The Theory of Hamas’s Catastrophic Success
Both Hamas and Israel are making up strategies as they go.
Updated at 9:50 a.m. ET on November 6, 2023
Three days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, I called the operation a “catastrophic success.” Now Hamas itself is saying something similar. A strange report in Middle East Eye (a publication funded by Hamas-friendly Qatar) quotes Hamas leaders admitting that they intended to commit heinous war crimes, but not at this scale. Hamas “had in mind to take between 20 and 30 hostages,” a source told the reporter. “They had not bargained on the collapse of [Israel’s] Gaza Division. This produced a much bigger result.”
By “bigger result,” the source presumably meant the murder, torture, and dismemberment of more than 1,400 Israelis, Thais, Nepalis, and others. Another bigger-than-anticipated result might be the invasion of Gaza. Had the dead and kidnapped numbered in the dozens, Israel would have had to consider its options. Once Hamas broke the three- and then four-digit barriers, Israel’s commitment to destroy Hamas completely became inevitable. Hamas’s main military benefactor, Iran, tends to mount attacks just under the threshold of causing all-out war. That pattern keeps the geopolitical consequences manageable. Hamas’s attack crossed that line.
The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success (and its flip side, Israel’s strange defeat), if correct, informs what may happen next.
Hamas is making up a strategy as it goes. I disagree with Hussein Ibish’s claims that the massacres were “intended as a trap,” and that “the intended effect is precisely the ground assault Israel is now preparing.” Invading Gaza may indeed be foolish, and Israel should certainly hesitate before doing what its enemy wants it to do. But I do not see evidence that Hamas planned for the magnitude of the response it is getting. Is there evidence that Hamas was stockpiling weapons, preparing cells for hostages, and digging even more tunnels in preparation for October 7? So far I have not seen it.
Public statements by Hamas’s leaders, moreover, have been garbled and pathetic, by turns taking enthusiastic responsibility for the atrocities and suggesting that they either did not happen or were not intended. “We will do this again and again,” Ghazi Hamad told LBC TV last week. Moussa Abu Marzouk told The Economist that terrorists may have slaughtered hundreds at the Nova rave because they mistook the partiers for soldiers. The same Middle East Eye story quotes another source claiming, ludicrously and in defiance of all evidence, that the only targets were military.
So is Israel. The job of military planners is to prepare for the worst. In Israel’s case that worst-case scenario is a multifront war, with Iran fully committed. But preparing for the worst is much easier than preparing for the weird. And it is decidedly weird when one’s enemy undertakes a sophisticated, disciplined, tactically brilliant operation—and then so bungles things that it exceeds its objectives and begins to defeat its own strategic goals. Ever since the Gilad Shalit affair, Israel has viewed the taking of another hostage to Gaza as a nightmare scenario, to be avoided at all cost. I have little doubt that the delay in starting the invasion was in part because no plans existed for the bizarre scenario—Shalit, times 240—that Israel currently faces.
Hamas might not be beyond deterrence. The decision to eliminate Hamas was made in a righteous fury after October 7. Israel could not abide the existence of a neighboring terrorist group with no apparent limitation on what it was willing to do. To have a neighbor who breaks your windows now and then is one thing; to have a neighbor who steals your children and dismembers your husband is another. In theory, one might deal differently with a lunatic than with a schemer. The former is incapable of weighing costs. Of course, Israel does not care to differentiate—and it probably shouldn’t. A neighbor who intended to steal only one child but got carried away and took dozens is just as intolerable as a neighbor who stuck to his diabolical plan and took only one.
Future war-crime prosecutions might take these details into account. A fighter who burns a baby alive is committing a war crime. But commanders who fail to keep their fighters from committing such atrocities are committing war crimes, too. This is known as the “Yamashita standard,” for the Japanese general who was found guilty of his men’s atrocities, merely because he took no precaution to prevent them. Hamas leaders can claim that they didn’t intend for their fighters to go berserk. If they are ever captured and prosecuted, evidence of intent and acts of omission could separately become the stuff of convictions and, if a court follows Yamashita’s example, hangings. (Israel has used the death penalty exactly once, for Adolf Eichmann’s crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.)
The most unsettling aspect of the current moment is how deeply all parties have gone into strategically uncharted territory.
The status quo between Israel and Gaza could have been interrupted in many ways: Expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia would have altered the picture to favor Israel. A Third Intifada could have been conjured by a sufficiently adroit Hamas leadership. A much more limited series of attacks by Hamas could have upended Israeli politics. But killing 1,400 people in a day erases all priors and leaves the future wide open for calamities foreseen and unforeseen. The deaths in Israel and Gaza could cascade politically, affecting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan—in ways that Hamas might welcome, or might not. Hamas may have stumbled much further into this darkness than it intended. Now Israel is stumbling in the same darkness, and the whole region is right behind.
The Yamashita standard was named for a Japanese general, not an admiral.