At last, Israel and Hamas have reached a deal — of a sort. On Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump announced that the warring parties in Gaza agreed to implement the “first phase” of the peace plan he presented in September. While this doesn’t quite mean the war is completely finished just yet, it appears to be an earnest attempt by Israel and Hamas to begin ending two years of bloody conflict, destruction, and despair.
Over two years of war — launched after Hamas invaded Israel and killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took around 250 more as hostages back to Gaza on October 7, 2023 — Israel has annihilated the Gaza Strip. It has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, starved and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million residents, and reduced most of the territory’s buildings and infrastructure to rubble. The fate of the hostages has also wrenched Israel’s population, driving many of its citizens to join massive protests demanding a deal to end the war and return those kidnapped for more than a year. Globally, Israel’s conduct has left its reputation in tatters, its leaders charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court and isolated on the world stage by nearly all but its closest ally, the United States. The war, and its unpopularity abroad, led Israel’s former allies Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Portugal, and Belgium to recognize Palestinian statehood at last month’s U.N. General Assembly.
Now we’ll find out if the peace can hold, and if so, what the “day after” actually looks like. Wednesday’s deal means, the parties say, that all Israeli hostages who are still being held in Gaza will be returned, beginning with those still living, estimated to be around 20 people, as soon as Monday; the remains of the dead Israeli hostages (approximately 30) will reportedly be returned in phases afterward. In exchange Israel will release nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, approximately 1,700 of whom were captured during the current conflict. Israel also says its army will retreat to an agreed upon line in Gaza as the first part of its withdrawal from the territory.
But most importantly, much is still unknown about the terms of the agreement that Israel and Hamas have reached. We don’t know whether Hamas has agreed to completely disarm. We also don’t know the extent to which Israeli troops are withdrawing from Gaza, or the timing of that withdrawal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet is meeting Thursday to vote on accepting the deal, and the ceasefire has not yet begun; Israeli strikes on the Strip were reported even as celebrations unfolded across both Gaza and Israel.
This is not a deal that Netanyahu’s government would have agreed to on its own. Indeed, he reportedly had to be strong-armed pretty aggressively by Trump into agreeing to it.
And yet, it’s about as close to an absolute victory for Israel as was conceivable over the past two years. If the deal actually being implemented resembles at all what was first announced by Trump at the beginning of this month, Israel will keep a troop presence in Gaza and the capability to periodically launch future strikes against militants there. Hamas will not control Gaza nor — for the foreseeable future — will the Palestinian Authority. It seems very likely that outside actors, not Israel, will be on the hook to pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. The seemingly impossible dilemmas faced by the Netanyahu government turned out not to be dilemmas at all.
Lessons will be taken from this, by both Israel and the rest of the world. The scale and totality of its operation, and their seeming success in achieving nearly all of the war’s goals, could lead the nation, and other militaries, to some very grim conclusions about how to best combat internal threats from militant groups like Hamas in the future.
A significant blow to “counterinsurgency”
It was clear from the very start that given the horrors of Oct. 7, this was going to be a different sort of war than the ones — costly for Gaza’s civilians but limited in scope and duration — that Israel fought in the territory in 2006, 2008, and 2014. The days of “mowing the grass” — degrading Hamas’s capabilities without getting embroiled in a long and costly struggle to wipe the group out entirely — were clearly over.
If Israel was going to try to put an end to Hamas entirely, international observers had suggestions. David Petraeus, former commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in 2024, that Israel was repeating America’s post-9/11 mistakes by going to war in Gaza without a plan for a post-war governance structure for the enclave. But, he suggested, Israel should learn from the relative success of the counterinsurgency tactics the US employed in Iraq after 2007.
“Killing and capturing terrorists and insurgents is insufficient,” Petraeus wrote in Foreign Affairs. “[T]he key to solidifying security gains and stemming the recruitment of new adversaries is holding territory, protecting civilians, and providing governance and services to them.”
This is plainly not what Israel did. Commanders weakened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants. According to some reports, more than 80 percent of those killed in Gaza may have been civilians, far higher than in other recent conflicts. More than 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings were leveled. Food aid was, at times, blocked entirely.
Israel was continually criticized throughout the war, particularly by Joe Biden’s administration, for not having a post-war governance plan for Gaza. But in the end, it simply fought on until one was devised by outside actors, particularly the US, that it found more acceptable than previous plans.
It seems likely that the Gaza War is going to deal a significant blow to the idea of “counterinsurgency” doctrine: that the best way to deal with an insurgency is to win over the local population — to “clear, hold, and build” your way to victory. Israelis might point out that while the 466 soldiers they lost in combat is a very high number compared to other Israeli wars, it’s about half of America’s losses in the first year of Petraeus’s “surge” in Iraq.
Israel fought a war so brutal it was found to have committed genocide by a UN commission and leading international scholars; its prime minister is under indictment by the International Criminal Court. And yet, it ends the war, mostly on its own terms, in a deal touted as a “GREAT DAY” by the president of the United States and fully endorsed by Arab governments.
In short, Israel’s overwhelming-force strategy — practically the antithesis of Petraeus’s philosophy — was largely successful in the cold terms of achieving its goals. But of course, there are caveats. Israel has deepened its political isolation, and while some of that may fade once the war ends, some of it won’t. As Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal writes, increasingly, “solidarity with the Palestinian cause—and hostility to Zionism—have become the political markers of a new generation.” The full extent of the consequences for Israel may not be evident for years. Israel’s relationship with the United States is also an exception to the norm: to put it plainly, there aren’t many countries that could fight this way and continue to receive billions of dollars per year in military aid. Regardless of Hamas’s ultimate fate, it’s hard to imagine many Gazans have a more positive attitude toward Israel at the end of this war than at the start of it. It’s not hard to imagine a new armed resistance movement emerging and carrying out future attacks on Israel.
And yet, other countries are likely to take the lesson that crushing the enemy is worth the international opprobrium that comes with significant civilian casualties. As a number of commentators put it when discussing US and Israeli strikes on Iran, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule,” that when it comes to using military force, “if you break it, you own it,” seems to no longer apply. When it comes to crushing a counterinsurgency, you don’t have to “clear, hold, build.” You can just crush.
This feels like yet another indication that we have moved on from the norms of the post-9/11 “war on terror” era — but not to a more humane or lawful form of warfare. Instead, Gaza may perhaps come to be seen as the first counterinsurgency war of the post-“liberal international order” era — an era in which global institutions are weaker and norms around the laws of war, democracy, and human rights are withering.
The coming days will tell whether this is just a hostage exchange and prelude to a new phase of the conflict, or a lasting peace. If it’s the latter, it will be welcome relief for Palestinians and allow opportunity for more desperately needed aid to enter Gaza, and for the residents to start to rebuild. Israel will have to reckon with the failures, military and political, that led to the October 7 attacks as it heads into what could be a closely fought national election next year.
But the true legacy of this conflict is likely to become clear only when those future wars break out. When questioned about the way they conduct those wars, governments are likely to point to Israel’s example.
