Hamas’s Last Stand? Five Factors Supporting an Israeli Victory in Gaza

The Hamas-Israel war is nearing the end of its second year. What began as another bloody round in the endless cycle of military tit-for-tat between the two sides has become something different: a campaign in which Israel could actually achieve the difficult – some said impossible – military objectives it set for itself at the war’s outset.

Five factors are making Israel’s eventual victory increasingly likely within the next six months. Hence the title of our post: “Hamas’s Last Stand? Five Factors Supporting an Israeli Victory in Gaza”.

Operation Gideon’s Chariots, its new offensive in northern Gaza, is not merely another clearing operation, but is the culmination of two years of attrition that have left Hamas weaker than at any point since its rise to power.

Back in November 2023, Greymantle predicted that Israel would win the Gaza War. At the time, Greymantle’s view ran against the prevailing consensus, which assumed that U.S. and international diplomatic pressure and Israel’s limited appetite for prolonged war would hamper it. Israel’s divided society and polarized politics were other factors that observers – particularly Israel’s enemies — believed would limit its combat effectiveness.

Yet two years on, Israel has endured, Hamas has been bled white, and the prospect of an outright Israeli military victory is no longer theoretical. For the first time since October 2023, it is possible to speak seriously about Israel defeating Hamas on the battlefield — not erasing the movement politically or ideologically, which is impossible – but breaking its ability to function as a conventional military force.

Five key factors support an Israeli victory in Gaza within four to six months:

• Hamas’s degraded battlefield strength, as measured in missiles, men and shelter
• Hamas’s initial strategic miscalculations, as Hamas envisioned a limited war
• Netanyahu’s determination to revenge himself on the October 7 attackers
• Israel’s technological advancements resulting from two years of war
• Success breeds success: Israel’s political and military victories have destroyed or weakened Hamas’s key regional allies, leaving it isolated and vulnerable.

Yet, as with all things in this conflict, even a victorious outcome for Israel will come wrapped in paradox: Hamas may die as an army but survive as a political idea.  The future of Gaza is yet to be written.

What Changed Since August?

Four weeks ago, we wrote that the Gaza conflict seemed stuck in a kind of ‘strategic limbo’, with both sides unwilling to compromise on such basic goals as a brief ceasefire, the release of a small number of hostages, and better conditions for the provision of humanitarian aid.  Greymantle wrote then that ‘both sides appear trapped inside their ideological boxes, unable to achieve to victory, but unable to admit defeat’.   

The war seemed stuck, with a deeply weakened Hamas desperately clinging to control over roughly 20% of Gazan territory or scattered underground in small cells, and Israel vacillating between negotiation and a renewed offensive.  Both sides appeared unable or unwilling to halt the slide into starvation that had gripped Palestinian civilians residing in the enclave.

That was a month ago.  Since then, Israel has broken out of its strategic box.  Prime Minister Netanyahu has convinced the Israeli military – over the objections of its leaders – that a renewed, all-out offensive to take the Gaza Strip, crush the remaining fighters, and rescue the hostages by force is the right ‘play’.  Netanyahu believed Hamas was going to drag negotiations out forever while racking up diplomatic victories.  The time to strike is now.

Hamas’s Fading Strength

Hamas entered the war with real assets:

• 20,000 medium-range rockets, a stockpile meant to impose costs on Israel’s cities.
• 30,000–40,000 trained fighters, organized and disciplined, with battlefield experience.
• A vast underground fortress, the tunnel system beneath Gaza, consisting not only of tunnels but bunkers, factories, water cisterns, hospitals and armories.

Those advantages have been deeply eroded by two years of constant fighting.

Hamas retains only a few hundred rockets according to most informed estimates. Its trained fighters have been whittled down to around 5,000 hardened veterans, reinforced by perhaps 20,000 poorly trained young recruits. The tunnels still exist, but are no longer a mystery: Israel has mapped much of the network using satellites, drones, AI, and robotics. Hamas continues to resist, but the balance of forces has shifted decisively in Israel’s favor since October 2023.

Israel’s Objectives

Israel has framed two goals for Gideon’s Chariots:

1. Recover the remaining hostages. Roughly 70 Israelis are still in captivity (perhaps 25 are alive), scattered and hidden across Gaza. Their return is both a moral imperative and a political necessity for the Israeli government.
2. Defeat Hamas militarily. Not just degrade it, as in past wars, but break it as a military force.

The two objectives are not fully compatible. Hostage recovery demands precision and intelligence. Military victory requires relentless pressure. Israel is attempting both at once, a gamble that risks the hostages’ lives even as it promises Hamas’s destruction.

That Israel, and particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu, has been entirely willing to risk the lives of the hostages by repeated ground and air assaults against Hamas inside and outside of the Gaza Strip speaks volumes about Israel’s tactical shift regarding terrorist hostage-taking.  Henceforth, Netanyahu appears to be saying, enemies of Israel who take Israeli hostages will no longer have veto power over Israel’s strategic decisions.

Hamas’s Failed Expectations

What is striking to Greymantle is how completely Hamas misjudged Israel’s response. The organization’s leadership went into the war with a defined set of strategic assumptions. Nearly all have been confounded.

• Short duration of ground war. Hamas expected Israel’s ground operations to last two or three months, perhaps six at most. Instead, the IDF has sustained an offensive for nearly two years, cycling forces in and out, adapting tactics, and refusing to relent.
• External pressure. Hamas counted on the United States, Europe, and international institutions like the United Nations to force Israel to de-escalate or prioritize humanitarian concerns over victory. That pressure has come, but Israel’s leadership has absorbed it. For all the outside criticism, the war continues.
• Regional escalation. Hamas assumed Israel would seek to contain the war within Gaza. Instead, Israel expanded it: fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, striking Syria, attacking Houthi assets in Yemen, and even trading blows with Iran directly. Iran ordered its proxies to pressure Israel; Israel responded in kind.
• Israeli society has held together.  Faced with the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, a deeply divided Israeli society came together and has born up admirably under 24 months of war, thousands of missile strikes, the mobilization of its entire military reserves, and countless other pressures. Hamas believed that Israeli society was on the verge of collapse in 2023. They were wrong.  

Hamas’s failure here is not just tactical but conceptual. The Hamas leadership simply could not imagine that Netanyahu and his circle would fight this hard, this long, and take matters this far. Hamas underestimated Israel’s true appetite for escalation.  For Netanyahu, the revenge element to the war is deeply personal.  Hamas humiliated Bibi on October 7, 2023, and he has sworn to destroy all those responsible, or even remotely connected, to those events. 

Greymantle has previously analyzed the consequences of failures of imagination as they have related to financial system actors (e.g. the failure of Silicon Valley Bank), geostrategic miscalculations (e.g. Western European countries’ disbelief that Russia would invade Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin’s inability to conceive that Ukraine would resist with such ferocity), and electoral politics (e.g. Republican voters’ mistaken belief that Barack Obama would not be elected to the U.S. presidency not once, but twice, due to his unusual background).

We believe failures of imagination are an undercounted factor in geopolitics.

The Qatar Strike

The most vivid example of Israel’s willingness to escalate came on September 9, 2025, when Israeli aircraft struck Hamas’s political leadership domiciled in Qatar. It was the first time Israel had used military force against Hamas on Qatari soil. The meaning was unmistakable.

First, it was a warning to Hamas: even its top leaders living in supposedly ‘safe’ foreign countries would no longer be exempt from Israeli assassination attempts.

Qatar may be located only a few hundred miles from Beirut, but Hamas’s leaders saw it as worlds apart from Lebanon (their other major hiding place) given Qatar’s close relationship with the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Russia.  Qatar appeared to possess too much ‘clout’ and too many powerful friends to leave it vulnerable to an Israeli air strike.  No longer.   

Second, the strike was a warning to Qatar’s rulers: stop bankrolling Hamas, or risk further escalation by Israel – against yourselves. For a small Gulf monarchy dependent on external protection, the threat was serious. The strike underscored that Israel is prepared to extend the war’s reach very far indeed, if necessary — much farther than Hamas ever anticipated.

Hamas’s Political Defeats

Militarily, Hamas has been ground down. Politically, its fortunes are little better. The group has relied on a campaign abroad, amplified by student groups, left-wing organizations, and aligned activists. Demonstrations have been large and noisy, and some Western governments are going through the motions of recognition. Canada, France, Spain and the UK recently announced their intention to recognize a Palestinian state if certain conditions are met (mainly by the Israelis).

Yet these gestures are hollow. They do not change the battlefield calculus in Gaza. They deliver neither weapons nor relief.  They do not force Israel to stop fighting, nor incentivize Hamas to release the hostages or cease their own hostilities. Diplomatic recognition without substance is, at best, a pyrrhic victory for Hamas — symbolic, yet inconsequential.

Hamas mistook a lot of noise abroad for leverage at home, a fundamental miscalculation. Furthermore, the noise and disruption generated by Hamas’s activist allies has been serious enough to generate a powerful backlash – particularly in the United States.  The Trump Administration is actively targeting Palestinian-linked groups and activists for detention and expulsion and cracking down on universities that took a hands-off approach to these groups.

The IDF’s Evolving Technological Edge

What enables Israel to press its campaign this deep, this long, is the sharpening of its technological edge.  As an economically developed ‘first world’ state, Israel has tremendous advantages in wealth, technological know-how, and trained professionals that has accelerated the build-up of its military AI and data analysis capabilities since 2023. 

These technological capabilities include:

• Tunnel mapping. Once Hamas’s ace-in-the-hole, its tunnel network is now becoming a liability. Israeli AI-driven mapping and robotic probes have stripped away much of the network’s secrecy and identified weak points in its structure.
• Persistent surveillance. Drones and satellites keep Gaza under near-constant watch. Hamas can still move, but to move stealthily is much harder.
• Precision targeting. Better coordination between intelligence and firepower has allowed Israel to hit command centers, caches, and leadership hideouts with growing accuracy.
• Facial recognition applications.  Israeli satellites and drones can recognize senior members of Hamas by sight from long distances using facial recognition and other technologies that home in on walking gate, body posture, etc. 

Technology alone does not guarantee victory. But it has given Israel tremendously powerful tools to solve problems — especially the tunnel labyrinth — that once seemed insoluble. The rapid evolution of these tools will be central to determining the ultimate Gaza War outcome.

Scenarios – Three Plausible Outcomes

Three plausible outcomes frame the future.  Greymantle assigns each scenario a low-medium-high probability score and percentage outcome:

1. Rapid Decapitation (low probability – 15%).
   Hamas’s leadership is located and destroyed, the remaining hostages are rescued, and the organization collapses. This would be Israel’s ideal outcome. But it requires near-perfect intelligence and execution. Wars rarely grant such perfection.  But keep in mind that Israel has already beaten the odds more than once in this war (i.e. the decapitation of the Hezbollah leadership; the weakening of the Syrian regime to the point that rebels overthrew it; the destruction of Iran’s entire air defense system).  
2. Pyrrhic Victory (medium probability – 20%).
   The IDF kills thousands more Hamas fighters, captures key patches of terrain, and cripples command networks. Hamas loses its ability to mount coordinated operations. But only some hostages are freed, and Hamas survives as a terrorist underground. Israel declares victory, but Gaza becomes an arena of insurgency rather than resolution.  Israel occupies Gaza and attempts to administer and pacify it for several years.
3. Tactical Success, Strategic Uncertainty (high probability – 65%). Hamas is broken militarily, but at staggering humanitarian cost. Civilian casualties climb, international backlash grows, and Israel risks diplomatic isolation. Hamas is defeated militarily but survives as a political organization and as a symbol and rallying cry. Israel’s international legitimacy is badly compromised, and it is still left with the unanswered question of who or what will govern Gaza after the war.

Conclusion: Five Facts Point to an Israeli Victory

Nearly two years into the war, the military logic points in Israel’s favor. Hamas’s rockets are nearly gone. Its veteran fighters have been killed, wounded, or captured. Its tunnels, once a hidden fortress, are increasingly exposed to the combined forces of artificial intelligence, rapid computer modeling and mapping, robotic penetration and accurate airstrikes. Its leaders are hunted down and killed even abroad. Its political campaign has failed.

This is not the outcome Hamas envisioned in October 2023. It gambled that Israel would fight briefly, bow to pressure, and avoid escalation. Instead, Israel has fought relentlessly, endured pressure, and expanded the scope, aims and tempo of the conflict. Consequently, Israel is pushing toward a goal its enemies believed unreachable: a Hamas last stand.

Hamas’s big gamble failed because it contained within its basic conception a critical failure of imagination: Hamas could not conceive that Israel’s leaders would fight this hard, this long, or over this wide a territory for two straight years. 

Hamas underestimated Netanyahu’s ruthlessness and thirst for revenge.  They underestimated the Israeli military and public’s ability to follow a leader that many despise through two long years of grueling warfare.  They underestimated and misunderstood the underlying Israeli mentality: for Jewish Israelis, this war has always been about national survival.

Israel may be in the brink of achieving what it never has before: the total defeat of Hamas as a military force. But the paradox remains. Hamas will likely survive as a political idea, an underground movement, and a symbol of grievance. Israel can kill the army, but not the idea. Israel’s military victory, if and when it comes, will be real — but it may not be final.

Until next time, we remain —

Greymantle