An American Looks at the First Year of Israel’s War with Hamas and Hezbollah

Beyond the opportunity to hear from an always impressive lineup of speakers and to directly engage with leading analysts and government officials from all parts of the world, one of the privileges of attending the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) World Summits over the years, for me, was a regular invitation from Shabtai Shavit, Chairman of the ICT’s Board of Advisors and former Director of the Mossad, to get together for several hours to discuss current issues. 

Often these talks took place at his home. This was not merely two old guys complaining that the world is going to hell, but an always challenging review of trends and threats. As evident in his book,⁽¹⁾ Shabtai was a methodical thinker who addressed both the strategic and the often-difficult moral considerations of any course of action.  A demanding interlocutor, Shabtai was also a dear friend who is deeply missed.

In preparation for these meetings, I would often come to his house with a list of points I hoped to discuss, and on occasion, Shabtai prepared memos on matters he wanted to review. In keeping with that practice, I have prepared a preliminary list of the takeaways from the current multifront war in the Middle East. These are not conclusions. Rather, they are areas that, in my view, warrant further inquiry in order to identify consequences, provoke creative thinking, and distill lessons to be learned, even as the conflicts continue. 

October 7 will be indelibly etched in the memories of all Israelis, as 9/11 is for Americans. To equal the ratio of more than 1,200 deaths as a percentage of Israel’s smaller population, close to 40,000 would have had to die in the United States. I can only imagine what the U.S. response would have been had that many Americans died. 

The sad anniversary of the October 7 attack is a remembrance of a tragedy that has led to Israel’s longest war since its war of independence. For Israelis, the current conflict has revived existential fears, confirmed military maxims, and exacerbated the country’s moral and political divisions. Observers beyond Israel see fundamental changes in warfare, cascading political and economic consequences, new terrorist threats, and moral dilemmas. 

Hostage-taking has been elevated to national strategy. While kidnappings are a common terrorist tactic, the mass abduction of Israelis on October 7 was strategic.  Hamas took hostages to barter for ceasefires, divide Israeli society, exchange for large numbers of Palestinian prisoners, and ensure the continued survival of Hamas rule after the war. From Hamas’s perspective, it has worked so far.

Hamas had for years used Israeli hostages to protract negotiations. The Gilad Shalit case is the most memorable. After more than five years of negotiations, Israel released more than 1,000 prisoners, including the current commander of Hamas in Gaza, to gain Shalit’s release. The experience probably haunted the Israeli government in dealing with the October 7 hostage case. 

In the immediate wake of the October 7 attack, the Israeli government made destroying Hamas militarily and recovering its shattered deterrent credibility the paramount objective. Hostages would never be forgotten, but their fate would not dictate Israel’s strategy. As the fighting continued, domestic pressure to bring back the hostages predictably increased, and because U.S.-Israeli dual citizens were among the hostages, American politics were brought into the equation. Despite the United States and other intermediaries talking up the prospects of an imminent deal, which they have been doing for months, I remain skeptical that Israel and Hamas have changed their fundamental positions––we are not there yet.

The Israeli government has remained suspicious that the ceasefires demanded by Hamas were ploys to permanently end Israel’s operations, allowing Hamas to survive as a governing body and military force while again dragging out hostage negotiations for years. That probably was Hamas’s original strategy, and Hamas may calculate that eventually this Israeli government or another will be forced to deal. At the same time, the government of Israel may reckon that continuing military operations will eventually compel surviving Hamas commanders to release the hostages, if only to barter for their own safe departure. 

The calculus is complex. How it may end remains uncertain. What is virtually certain is that hostage negotiations will remain an important component of statecraft, both in Israel and worldwide. It is an issue that will continue to grow. The development of the hostage taking from a tactic to a dangerous strategy, and the inherent weakness of liberal democracies in coping with this strategy, make formulating response strategies highly urgent. These strategies should relate to several different domains, such as domestic public opinion, deterrence measures, negotiation tactics, international law, and more.⁽²⁾ Kidnappings and wrongful detentions have been addressed in the last three ICT Summits.

Missiles and drones are changing military equations. Initially, only the United States had drone technology. That technology is now ubiquitous—cheap drones are available on Amazon. Drones quickly became a major component of the Ukraine-Russia War, where innovations are rapidly advancing drone and counter-drone warfare. These innovations will spread, certainly from Russia to Iran, which is supplying Russia with drones, and from Iran to its proxies.

While Hamas’s attack was deliberately intended to display savagery and provoke a ferocious Israeli response, it was mostly a low-tech assault. The threat posed by Hezbollah raised different fears. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Syrian artillery on the Golan Heights routinely fired on Israeli communities in northern Israel. That ended with Israel’s capture of the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War in 1967. But in 1974, Israel was alarmed by the Soviet Union’s shipment to Syria of SCUD B missiles with heavy warheads that could reach almost every part of Israel. 

Fast-forward to Hezbollah’s estimated arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles with a range of more than 300 miles, and a large fleet of drones. An all-out missile attack by Hezbollah could devastate Israel’s critical infrastructure––an existential threat.

Israeli military doctrine rests heavily on deterrence. Israel’s intense immediate aerial assault on Gaza was intended not only to preempt further attacks by Hamas, but also to warn Hezbollah that its intervention would see Lebanon suffer the same level of destruction. Hezbollah intervened, but instead of a full-scale attack, it fired more than 12,000 rockets into northern Israel. Few people were killed, but the continuing barrage forced the evacuation of tens of thousands from the northern part of the country. Only in the past two weeks has the balance between Israel and Hezbollah changed after the killing of Hezbollah leaders and the neutralization of a large part of Hezbollah’s long-range-missile array.

Meanwhile, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, another Iranian proxy, have been attacking merchant shipping in the Red Sea with missiles and drones and, on occasion, attacking Israel itself. This has completely disrupted shipping through the Suez Canal, depriving Egypt of more than $2 billion in annual revenue. The cost of goods and shipping times have increased as ships are forced to sail around the African continent instead of the shorter route through the canal. 

Targeted killings can be disruptive but have consequences. During war, enemy commanders are legitimate targets. In 1943, the United States shot down the commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy, the man who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. The British had plans to assassinate Hitler in 1944 but did not implement them. 

Killing terrorist leaders engaged in war would seem to follow the same logic, although they are controversial, and, as Shabtai Shavit pointed out, even “countries that support these actions use them selectively.”⁽³⁾ Prevented from bringing terrorists operating abroad to justice through conventional law enforcement means, Israel developed an operational code that takes into account the lack of alternatives, the degree to which the target is directly involved in commanding or carrying out operations, the imminence of hostile action, and the risks of unacceptable collateral damage. Each decision requires high-level approval. 

In its long global war on terror, the United States has also carried out targeted killings. They have included the top al Qaeda leaders; the first three heads of Islamic State and its predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq; commanders of other al Qaeda affiliates; and the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force in Iraq. Israelis have killed commanders of Palestinian organizations responsible for terrorist attacks on Israel, commanders of Hamas and Hezbollah, and, most notably, Hasan Nasrallah last month. 

Targeted killing is a strategic decision, not a legal one.  Whether it is wise is another question. Enemy commanders are routinely replaced by others, who may be less effective but who also may be turn out to be superior leaders or even more ruthless killers. Killing a terrorist leader removes someone who can order an attack but also someone who can enforce a ceasefire or order the release of hostages or potentially even negotiate peace. 

The death of Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah, who some saw as a formidable and determined leader but not a reckless one, does not end the conflict or eliminate the threat posed by Hezbollah’s missiles. In a decapitated Hezbollah, the risk increases that individual commanders seeking revenge might decide on their own to fire those they command. There are no fail-safe procedures in terrorist groups. Israel’s justification appears to be that Hezbollah was about to launch a major attack on Israel, which necessitated preemptive action.

Killing enemy commanders, especially when they are also political leaders, encourages retaliation. Terrorist commanders are targeted because of their specific command or operational role. In contrast, terrorists seeking revenge are concerned only with symbolic symmetry, which can be defined broadly to include the killing of any current or former official, or the bombing an Israeli embassy or Jewish center, as Iran and Hezbollah were accused of doing in Buenos Aires in 1994. 

The elimination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders could open up a different path in Gaza and Lebanon.  Hamas’s brutal elimination of political rivals and iron-fist rule did not make it popular among all Gazans, although the manifestation of opposition was dangerous. Similarly, not all Lebanese, or Shias, or even those in Hezbollah were comfortable with Nasrallah’s subservience to Tehran. Organizations that appear monolithic when under intense pressure may become more fractious when the lid is removed. 

A possible way forward involves not seeking reconciliation and lasting peace, which is a very Western approach, but demonstrating the benefits of less hostility. The benefits––material and psychological––must accrue to the people and not become protection money to an alternate set of villains. 

Urban warfare remains difficult and bloody. The fighting in Gaza has highlighted the difficult and bloody business of urban warfare. In Gaza, this has posed not just an operational challenge—the nature of urban combat put Israel at a disadvantage in public perceptions. 

Urban combat may have been just as horrific during World War II (if not worse), but no one had cell phone cameras or social media accounts then.  Moreover, public attitudes toward the carnage of war have changed, especially in the West, and even more so when Israel is involved. No army today can ignore this.

The deployment of precision-guided munitions in the late 20^th century, combined with real-time intelligence and communication, transformed modern warfare. It allowed commanders to contemplate using military force in circumstances where the prospect of collateral casualties would make such operations unacceptable. But that doesn’t work as well in crowded cities, especially where defenders deliberately co-locate military command centers, arsenals, and firing positions next to or in houses of religious worship, hospitals, or schools, or beneath high-rise residential buildings. 

Pentagon-sponsored studies of recent urban battles such as the attack on Islamic State’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, showed that U.S. efforts to avoid civilian casualties were considerable but insufficient.⁽⁴⁾ That finding led to new efforts to mitigate civilian harm. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also tried to mitigate civilian harm. Was it enough? 

Were alternate approaches feasible? What would have been the estimated costs in terms of additional risks to IDF soldiers’ lives, delay, and financial outlays? Could more have been done to reduce the risk of harm to civilians while continuing military operations against Hamas? While destroying Hamas’s military capacity, could Israel have handled the predictable masses of refugees and loss of life-supporting infrastructure? In World War II, Allied armies included civil affairs units, trained to deal with displaced civilians. Medical civic action programs are part of counterinsurgency strategy. Could the IDF itself have opened accessible field hospitals to treat Palestinian sick and wounded? Could more humanitarian aid have been distributed? The same issues are arising in Lebanon and will increase if Israel invades with ground forces.

Tunnels are a new dimension of conflict. Underground warfare, which Professor Daphné Richemond-Barak wrote about years ago, has, as she predicted, become a critical dimension of strategic importance.⁽⁵⁾ In the 1960s, my comrades and I crawled through Viet Cong tunnels in Vietnam, but what Israeli soldiers confront in Gaza and Lebanon today are not your grandfather’s tunnels.

Hamas and Hezbollah dug their tunnels not to shelter civilians but to hide their weapons, protect their commanders, and assist their fighters. They also dug tunnels to bypass obstacles and smart fences, expertise that they are now sharing with Mexico’s drug cartels. Built largely with diverted aid, Hamas’s vast underground infrastructure has nothing to do with civil defense. Gaza’s civilian population is deliberately left exposed because heavy civilian casualties are a component of Hamas strategy––a calculated outcome that advances Hamas’s goal of promoting enduring hatred among both Palestinians and international audiences, thereby ensuring perpetual war.

Wars are increasingly contests of manipulating perceptions. Like contemporary warfare in general, the war in Gaza became a contest of manipulating perceptions. Gazans had a “home field” advantage in feeding disturbing images to social media. Indeed, photos of dead children and anguished families are horrifying––and they are lucrative. They sell newspapers, increase TV ratings, and attract clicks. And Hamas took an early lead with reporting what were purported to be “civilian” death tolls. Challenging these numbers was a matter of statistics, too technical to dull the impact of a horrific body count.

Hamas also benefitted from sympathetic foreign volunteers and anti-Israel officials in international organizations operating in Gaza.  Nor was the international media always neutral in its reporting, which often blended antiwar sentiments with anti-Israeli attitudes.

Israel’s military superiority was not matched by its ability to counter anti-Israel narratives. Public diplomacy aimed at crucial Western audiences was replaced by public displays of disdain and defiance. Israel’s powerful diplomats of the past, such as Abba Eban, are nowhere to be found.

To a degree, one can understand Israel’s pugnacious and dismissive attitudes. Since its creation, Israel has been obliged to fight against ruthless foes in an indifferent, often hostile world.  Security demands have outweighed diplomacy. And perhaps giving the proverbial finger even to Israel’s friends abroad makes for good domestic politics, but it risks self-harm in the long run. 

The current conflict increases the likelihood of new waves of terrorism. The war in Gaza has energized jihadist groups worldwide. Always resilient, jihadists are making strong comebacks in several parts of the world and are now calling for more attacks in the West. Iran is still seeking revenge for the 2020 U.S. killing in Iraq of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of its elite Quds force; the Israeli killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran earlier this year; and the killing of a general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who was with Hasan Nasrallah.

The expulsion of Hamas from Gaza and its occupation by Israel will not prevent Hamas from instigating terrorist attacks abroad. Hezbollah has a vast international network, including connections with organized crime in many parts of the world. The death of Nasrallah may provoke centrally directed or spontaneous attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets abroad. Assassinations and mass shootings, rather than bombings, seem the more likely tactics.

Domestic divisions will weigh heavily in every future conflict. The war in Gaza has exposed deeper divides than were imagined in Western attitudes toward Israel, a continuing affinity between the far left and anti-Israel sentiments, and persistent displays of anti-Semitism.  The protests, in turn, created opportunities that have been exploited by neo-Nazi and other far-right groups. Domestic divisions––more evident in democracies––will feature in future conflicts. 

Few saw this coming at the outset of the Gaza war. The numbers involved in the anti-Israel protests so far are not great––nothing close to those in the anti-Vietnam War movement—but the protests quickly moved to disruption and received intense media coverage.  

The current environment in the United States may not encourage inquiry about the protests. Explanations on offer include shock and outrage at the scale of death and destruction in Gaza; the presence on university campuses of influential pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel influencers; a demonstration of the power of social media to generate sudden mass movements; foreign influence operations; generational change; and faint-hearted decisionmaking by university officials and local governments.

Israel has made itself a partisan issue in American politics. The war in Gaza has cost Israel support in many segments of American society, support that will not easily be restored.  While there have sometimes been intense policy debates, American support for Israel was historically bipartisan. 

A majority of Americans still support Israel, but Israel has made itself a partisan issue in American politics. By so obviously tying Israel’s fortunes to one political party over another instead of seeking to maintain bipartisan support, Israel risks permanent damage to itself at a critical time in its history. Judging by the reaction to the Gaza war at many of the leading college campuses in Europe and America—the crucible of future leaders—Western attitudes will only further harden against Israel. Israel has an American problem that it will struggle to effectively address.

America has been Israel’s strategic insurance policy for decades. In constant dollars, it has provided more than $300 billion in economic and military aid. That does not include the costs of U.S. military deployments to deter Israel’s foes or to help shoot down missiles fired by Iran, as those deployments did earlier this year and on October 1. Between 1945 and the beginning of 2024, the United States has used its veto power in the United Nations 89 times to block General Assembly resolutions; more than half of those times were to defend Israel. It is not clear that the current Israeli leadership fully values this continued support.

The war has diminished the United Nations. The moral claims of international organizations, including UN agencies, have been diminished by the organizations’ biased attitudes and one-sided condemnations. Sympathy easily slides into complicity. For years, thousands of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) employees worked in Gaza. They watched Hamas increase its military strength, and some were surely aware of the diversion of international aid to construct tunnels, build rockets, and fund Hamas operations. The UN was obliged to fire some UNRWA employees who are believed to have participated in the October 7 attacks. UNRWA did not have to spy for Israel, but was there no quiet effort to head off a war that would bring catastrophe to Gaza itself?  

Israel contributed to this situation. By making the Gazans dependent on foreign aid, Israel created the circumstances in which close relationships between UN staff and Gazans inevitably developed. 

And the UN did nothing when Hezbollah openly defied UN Resolution1701 that only Lebanon’s armed forces and UN peacekeepers would be deployed south of the Litani River. (Critics of the UN would argue that many of its resolutions are ignored, including by Israel.) Only after the Israeli assault on Hezbollah and the death of its leader did the Prime Minister of Lebanon announce that the Lebanese Army was now ready to move into the southern area and fully implement Resolution 1701. 

However, if ultimate resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians requires that both parties receive credible guarantees of their security, can the UN still be the guarantor? Or will another credible international force, acceptable to both sides and capable of enforcing the arrangement, have to be assembled?

We are back to arguing about the definition of terrorism. The war in Gaza has rekindled old debates about the definition of terrorism itself. In the 1970s, some argued that the definition of terrorism could not be applied to national liberation movements fighting colonial governments, since their cause was just. Others, myself included, countered that terrorism was defined by the quality of the act, not the identity of the perpetrators or the nature of their cause.  

Eventually, sufficient international consensus was achieved to prohibit certain acts, including taking hostages, hijacking or sabotage of commercial airliners, attacks on diplomats, and deliberately targeting civilians. No exceptions were made for “just causes.” Collectively, these restrictions, which in principle mirrored the Geneva Conventions, effectively defined terrorism. 

But as a body, the UN still leaned against this view. For example, in a 2002 resolution, the UN affirmed the right of Palestinians to fight the Israeli occupation “by all available means.” While some national representatives objected that this language condoned Palestinian terrorism despite the UN’s condemnation of terrorist tactics, the resolution passed.

Old battle lines have now been redrawn. Counterterrorism and “settler colonialism” have been conflated as a form of terrorism. According to this argument, no norms of conduct can be applied to groups like Hamas, which claim to be fighting settler colonialism. And no defense against them is legitimate because the Israelis lack legitimacy. 

A new axis has emerged. We have in the past confronted military alliances, terrorist consortiums, state-sponsored terrorism, and proxies. But the assemblage of forces in the current conflict, led by Iran and involving Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, militias in Syria and Iraq, and even al Qaeda⁽⁶⁾ represents a remarkable level of connectivity and coordination that transcends the divides between secular nationalists and Islamist extremists, between Sunnis and Shias. It highlights how much the Palestinian cause resonates with the Middle East masses, even if it is often an afterthought to Arab and Muslim leadership. 

And it points to the leading role played by Iran, which for many years Shabtai Shavit saw as the principal threat to Israel. Since the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran has endeavored to surround Israel with a constellation of proxies and protect itself with a nuclear arsenal. To a degree, it has succeeded in the former, although that project has suffered with the recent assaults on Hamas and Hezbollah. 

This Middle East constellation led by Iran has become the branch line of a higher-level revisionist collective that includes Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea, states that are collaborating to overturn the existing world order. Three of the four are nuclear-weapons states, and Iran may soon join them. While the United States and its military allies still tend to view conventional war, counterterrorism, and psychological operations as separate fields, these countries orchestrate nuclear threats, overt military aggression, proxy wars, terrorist attacks, and information operations. It will remain an enduring challenge. 

Let me conclude with another personal note. For many years, I have served on the Advisory Board of the International Institute of Counter-Terrorism, founded by Boaz Ganor. The ICT and its annual World Summit on Counter-Terrorism have for more than two decades been a center for research, an international forum for the exchange of views, and an arena for frank and forthright debate on the operational, strategic, and ethical challenges of this particular dimension of conflict. As these issues again dominate the headlines, that function remains critical to understanding the threat and how it continues to evolve. It is not an easy topic, it never was, it never will be. But it is essential––inescapable.  

⁽¹⁾ Shabtai Shavit, Head of the Mossad: In Pursuit of a Safe and Secure Israel, University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.

⁽²⁾ I am grateful to Ariel Merari, with whom I have discussed these matters since the 1970s, for his always helpful comments.

⁽³⁾ Shavit, op. cit.

⁽⁴⁾ Michael J. McNerney, et.al, Understanding Civilian Harm in Raqqa and Its Implications for Future Conflicts. Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 2022.

⁽⁵⁾ Daphné Richemond-Barak, Underground Warfare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

⁽⁶⁾ Assaf Moghadam, “Marriage of Convenience: The Evolution of Iran and al-Qa’ida’s Tactical Cooperation,” CTC Sentinel, Volume 10, Issue 4, April 2017.