The battlefield reality behind the Gaza ceasefire

Even if this week’s ceasefire does indeed stick, what comes next will be the hardest thing.

For its part, Israel is victorious on the battlefield – and recognition of that probably accounts for the willingness on both sides to negotiate a ceasefire.

Politicians in Washington are indulging in a certain amount of unseemly grandstanding about who deserves credit for the Gaza ceasefire, provisionally agreed in Qatar this week and announced on Thursday. Outgoing US President Joe Biden boasts of his patient diplomacy through 15 months of war. President-elect Donald Trump touts his threat of “all hell to pay” if Hamas does not free its hostages before his inauguration on Monday (Tuesday AEDT), and the role his newly appointed envoy, Steve Witkoff, played in clinching the agreement.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets US President-elect Donald Trump's Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff at his office in Jerusalem.

These claims are, of course, exaggerated and wildly premature. This is a complex three-stage ceasefire agreement, only the first stage of which has been approved, and whose implementation will be extraordinarily contentious and difficult. The political pointscoring also obscures the military facts on the ground that drove the deal, which resulted less from deft diplomacy than from brutal battlefield reality.

That reality is obvious if we consider that only two of the principals who were in office when the war began will be alive still and in power when any ceasefire takes effect: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yemen’s Ansarallah (Houthi) leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.

Hamas military commander Yayha Sinwar has been killed, wounded by an airstrike then finished off, live on social media, by an Israeli first-person-view drone in October. His counterpart, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, also is dead, assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.

Slain Hamas military commander Yayha Sinwar. Picture: AFP

Many other senior Hamas commanders are dead, as is Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, killed in an airstrike that collapsed his headquarters last September.

Nasrallah’s successor, Hashem Safieddine, died days later in another Israeli strike, along with Hezbollah’s intelligence chief, Hussein Hazimah. Dozens of other Hezbollah leaders were killed, thousands wounded and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, blinded in an earlier Israeli covert operation that concealed explosives in pagers and radio transceivers.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Hezbollah partner and Iranian ally, was overthrown last month and is exiled in Moscow. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, a crucial Hamas and Hezbollah sponsor and Assad’s principal backer, died in a helicopter crash last May. Several Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps generals – advisers to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Syrian regime – also have been killed. These include the IRGC’s commander in Syria, Razi Mousavi, killed in an airstrike in Damascus shortly after the war began. Iran’s senior adviser to Hezbollah, Abbas Nilforoushan, died in the same strike that killed Nasrallah.

This decapitation of Iranian, Syrian, Hezbollah and Hamas leadership reflects the broader beating that Israel – with extensive non-combat assistance from the US – has dealt its regional adversaries.

Syria’s army evaporated when Assad fled; its navy was sunk at its moorings by Israeli jets and its air force destroyed on its runways in the days after the regime fell. Hezbollah lost thousands, killed and wounded in its two-month war with Israel in 2024, while expending a significant portion of its missile arsenal, to lesser effect than many analysts (including me) expected before the war.

Hamas started the war with its own extensive rocket arsenal and perhaps 40,000 fighters at its disposal between its own military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, and allies such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At least half these fighters have been killed and others scattered or forced underground.

The Gaza Strip is de-urbanised, depopulated and extensively damaged, whole settlements bombed and bulldozed, and millions of civilians displaced to makeshift camps in horrific conditions. It is claimed up to 50,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict and many times more wounded.

Large areas of Lebanon – especially in the southern region, in Beirut and in Hezbollah strongholds of the Bekaa Valley – have been extensively damaged in Israeli airstrikes. Syria’s cities were battered by more than a decade of war but the final campaign inflicted even further damage.

The exception to this picture is Yemen’s Houthi movement. The Houthis entered the war in late 2023 with a campaign against commercial shipping in the Bab el-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint that carried, before the conflict, 13 per cent of total ship traffic. Their stated intent was to pressure Israel and Israel-friendly nations by holding ships and trade routes at risk until a ceasefire was agreed and Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza. Using aerial drones, missiles, uncrewed surface vessels, armed speedboats and helicopters, the Houthis succeeded in reducing shipping through the strait, costing billions of dollars, disrupting supply chains and damaging more than 87 ships while sinking two and capturing one.

Houthi supporters raise their machine guns during an anti-US and Israel rally in Sanaa, Yemen, in November. Picture: AP

Despite two naval taskforces – one US-led and one assembled by the EU – deploying to protect commercial shipping in the strait, along with extensive airstrikes and a blockade against Yemen’s port of Hudaydah, the Houthis continue their campaign. Their reaction to the news of this week’s tentative ceasefire, so far, has been to threaten that they will resume their efforts if the deal collapses while in fact persisting in their attacks. Iran’s proxies in Yemen remain defiant even as Iran and the others in its self-styled Axis of Resistance are on the back foot.

For its part, Israel is victorious on the battlefield – and recognition of that, rather than fancy footwork by Western diplomats, probably accounts for the willingness on both sides to negotiate a ceasefire. Indeed, it’s possible Israel’s main motivation for a ceasefire arose from the combination of clear battlefield victory close to home along with equally clear inability to suppress the Houthis, who continue launching long-range missiles against Tel Aviv. Benjamin Netanyahu is personally triumphant, albeit facing political and legal challenges.

None of this assuages the pain of Israeli families whose loved ones were massacred in the initial attacks or have been held by Hamas since October 2023. As few as 20 of the roughly 250 hostages taken at the outset of the war may remain alive, though it is almost impossible to say. In Israel, about 980 civilians and an equal number of military personnel have been killed, more than 13,000 wounded and up to a 500,000 displaced from their homes because of ground attacks at the start of the conflict and rocket and missile attacks since then.

Israel also faces difficult decisions, even if the ceasefire is confirmed and broadly holds. Hamas can survive with largely uncontested control over Gazans; there were no significant incidents of anti-Hamas unrest in Gaza at any time during the war. In the displaced persons camps and ruined cities of the Gaza Strip, Hamas maintains political authority. It also has sufficient military potential – at least 10,000 fighters still at large – to maintain the fight in the form of a guerrilla campaign or terrorist activity. Permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza would face an insurgency, while full Israeli withdrawal risks resurgence of conventional capability on the part of Hamas. And Israeli forces are still heavily committed in Lebanon, the Golan and the West Bank, with no immediate end to these deployments in sight.

All of which is to say that, even if this week’s ceasefire does indeed stick, what comes next will be the hardest thing. We can only hope the region’s innocent civilian populations – in Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian and Yemeni territory – receive some measure of relief, however temporary. Who, if anyone, gets the credit for a ceasefire matters far less than the possibility that one may finally be at hand.

David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007. He was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, followed by special adviser for counter-insurgency to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of six books including most recently The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West and The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan.