In a column just two weeks after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, I warned against Israel's blindness, which, by lashing out at the population of Gaza, would inevitably play into the hands of the Islamist militia. I called on the Israelis and their allies to avoid "the Hamas trap in Gaza" and "not to let Hamas prevail in Gaza, even on a field of ruins." Israeli retaliation was already taking the form of a wave of bombardments of unprecedented violence.
However, the "Hamas trap" was designed to lure the Israeli army into a ground reoccupation of the Palestinian enclave. This reoccupation, which began on October 27, 2023, continues 15 months later, despite the military redeployments of recent weeks. And each Israeli escalation – with the May 6, 2024 offensive on Rafah, followed by the campaign to depopulate northern Gaza, launched on October 6, 2024 – has only added ruin to ruin, without endangering Hamas's pre-eminence.
The Israeli General Staff has given in to a fixation with purely statistical results, as if it were enough to reduce the "stockpile" of Hamas fighters to eliminate the "terrorist threat." Not only has this obsession with numbers been able to justify the deaths of dozens, even hundreds of civilians for each "target" aimed at. But it has also ignored Hamas's recruitment momentum, which is accentuated by the more or less indiscriminate nature of Israeli strikes.
Mohammed Sinwar rather than Yahya Sinwar
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state under Joe Biden, declared on January 14 that "Hamas has recruited almost as many militants as it has lost," seeing this as a "recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war." It's all the more regrettable that the Democratic administration has consistently supported such a misguided Israeli policy, paving the way for the dictates of the new US president, Donald Trump.
You might say the leadership of Hamas in Gaza has simply passed from one Sinwar to another. Yahya Sinwar, the "mastermind" of the October 7 carnage, was killed by an Israeli patrol a year later, but his brother Mohammed has taken over. A hardened militiaman and veteran of several conflicts with Israel, he is revered by the new Hamas recruits and, even more so, by all the foot soldiers promoted to positions of responsibility as a result of the elimination of Islamist officers and leaders.
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