Nobody Won the War in Gaza
The same ceasefire agreement was almost signed in May 2024. Instead, the pointless violence continued for several more months—at Americans’ expense.
The Israeli government and the Palestinian armed group Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire and hostage deal, President-elect Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. The ceasefire is a much-needed breather for the people of the region after 15 months of some of the most brutal violence seen in modern history. The deal also goes to show how pointless extending the war was—and what a large role U.S. power played in it.
Israel and Hamas will reportedly exchange captives as Israeli troops pull out of Gaza, the Palestinian enclave, in a three-stage deal beginning on January 19. It is basically the same framework that Hamas, Israel, and the United States had all agreed to in May 2024. But over the following months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked back his agreement, stating that he "will not stop the war and leave Hamas standing in Gaza," and expanded the war into Lebanon.
President Joe Biden tacitly endorsed the "de-escalation through escalation" strategy, flooded Israel with weapons at U.S. taxpayer expense, and even deployed U.S. troops onto Israeli soil. In November 2024, the Hamas negotiating team was kicked out of Qatar, reportedly because of Biden administration pressure. Thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians were killed. And for what?
Hundreds of Israeli troops have died since May 2024, as well as several Israeli hostages who would have been released under this week's deal, including at least one American. Hamas has nearly recovered from its military losses by recruiting new fighters, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in his farewell speech on Tuesday. As Israeli troops withdraw, Hamas fighters will once again be in charge of Gaza.
Despite his talk of a World War II-style total victory, Netanyahu was not offering Palestinians a World War II-style surrender. There would be no Marshall Plan, and no new government in Gaza to replace Hamas and rebuild Palestinian society. Instead, Netanyahu's government was betting—and some cabinet ministers publicly said so—that they could physically remove the Palestinian population instead.
Biden administration envoy David Satterfield reportedly agreed with expelling Palestinians at first. When neighboring Arab countries refused to go along with mass expulsions, Israeli government circles passed around a plan for herding Palestinians into tent camps and subjecting them to forced re-education. On the ground, Israeli troops reportedly handed over control of food supplies to disorganized Palestinian gangsters.
With no alternative, Hamas will fill the vacuum by default. But the war was not a victory for Hamas, either. Hamas will rule over a traumatized population living in bombed-out wreckage. The dead have still not been properly counted; the official death toll of 46,600 may have missed 40 percent of violent deaths, and doesn't include deaths from starvation and disease. Back in May 2024, the United Nations estimated that rebuilding Gaza would take decades and cost $50 billion, money that will not be forthcoming to any Hamas-led government.
"These deaths should be on the conscience of the Israeli leaders who decided to kill all these people," Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi told Drop Site last year. "But they also to some extent should be on the consciences of the people who organized [the October 7, 2023] operation. They should have known, and had to have known that Israel would inflict devastating revenge not just on them but mainly on the civilian population."
The current war began with raids on Israeli towns on October 7, 2023. Hamas fighters killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers, returning to Gaza with 251 captives. In later interviews, Hamas officials argued that Palestinians were being slowly wiped out under Israeli rule, so they needed to force a confrontation to give the Palestinian nation a fighting chance.
Their calculations, however, were entirely wrong. Hamas had assumed that domestic dissatisfaction with Netanyahu would weaken Israel internally; instead, the attack caused Israelis to rally around the flag. The United States was willing to give far more support to Israel than expected.
Iran, which had given Hamas vague assurances of support in a war with Israel, was caught by surprise in October 2023 and turned out to be unprepared for the confrontation that followed. The war in Lebanon battered Iranian and pro-Iran forces, which soon found themselves forced out of Syria, too. Instead of winning Arab allies, Iran's support for the Palestinian cause led to Iranian armies being kicked out of the Arab world. And Israel broke the taboo of striking Iranian soil directly.
Iranian losses, however, are not necessarily American gains. The United States now has more responsibilities in a Middle East that is more chaotic and violent than before. Israel beat back Iran at a cost of over $22 billion in American taxpayer dollars. U.S. troops are still deployed on Israeli soil. The U.S. Navy is still fighting the spillover of the war in Yemen. American money is paying to rebuild Lebanon and its government, which American bombs tore up, and U.S. diplomats are micromanaging new Lebanese elections.
Before the war, both parties in American politics had dreamed of imposing a permanent new order on the Middle East. The United States could get out, proponents claimed, if Israel and Arab countries agreed to "police their region of the world" together. Instead, Washington has found itself babysitting Israel and the Arab states separately.
The only winner so far is Trump. Discontent over Biden's war helped swing the election to Trump, and a ceasefire on the eve of inauguration is the best of both worlds for the Trump administration. While Trump can blame Biden for any downsides or failures of the deal, the timing lets Trump take credit for "peace through strength."
Publicly, Trump had threatened Hamas that "all hell will break out" if there is no deal by the time he takes office. But privately, the most decisive pressure may have gone in the other direction. Last weekend, Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Israel to wrap up negotiations. Israeli officials complained that he pushed them "unusually aggressively," with "salty" language, to get the deal done quickly. Witkoff did "more to sway [Netanyahu] in a single sit-down than outgoing President Joe Biden did all year," Arab officials told The Times of Israel.
Asked who deserves more credit for the ceasefire, Biden said on Wednesday that "this is the exact framework of the deal I proposed back in May. Exact." That's an indictment, not a defense, of his policy.
