War in Gaza: Has Hamas achieved its aims against Israel?

The masked Hamas fighter is hunkered down with an assault rifle against a damaged wall, apparently relaxed and sipping tea.

“There is a tank standing by the entrance of the tunnel,” the inscription reads on the social media post. “No problem, I will drink my tea, and go blow it up.”

Likewise, a short pro-Hamas propaganda sketch posted on TikTok purports to show a bearded fighter asleep under an olive tree after a night of prayer. He is woken by a comrade in camouflage, who tells him of an Israeli tank nearby.

“Mohamed” asks if he should strike it with a “Yasin 105,” a Hamas-made anti-tank grenade. The video shows him scoring a direct hit on the tank, then calmly returning to the olive tree to continue his nap.

It is not clear if these scenes circulating on pro-Hamas media are produced by the Palestinian militant group itself. But nearly six weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, precipitating punishing Israeli airstrikes and a massive ground invasion of Gaza on a mission to “destroy” the group, analysts say such scenes help it portray a calm confidence.

In Hamas’ carefully planned and executed Oct. 7 attack, which it called “Al-Aqsa Flood,” 1,200 people in Israel were killed, and some 240 were taken hostage. In the ensuing conflict, which has laid waste to swaths of the Gaza Strip, more than 11,300 Palestinians have been killed, among them an unknown number of Hamas fighters.

Israel says dozens of its soldiers have been killed in the ground war. Wednesday morning the fighting took a dramatic turn as Israeli forces entered parts of Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital, below which, Israel and the United States said, Hamas had concealed a command center and weapons.

“It tells a lot that they are not near raising a white flag” of surrender, says Azmi Keshawi, Gaza analyst for the International Crisis Group, contacted in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.

“Hamas is not worried,” he says. “I think they wanted the Israelis to go into the deep mud of Gaza; now they will have the advantage.”

Hamas sources inside Gaza are “no longer available,” Mr. Keshawi notes. And Hamas political officials based in Lebanon, Qatar, and elsewhere have limited contact with Hamas’ military wing in Gaza, which conducted the Oct. 7 operation.

Does Hamas believe it’s winning?

But analysts say a picture is emerging about Hamas’ thinking and expectations before it launched the raid, and about its aims during the violent aftermath.

Does Hamas believe it is winning? Did it expect such a lethal Israeli counterstrike, which might jeopardize its existence? And has the cost been worth it, purportedly to resurrect the long-festering Israeli-Palestinian issue, and demonstrate that living under an Israeli blockade was no longer sustainable for Palestinians in Gaza?

Hamas’ goal is to inflict casualties for as long as they can, as international pressure grows to end the war, Mr. Keshawi says.

“Hamas knows their capabilities, but what they are betting on is holding out for as long as they can, because every day they hold steadfast, it gets the Israelis one step closer to totally break and not recover,” he says.

The analyst says he has felt the impact of the fighting. His adult son was wounded in an Israeli airstrike near where the family had taken shelter in southern Gaza, and he lost two apartments.

He notes how a judicial overhaul plan pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government had sharply divided the Jewish state in the months before the war, creating a sense that Israel had become more vulnerable.

Hamas’ attack then shattered the conventional wisdom among Palestinians and Arab states – and Israelis themselves – of Israeli invincibility. Israeli analysts say a restoration of deterrence is one aim of this war.

Yet already Hamas has achieved some of its war aims, including a halt to budding normalization agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states, says a senior Hamas official in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan.

The Oct. 7 attacks were part of the Hamas “strategy ... aimed at ending Israel’s attempts to bring an end to the Palestinian cause and to build local alliances that will remove the Palestinian people,” Mr. Hamdan told the Lebanese newspaper Al-Liwaa, according to a translation by the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

The “greatest achievement” of the Hamas operation, said Mr. Hamdan, was that it “ended Israel’s ambitions to become a natural entity in the region at the expense of the Palestinian nation.”

Blow to Israeli security

The surprise scale of the Hamas incursion has also meant a far deeper than expected impact on both sides, says Tareq Baconi, an expert on Hamas who is board president of Al-Shabaka, a network of Palestinian analysts. He says such action to disrupt the status quo was “in some ways inevitable,” after 17 years of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and Israeli actions since last spring against Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank that drew Hamas ire.

“The speed with which the [Israeli] blockade moved from being impenetrable, and from Israel being invincible, to clearly how much all of this was a house of cards, just meant that Hamas was able to be much more successful – and therefore the [Israeli] retaliation was much more brutal,” says Mr. Baconi, author of the 2018 book “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”

“Regardless of how Hamas emerges ... there is no doubt that they have achieved a pretty significant blow to Israel’s sense of security, and undermined a fundamental pillar of Zionism, which is that Israel can be a safe haven for Jews, even while it maintains an apartheid system against Palestinians,” he says.

“I think Hamas has just shattered that,” says Mr. Baconi. “In some ways, Israel is in an existential battle, not militarily – because obviously it can’t be defeated militarily in this way – but discursively, I think the foundations of the state have really been shaken.”

Israel’s stated aim of destroying Hamas may also be “unachievable,” says Mr. Baconi, because “Hamas only has to ‘not lose’ to emerge victorious.”

Ready to pay the price

Indeed, Hamas political officials are savoring the moment, with a Politburo member in Beirut, Ghazi Hamad, boasting on Oct. 24, for example, that to “sacrifice martyrs” was a point of pride for Hamas.

“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again,” Mr. Hamad told Lebanon’s LBC television, according to a MEMRI translation. “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth [attack]. ... Will we pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it.”

Not all Gaza residents are enthusiastic about Hamas, however, nor about the upheaval and suffering that its attack on Israel has brought to their lives. Such sentiments are reflected in some Palestinian social media channels, though they are not widely broadcast in public.

“Hamas is calling this a popular resistance against Israel, but are they giving us arms? Are they protecting our wives and children in their tunnels? Are they sharing their fuel?” asks a taxi driver in Gaza, who gave the name Louay. “No, they are putting our families on the front lines and waging their own war on their own terms for their own interests.”

Still, even though Hamas actions triggered the Israeli response, the high death toll among Gaza residents has often meant increased support for Hamas, says Mr. Keshawi of the International Crisis Group.

“A lot of people now have personal vendettas [against Israel],” he says. “So instead of just having a few people who had a belief or ideology to liberate Palestine, now it became 2.3 million that have personal vendettas toward Israel for the new Nakba [catastrophe] they have been in.”

Taylor Luck contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank.