We’ve had the victory pictures; here’s how Israel is aiming to actually win the war
Sinwar and Nasrallah are gone, but their weakened terror groups are still dangerous and Iran’s regime is untouched. The IDF, Netanyahu government and US are working, sometimes in harmony, to change that
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
It was the elimination that Israel had desperately sought for a full year — arguably the ostensible victory picture: Yahya Sinwar, the primary figure in the most cataclysmic attack in the history of sovereign Israel, finally forced out of his tunnels into the open and killed by the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, his last moments and lifeless corpse there for all to see in the rubble to which he has reduced Gaza.
And the killing of Sinwar in Rafah last Wednesday was indeed an essential component in Israel’s necessary victory over Hamas — practically, in terms of his centrality to that terrorist-army-government bent on Israel’s destruction, and psychologically, in terms of Israel’s long climb out of the abyss into which Sinwar plunged us on October 7, 2023.
But his demise, as has been underlined every moment since it was confirmed, does not mark an absolute victory, does not complete a lasting, stable revival of Israeli security, and has not ended the war — not in Gaza, where the remains of Hamas continue to try to leverage the hostages to force an IDF withdrawal, and not on any of the other fronts from which Israel is being attacked.
In Gaza, the war has metastasized from conflict between organized military forces on an urban battlefield, above and below ground, where Hamas wrongly believed its home advantage, years of planning, and absolute indifference to the deaths of Gaza’s civilians would defeat the IDF and enable its survival. Now, Hamas is engaged in guerrilla-style warfare, hurting the IDF wherever it can, and maintaining much of its authority in the lower two-thirds of the Strip.
In the north of Gaza, with the focus on Jabaliya at present, the IDF is in the process of displacing the entire civilian population, moving the remaining 150,000 or so Gazans south as it seeks to eliminate any Hamas presence — monitoring Gazans as they evacuate, and arresting Hamas suspects among them as they go, and gradually turning the area into a kind of closed military zone.
The goal appears to be to create a dependably safe, Hamas-free northern Gaza, managed by some kind of international mechanism, featuring a non-Palestinian Authority local bureaucracy, with civilians gradually returning, a possible role for private firms in distributing aid, and no prospect of Hamas regaining military or civil governance. Success in the north of the Strip, it is apparently hoped, would enable a gradual replication of that process through the center and south. An offer of safe passage for Hamas out of Gaza — akin to the PLO’s forced relocation from Lebanon to Tunis in 1982 — might enable a deal to secure the release of the hostages.
If that sounds vague and improbable, it’s partly because official Israel isn’t talking publicly about how this might play out, for domestic political and diplomatic reasons. But on the ground in northern Gaza, that mass displacement is happening right now.
Hezbollah still potent, but cannot invade
In Lebanon, the targeted IAF strike that killed Hassan Nasrallah in his Beirut bunker on September 27, was, as with Sinwar, an essential component, but not the only such component, of definitive Israeli success.
Hezbollah’s leadership has been largely eliminated, thousands of its fighters have been killed and incapacitated, and a significant proportion of its weaponry has been destroyed.
But almost a month later, it is gradually reconstituting its leadership. Its armed forces still number in the tens of thousands. And if, as was being claimed this week, it retains some 30 percent of its rocket and missile capabilities, that would still leave it many times more powerful than most of the world’s armies, and far more potent than Hamas was at the start of this conflict.
On Wednesday morning, on the eve of Simhat Torah, a year by the Hebrew calendar since Hamas’s invasion and slaughter, central Israel woke up, just as it did so terribly a year ago, to sirens announcing rocket and missile fire — in what is becoming the new routine of attacks from across the northern border. Barely a day goes by without Hezbollah firing 100 or more rockets and missiles at northern and central Israel.
The terror group continues to intermittently outmaneuver Israel’s astonishing defense systems with its drones — most brazenly by hitting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Caesarea home on Saturday, where an exploding UAV shattered a bedroom window. It has been profoundly shaken by the destruction of its leadership, but it has not been thoroughly cowed or deterred.
What it was planning to do and can no longer do, however, is carry out a mass invasion of northern Israel. This month’s IDF ground operation is destroying Hezbollah’s infrastructure in a band several kilometers deep along the border. As things stand, the IDF would like to complete that operation within the next few weeks, and potentially enable the return of at least some of the tens of thousands of Israelis who have been forced from their homes in the north since October 8, 2023.
The north is and would still be vulnerable to Hezbollah fire, just like the rest of the country — but not to invasion. The IDF, which has overwhelming military primacy in Lebanon, does not anticipate going after Hezbollah’s entire rocket, missile and drone arsenal — deep, deep in Lebanon, including in Beirut and even beyond — unless the Netanyahu government has other ideas and instructions. Preventing, rather than eliminating, that ongoing Hezbollah danger, as far as the IDF is concerned, will require a diplomatic settlement, under which Israel would insist on freedom of action to tackle any Hezbollah return to the south.
An anti-Iran coalition?
As for the wider regional theater — and the strategic imperative to face down the regime in Iran — government officials are adamant that Israel must and will respond to the October 1 ballistic missile assault that sent most of the country dashing to bomb shelters and safe rooms. They recognize the potential for that Israeli response, in turn, to trigger further potential rounds of escalation.
The government does not want to trigger a broader war with Iran, and emphatically wants to maintain the close military and diplomatic support of the United States. It sees both the need to respond to October 1 and to ensure ongoing American support as essential to restoring Israeli deterrence against the regime.
More broadly, the Biden administration remains convinced that a grander vision is achievable — as in, the deepening of a US-led alliance that sees Israel more deeply integrated into the region, a robust coalition against the regime in Tehran, with the key element of Israel-Saudi normalization. Mossad chief David Barnea, closer to Netanyahu than most of the key figures in Israel’s security establishment, and Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s leading ministerial confidant, are key Israeli players in this regard.
For now, the Saudis are keeping their options open. They maintain a degree of self-protecting diplomatic interaction with Iran, know they cannot take on the regime themselves, and wait to see how Israel and the US will fare in that endeavor.
They recognize that Netanyahu will not proclaim a clear readiness to advance toward Palestinian statehood, nor allow a formal role in Gaza for the Palestinian Authority — much of whose leadership eulogized the would-be genocidal Sinwar as a “great national leader.” But with the immense potential benefit of a dramatically enhanced relationship with the US, there may be Israeli diplomatic formulations that Riyadh could choose to portray as at least opening a diplomatic horizon for the Palestinians, thus assuaging its own Shiite minority and enabling an overt, deepened relationship with Israel.
In that context, the Saudis are doubtless hoping for the imminent return to the US presidency of the uber-confident, spare-me-the-details Donald Trump, rather than a cautious first-term Kamala Harris. As indeed, of course, is Netanyahu.
