There are no good options for the future of Israel’s aggression against Gaza, according to a report that monitors the potential repercussions of any path chosen by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. What does this future outlook look like?

“A future look at the Israeli war to destroy Hamas,” under this title the American magazine Foreign Policy published its report, which sheds light on what Tel Aviv may face in the future as a result of its ongoing aggression against the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.

Since the military operation "Al-Aqsa Flood" on October 7, Israel has launched an air and naval bombardment on the Gaza Strip, followed by a ground invasion, declaring two main goals: destroying the resistance, and liberating the prisoners by military force.

Amid the state of panic and shock that gripped the Israelis, the spread of video clips and pictures of tanks and armored vehicles belonging to the occupation army, either burned or under the control of Palestinian resistance fighters, the capture of dozens of soldiers from the occupation army and settlers, and complete Palestinian control over settlements, the occupying state declared that it was “in a state of war” for the first time since the October 1973 war.

The worst scenarios are bitter for Israel

The Foreign Policy report is based on a forward-looking outlook on the situation on October 7, 2025, in what is known as the theory of pre-death scenarios, which is a tool of psychoanalysis by Gary Klein, a famous psychologist, and is recommended by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Caiman. This tool is to reduce the risk of failure and its idea is simple. Imagine the results of the current policy in its worst-case scenario after it has completed its implementation, then analyze the mistakes that were committed. The result is that potential mistakes are monitored, and decision-makers study them at the present time with the aim of avoiding them, and then changing the policy followed.

Based on this theory, the Foreign Policy report sets out this scenario two years from today: Hamas returns to control of the Gaza Strip, and its popularity rises remarkably in the West Bank, Jerusalem, the region, and the world, while Israel suffers from stifling international isolation and a severe deterioration in its relationship with the United States. On the internal level, the rifts are increasing and the political and social division in Israel is wider than it was before the war on Gaza, which is practically paralyzing the occupying state.

The war on the Gaza Strip

At the Middle East level, Iran's allies are becoming more aggressive than before, the frequency of missile attacks launched by Lebanese Hezbollah on northern Israel is increasing, and the Houthis in Yemen continue to target ships to and from Israel via the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab.

These possible future results were reached through a field visit conducted by a team of researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies to Israel, where they conducted interviews with high-ranking security and political officials in the occupying state, through which the researchers concluded that the Israeli leadership’s lack of understanding of Hamas’s true power and reducing that Leadership of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement will, at the end of the current path, strengthen the movement more than it is now, will weaken the internal front in Israel, and will fail any scenario through which Tel Aviv moves from the stage of war to the stage of ruling the Gaza Strip. It will also undermine Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Israeli underestimation of the strength of Hamas

Israel, led by Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant, and the rest of the members of the most extremist government in its history, has placed the goal of eliminating Hamas at the top of their agenda in the current war on Gaza, by killing the movement’s leaders and resistance. Before October 7, the strength of Hamas’s military wing reached about 25,000 fighters, and now Israel claims to have killed about 7,000 of them, including field commanders.

But the Foreign Policy report confirms that Hamas will ultimately prove, in a very remarkable way, that it is indestructible, and that the movement will continue to grow and build its strength. Israel assesses the strength of Hamas through the numbers of fighters in the movement’s formations, monitoring the funerals of dead, and the Israeli occupation army’s data on the numbers of dead in the Gaza Strip. But an Israeli expert spoke to the American magazine, expressing his "serious doubts about the Israeli estimates regarding the number of Hamas fighters killed."

Also, the occupation soldiers in the field are unlikely to accurately classify Palestinian dead, and can easily consider all males of fighting age to be members of Hamas. In this context, the occupation army presents large groups of Palestinian men in Gaza as “prisoners of the resistance factions,” while the facts have proven that most of them are civilians.

There is another point, according to the Foreign Policy report, related to the fact that some Palestinian civilians in Gaza may take up arms to confront the ongoing Israeli aggression, which necessarily adds to the strength of Hamas and other resistance factions in the Strip.

The report also pointed out the fact that Hamas is rooted in Palestinian society, especially in the Gaza Strip, which has been run by the movement since 2007, where a generation was born that knows no one but it. The movement also works closely with major families in Gaza, and has a strong base inside the Strip’s camps, and even Before 2007, Hamas was directly present in all aspects of the daily lives of Gazans. The movement is an integral part of the fabric of society there.

Al-Qassam Brigades carried out a military deployment in the middle of Palestine Square during the handover of Israeli prisoners, and a monument appears behind them.

These deep roots of the movement in the Gaza Strip make it very easy for it to rebuild its strength even if Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas’ military capabilities, which does not seem a likely scenario in light of the data on the ground more than 80 days after the start of the war.

On the other hand, Hamas is not just a military or political organization, but rather a symbol and embodiment of the principle of armed resistance to the occupation, and the “Al-Aqsa Flood” military operation on October 7 came as an electric spark that ran through the veins of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and the Islamic world. Opinion polls showed that more than 80% of Palestinians in the West Bank support Hamas and the Al-Aqsa flood.

The brutal and ongoing Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, which caused about 21,000 dead, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians, also resulted in a huge rise in the popularity of the resistance path, and considering it the only solution to confront the Israeli occupation, which indicates that Gaza has become fertile ground for embracing resistance. Perhaps more than it was before October 7, especially since the majority of the Gaza Strip’s population, numbering more than 2.4 million people, are under 18 years of age.

This point, according to Foreign Policy, is in favor of the popularity of the principle of resistance in general, which is the axis that Iran and its allies in the region say they are adopting, in exchange for imposing great difficulties on the shoulders of Arab regimes described in the West as “moderate” such as Egypt and the Emirates, where you will find those countries dealings with the occupying state openly will not be acceptable at the popular level internally and in the region in general.

Israel faces wholesale crises

Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” led to the evacuation of thousands of Israeli settlers from the settlements surrounding Gaza, and the launching of rockets by Hezbollah led to the evacuation of thousands more from the settlements in northern Israel on the Lebanese border, so that more than 250,000 Israelis now live either in hotels at government expense or have relatives in areas deep within the occupying state.

After more than 80 days of war on Gaza, these settlers are still unable to return to their settlements, not only because of the continuing war in the south and border skirmishes in the north, but also because of their complete loss of confidence in the ability of the occupation government and army to provide them with security, which is the point that represents a priority for Israel now.

But restoring confidence, in the future outlook monitored by the Foreign Policy report, will prove to be a very difficult matter, both from a military standpoint and from a psychological standpoint, as Israel must first prove that it is capable of “defeating” Hamas and “deterring” Hezbollah, both of which "very elusive concepts, that is, very difficult to achiev"” especially in light of the catastrophic failure of the occupation army, intelligence, and security services on October 7, and the continuing failure so far to achieve any tangible military goal, despite the almost complete destruction of the Gaza Strip and its civilian infrastructure.

Restoring the confidence of the settlers to convince them to return to their settlements means that Israel must inflict a “tangible and comprehensive defeat” on Hamas in Gaza, and force Hezbollah to move its elite “Al-Radwan” units away from the Israeli border to ensure that there is no “sudden” attack. Israel may also need to deploy large numbers of its forces on each front, and provide each populated area with greater security capabilities, and these capabilities will be very financially costly, especially for a country that relies primarily on reserve forces, which makes it very difficult for it to maintain huge forces in a war. Long, according to Foreign Policy.

To make matters worse, there is a deep problem of mistrust in the political system in Israel, whose society has become divided to the point of fragmentation. There are deep divisions between religious and secular societies, and there is a deep division between the Arabs of 1948 and the Israeli Jews, and another division between Jews of Western origins (Ashkenazi). ) and Jews of Eastern origin (Sephardic). Then Netanyahu came in with his current government, which witnessed the joining of ministers from the extreme right and extremist settlers, who sought to overthrow the judiciary, which led to a more dangerous division.

Now Israel will have to impose higher taxes to finance the army, extend the duration of reserve service in the army, and other more difficult decisions, but the challenge here is the possibility of passing such policies in a society so divided.

Hezbollah front and the relationship with America

Israel also faces bitter choices regarding its northern front with Hezbollah. The Lebanese organization supported by Iran has much more armed capabilities and personnel than Hamas, which may mean that Israel will face a disaster if the border skirmishes turn into an all-out war, according to a Foreign Policy report.

However, the current situation will not enable Israel to return the settlers to their settlements on the northern border on the one hand, and the possibility of the outbreak of confrontation will remain, which hinders the restoration of Israelis’ confidence in the ability of their government and army to provide security. These calculations, in addition to Netanyahu's personal desire to continue the war in general so that he does not face his end politically, and perhaps end up imprisoned as well (the Prime Minister is currently being tried on charges of corruption, receiving bribes, and breach of trust), make the situation likely to explode on the northern front with Hezbollah as a scenario already existing.

Netanyahu and Gallant are already hinting at this possibility, but pressure from the Joe Biden administration may represent an obstacle for Israeli leadership. It is true that Biden has thrown all of Washington's political, financial and military weight behind Israel since October 7, but the failure of the occupation army to achieve any military victory and the insane chaos not only in Gaza, but in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, are all factors that have come to represent mounting pressure on The American president, who is awaiting fierce elections in November 2024.

American interests in the region and around the world have become threatened, not to mention Washington’s credibility as a superpower, the growing divisions within Biden’s Democratic Party, and the rising popularity of his potential Republican rival, Donald Trump, all of which are putting pressure on restraining Israel, which is currently led by a prime minister who also has his own calculations. Which indicates that a clash is looming between the two allies. The question here is: Does Israel have the luxury of losing American support or fracturing the strategic relations between the two allies?

The bottom line here is that Israel faces bitter choices in all future scenarios, according to a Foreign Policy report.

source: Arabic Post