UN.Credit: YouTube/United Nations

“This devastation has invited Palestinians to ask: ‘What did Hamas think it was doing?’“, Ibish writes for Canada’s Globe and Mail. “‘What happened to my family, my home, my job, my food, my drinking water? What is to become of us? What have you done?’”

Neither Israel nor Hamas is winning. And, measured against their stated aims, they cannot win. Netanyahu has said that Israel will “continue fighting until Hamas is eliminated – until absolute victory,” and that every last Hamas fighter is “a dead man”.

Hamas is a resistance movement. It’s in its name, which is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. As long as there is Israel, there will be Hamas. You can kill its fighters, but as long as it has a cause it will regenerate.

Three months ago, Netanyahu said that Israel’s forces has killed most of the estimated 30,000 Hamas fighters, destroyed three-quarters of its battalions – 18 of 24. Now he says only four battalions remain, all in the southern city of Rafah.

Yet on the weekend Israel said that Hamas fighters had re-emerged in the north of Gaza, where they’d supposedly been eliminated in the earliest phase of the Israeli bombardments.

US President Joe Biden and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Credit: AP

Israeli’s defence force said that it was attacking “Hamas terror targets” in Jabalia and the Gaza City neighbourhood of Zeitoun. Five Israeli soldiers had been killed in fierce fighting.

Credible, independent military analysts have said that Israel’s forces have been waging just about the most effective urban warfare possible against an entrenched enemy. Yet after seven months of intensive Israeli assaults from the air, ground and sea, Hamas is far from subdued in the north or the south.

Hamas’ short-term aim in the October 7 attack was to goad Israel into over-reacting. Israel’s relentless and disproportionate reaction, Hamas figured, would turn the world against it.

But Hamas’ ultimate goal is the eradication of Israel and the death of every last Jew. Its charter states that “there is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

The only way that Hamas could achieve this vision would be if Iran and its proxies launched a full-scale war against Israel and the US decided to sit it out. But we’ve seen that Iran is not interested, at least not now. And the US would defend Israel against Iran as effectively as it did last month.

So the stated aims of both Netanyahu and Hamas are unattainable. This may suit their respective political agendas for now. Netanyahu needs the war to continue to preserve his position as PM. Hamas derives its meaning and its support from killing Jews.

With impossible war aims, neither side credibly can claim victory. So the war grinds on.

In reality, the winner won’t be the side that achieves its military goal first but the one that can most adroitly negotiate a favourable political solution. War is, in Clausewitz’s immortal phrase, politics by other means.

But neither side is yet positioned to negotiate. Both persist in an unwinnable war. So the carnage continues.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.