The Gaza war will go on until both sides stop wanting it to.
The killing on Thursday of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the principal architect of the October 7 attack on southern Israel, offers a golden opportunity for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare victory and begin pulling troops out of Gaza. But that is not going to happen. Most likely, nothing will change, because neither Netanyahu nor Hamas wants it to.
Netanyahu’s calculation is no mystery. Should he leave political office, he faces a criminal-corruption trial and a probable inquiry into the security meltdown on October 7. He has apparently concluded that the best way to stay out of prison is to stay in power, and the best way to stay in power is to keep the war going—specifically, the war in Gaza. The battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon is too volatile, and involves too many other actors, including the United States, Iran, and Gulf Arab countries, for Israel to keep control of its trajectory. For this reason, Lebanon is much less useful than Gaza as a domestic political tool.
For Israel, the war in Gaza has become a counterinsurgency campaign with limited losses day to day. This level of conflict likely seems manageable for the short term, and appears beneficial to Netanyahu. Hamas, for its part, seems to think it can hold out in the short term, and gain in the long term. An insurgency requires little sophistication by way of organizational structure or weaponry—only automatic rifles, crude IEDs, and fighters who are prepared to die. Years, possibly a decade or longer, of battles against Israeli occupation forces for control of Palestinian land in Gaza are intended to elevate the Hamas Islamists over the secular-nationalist Fatah party as the nation’s bloodied standard-bearer. Hamas leaders may well see no reason to abandon this path to political power just because Sinwar is dead.
Some more moderate members of the Qatar-based Hamas politburo, such as Moussa Abu Marzouk, have expressed discomfort with the October 7 attack and Sinwar’s “permanent warfare” strategy. But they are not likely to prevail over more hard-line counterparts, such as the former Hamas leader and ardent Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Khaled Mashal (some sources are already reporting that he has been named to succeed Sinwar).
