After two years of foot-dragging, Israel’s government recently voted to establish a commission of inquiry into the causes of Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Detractors were quick to argue that this would be a whitewashing exercise, given that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long refused to accept any blame. Implicitly, however, Netanyahu has acknowledged his responsibility by repeatedly ruling out any return to Gaza’s prewar status quo—one that he himself designed and perpetuated.
Exactly what the Netanyahu government’s inquiry into Oct. 7 will find and how independent it will be are open questions. But Israel’s security agencies have already offered damning indictments in their own internal inquiries. Notably, they have condemned the country’s prewar “conflict management” strategy in Gaza. Israel’s policies toward Hamas, they concluded, were “paradoxical” in that the group was deemed “illegitimate, yet there was no effort to develop an alternative.” The result was a strategy that over-relied on military force at the expense of a long-term political vision, or what is now called a “day after” plan.
Following two years of war, in which billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives were lost, these warnings remain all too relevant.
Israel’s destructive and prolonged campaign has shifted the balance of power within Gaza in its favor. But this is more akin to moving pieces on a chessboard than changing the rules of the game. The current status quo in Gaza, which looks increasingly permanent, looks nothing like the “total victory” and destruction of Hamas that Netanyahu has repeatedly promised. Instead, it constitutes a return to Israel’s prewar strategy of conflict management and containment.
Just as in all the other rounds of Israel-Hamas confrontations, nobody has decisively won. In short, Palestinians and Israelis alike have paid a terrible price for more of the same.
The Israel-Hamas cease-fire has held since Oct. 10. But more than 300 Gazans and three Israeli soldiers have been killed since then. The conflict is not over, because the conditions that perpetuate it are still in place. Both sides want to undermine U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which provides a better vision, however vague, of Gaza’s “day after” than the ones that Hamas and Netanyahu would prefer.
All this has led commentators to affirm that Gaza’s supposedly temporary status quo could become permanent. But what many analysts have missed is that Israel’s underlying assumptions and policies toward Gaza seem to have changed surprisingly little since the Oct. 7 attack.
Israeli officials have described the a “yellow line,” which delineates the limits of Israel’s continued occupation of 53 percent of Gaza, as a new Berlin Wall. This implies that it will be anything but temporary. Hamas has not disarmed and instead has used its weapons to force Palestinians to accept the group’s authority. It is also allegedly stockpiling weapons abroad.
The humanitarian consequences of this situation will be dire. There is scant incentive to invest in a war zone, especially when any reconstruction can be undone at the push of a button. Even if the presence of a United Nations-mandated international stabilization force reduces the sporadic violence that has characterized the status quo after the cease-fire, any investors would be wary of accusations that they are sustaining Hamas’s or Israel’s continued control over Gaza. This is exactly what happened after the multiple rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas before Oct. 7: absent a political horizon, little of the billions of dollars that the international community has pledged to help rebuild Gaza has ever materialized.
It is the Palestinians beyond Israel’s “Berlin Wall” who will suffer the most from this strategic path dependency. As part of its obligations under the current cease-fire, Israel has allowed aid deliveries to resume within Gaza, while keeping the amount that reaches Hamas-controlled territory to a minimum. This will mean that most Gazans will receive enough aid to avert starvation, but little else.
This is the same logic that underpinned the siege of Gaza, in which Israel instigated a comprehensive blockade of the entire territory after Hamas’s takeover there in 2007. The goal in 2007 was to convince Gazans to overthrow Hamas. It did not work then. There is no reason to believe it will work now.
In 2019, Netanyahu fended off criticism from fellow right-wingers over his continued support for allowing Hamas to rule Gaza, claiming, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas.” Perpetuating Hamas’s control over the territory kept Palestinians divided and stymied their quest for statehood.
Today, Israel is—with the international community’s blessing—handing Gazans back to Hamas. It is no coincidence that only around 5 percent of Gaza’s Palestinians now reside in the 53 percent of the territory that Israel still occupies. Even if no Israeli official will admit as much, it has surrendered the remaining 95 percent of the population to the only other game in town: Hamas. This conforms to the ideological goal of “maximum land, minimum Arabs,” alongside the military’s more pragmatic but equally long-term aversion to shouldering Palestinians’ welfare and governance needs. The outcome suits Hamas, because its objective throughout the two-year war was always the opposite: to maintain its monopoly over Gaza’s inhabitants and prevent any alternative power center from emerging.
Over the last two years, Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that leaving Hamas in power would cross an Israeli red line. Yet he now seems to accept this outcome. Netanyahu’s government has done everything in its power to block the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. When Israel armed Gaza-based Palestinian factions to provide a supposed counterweight to Hamas, they were comparatively small, primarily criminal gangs that thrived off looting aid convoys and robbing civilians. They always lacked both the operational capacity to rival Hamas militarily and the local political legitimacy to replace it.
One topographical difference between the status quo before and after the war is the expansion of Israel’s occupation over most of Gaza. Israel now has direct control over all of Gaza’s borders and the adjacent land within the territory. Before Oct. 7, Israel’s strategic planners felt that they could manage Gaza and deter Hamas from the other side of the border. Israel has, by contrast, now reprioritized “strategic depth.” Israeli officials have often argued that their country’s permanent control over a buffer zone within Gaza is the only way to prevent the Oct. 7 attacks from reoccurring.
But the fact is that Israel did have a buffer zone on the morning of Oct. 7. For years, Israel’s military had unilaterally imposed a “no-go zone” that went up to one kilometer deep inside Gaza and left that part of the strip depopulated. Today, Israel’s buffer zone is much larger, but the paradigm remains the same.
The Gaza war has certainly shifted the balance of power in the strip to Israel’s military advantage. Hamas is a shell of its former self. Most of its leadership is dead, its munition stocks are depleted, and over half of Gaza’s territory is beyond its control. These developments have rendered it nearly impossible for Hamas to launch an attack as surprising and devastating as the one that occurred on Oct. 7.
During the war, some Israeli policymakers hoped to change the rules of the game with previously unthinkable policies, including the expulsion of the territory’s population. But international pressure rendered this impossible. In the absence of such radical measures, Israeli planners now believe that they can perpetuate the status quo indefinitely, thereby parking the Gaza problem once more without the need for a definitive resolution.
But Israel’s newfound advantages are neither strategic nor political; they are purely operational. If “victory” constitutes destroying the enemy’s will to fight and ability to resist—as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz claimed—then this conflict has no clear victor. By Israel’s own estimates, Hamas still possesses 20,000 fighters and remains devoted to pursuing armed “resistance.” It is more operationally constrained than ever before, but its willingness to confront Israel and violently resist its occupation of Gaza remains unchanged.
In sum, as the dust settles and the cease-fire looks increasingly like Gaza’s new normal, Israel’s policies toward the territory look less like a “day after” and more like a “day before.” Netanyahu’s pursuit of total victory has turned Israel into an international pariah. Yet as he continues to deny responsibility for Oct. 7 and reject a return to business as usual, his approach to Gaza continues Israel’s prewar pursuit of indefinite containment.