Hamas claimed it had not withdrawn from Gaza truce talks on Sunday, despite earlier reports to the contrary, after Saturday’s Israeli offensive targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. Hamas says Deif survived, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Deif’s fate remains unclear. The strike killed 92 other Palestinians, including women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
A Hamas official described the attacks as a “grave escalation” that showed Israel was not interested in reaching a cease-fire agreement, but Hamas’s military strategy also does not facilitate this objective. A weekend report from the New York Times, for example, details how Hamas fighters embed their operations within civilian areas, ensuring that any Israeli action produces heavy casualties. Hamas fighters often use a system of lookouts, including children, to monitor Israeli movements before emerging in plain clothes to launch surprise attacks and meld back into the local population.
This accomplishes Hamas’s real goal of dragging out the conflict with Israel, undermining the Jewish state and isolating it on the international stage.As far back as November 2023, Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, said “This battle … did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
With the conflictnow increasingly expanding to include Hezbollah, Hamas may be dangerously close to achieving this goal. The losers, of course, are both the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the people of Israel, desperate for the return of the over 100 hostages still held by Hamas, as well as Jews around the world now subject to a surge in antisemitic attacks.