Jonathan Lipow
Times of Israel, Aug. 7, 2025
“… it is vital that Israel win this war, and frankly, the only way to do so is to isolate Hamas from Gaza’s civilian population. There are three options for doing that – and all of them are bad. One option, however, is clearly better than the others.”
About a year ago, I posted an essay in the Times of Israel (“Should Israel ‘clear and hold’ Gaza?”) that explored whether Israel should shift from a strategy of raiding Hamas strongholds to one of occupying Gaza and taking responsibility for its civilian population. At the time, a number of senior American military thought leaders – including David Petraeus and Charles Brown – had argued that the only way to defeat Hamas was to isolate it from the civilian population that was its source of manpower, food and fuel, and human shielding.
I concluded that “in the short run, this isn’t even a real question. Israel can ill afford to divert the number of troops required for occupation (estimates range as high as 50,000) from other missions while it faces the prospect of a major ground war with Hezbollah. Furthermore, as long as Hamas can put up an organized military resistance, establishing a permanent – and intrinsically vulnerable – military and civil presence in Gaza would result in large numbers of Israeli casualties.”
But I went on to argue that “it is only a matter of time, however, before Hamas transitions from resisting Israeli incursions to hiding and hoping to survive to fight another day. And it is also just a matter of time before the confrontation in the north is resolved – either through an agreement or through war. At that point, should Israel occupy Gaza, finish off Hamas, and take responsibility for the governance of its population? The answer is yes.”
The time has come. Israel needs to decide if it intends to win or lose this war. This might sound like an odd question, given that Hamas’s actions led to the destruction of Gaza and the loss of fifty times more combatants than those lost by the IDF. How could Hamas possibly “win” this war?
The answer is that this war is asymmetric, being fought between a conventional military and a guerrilla army/terror gang. In his analysis of America’s defeat in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger summed up how asymmetric wars are won or lost: “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” …SOURCE