Hamas’ Stunning Victory

TED RALL

HAMAS’S STUNNING VICTORY

RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2025

Hamas’s victory over Israel will go down in history as one of the most stunning upsets in the history of modern warfare. It will be studied by future Resistance groups for instructions on how a guerrilla army can achieve its aims despite facing an adversary with seemingly insurmountable advantages in weaponry, technology, funding and international legitimacy.

This Islamic group’s achievement was breathtaking. Indicating an astonishing ability to adapt, it pivoted from a ragtag outfit of irregular militants to a full-fledged governing authority with the organizational structure of a nation-state in 2007—ironically, with the support of Israel, which pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy to undermine Fatah’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Then, with the Abraham Accords and Arab states moving toward normalization of relations with Israel, Hamas leadership concluded that it needed a radical gamechanger, an incident that would expose the Jewish state as genocidal, scuttle its hopes of regional acceptance and put the Palestinian question back on the front burner.

Correctly predicting the massive scale of the onslaught Israel would unleash following the October 7^th attack, Hamas created stockpiles of missiles fabricated from dud Israeli ordnance and constructed a sophisticated tunnel system to allow it to move fighters and equipment throughout the war without having to worry much about the IDF. Hamas hoped its regional Iranian-backed allies in the Middle East, the Axis of Resistance, including Hezbollah and the regime of then-Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, would open a multifront war against Israel, but they never viewed hope as a plan. After Hezbollah demurred and was itself nevertheless decimated by Israeli airstrikes and a vicious pager attack, Hamas carried on solo, with the exception of distant support from Yemen’s Houthis.

Days after the beginning of the current ceasefire, Hamas is consolidating power, purging Gaza of its rivals, parading publicly in shows of strength, restoring basic services, and is even conducting foreign policy by conveying its desire to maintain law and order to a grateful United States—reverting to its pre-2023 governance posture.

This time, however, global and U.S. opinion now favors creating a sovereign Palestinian state. Hamas, already rebranding itself, is establishing itself the de facto sole ruling authority of the Gaza half of that future nation.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which experts say undercounts war dead, Israel has killed about 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the war began. According to Donald Trump, the number is between 400,000 and 500,000 out of a prewar population of 2.2 million. Israel has destroyed 90% of the homes. Gaza’s basic infrastructure—roads, schools, shops, hospitals, sewage system—has been pulverized. 468 IDF troops were killed. How can anyone call this a Palestinian victory?

If lopsided death tolls determined victory and defeat in warfare, the United States would have beaten Vietnam (2,000,000 to 58,000), Iraq (940,000 to 4,400) and Afghanistan (572,000 to 2,400). In each of these conflicts, the warring parties had the same goal, to maintain military and political control over a territory. The U.S. withdrew. Thus, it lost.

Hamas had several objectives in its 2023-2025 war against Israel.

Job one was making a big splash. It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, top Hamas official, told The New York Times a month after the start of the war “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.” Hamas wasn’t merely willing to sacrifice the lives of its fellow Palestinians in order to achieve them. Provoking the Israelis to kill Gazans—the more the better—was an essential part of their plan.

Two years later, Palestine has knocked the Russo-Ukrainian War off the headlines. It enjoys formal diplomatic recognition from 157 out of 193 nations, including the likes of France, Canada and Great Britain. Israel, fending off judicial inquiries, sanctions and business boycotts, is forced to send Netanyahu to the U.N. via a circuitous route lest his plane be forced down and the prime minister thrown in jail. It’s becoming a pariah state.

Israel could have avoided all this by not overreacting. By not viewing the Hamas’s attack as an opportunity for a land grab. It chose to feed its rage.

Before October 7^th, Saudi Arabia, nominally a fervent supporter of independent Palestine, had been moving toward formal recognition of Israel. Worried that such a move would mark the beginning of the end of the Palestinian cause, Hamas hoped its war would force the Saudis and other Arab states to back off from Israel. Clearly, that has succeeded.

Hamas achieved both of its main goals. It also wanted a Palestinian state. We’re not there yet. But the odds have never looked better.

Israel had two war aims.

First, they wanted to destroy Hamas and end their rule over Gaza. “Once we defeat Hamas, we have to make sure that there’s no new Hamas, no resurgence of terrorism, and right now the only force that is able to secure that is Israel,” Netanyahu said in November 2023, calling for long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza. Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” began with the requirement that Israeli forces withdraw—even before the first hostage was released. Trump told Hamas he would not allow Israel to break the ceasefire, as they have done many times in the past. And he said that he has decided to leave Hamas in charge for the time being.

Clearly, Israel failed.

Second, Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its indigenous population, annex the territory and exploit it for real estate developments for Israelis. But Trump is telling Israel to back off and allow Gazans to stay in what’s left of their homes. He also warned Israel to stop building new settlements. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” he told reporters in the Oval Office in September 2025. “I will not allow it. It’s not going to happen.”

Hamas got everything it wanted and more. Israel got nothing, and wound up in a much worse position. That victory lap in the Knesset? Pure spin.

Many Israelis recognize what really happened: a country that relies upon international support lost it. “Wars are not won by tanks or drones but by headlines and hashtags. The side that controls the story controls the future,” Jose Lev Alvarez Gomez, a right-wing supporter of the genocide, complained in The Times of Israel. “Israel won the war. The world rewarded Hamas—with sympathy, airtime, and impunity.”

Not that Israel wasn’t warned. “If Israel had adopted a more measured, precise, and diplomatically savvy approach in its efforts to neutralize Hamas, [Hamas’s] assertions of victory, whether actual or perceived, would likely appear less credible,” David Ucko wrote in a nifty December 2023 piece titled “Theories of Victory: Israel, Hamas, and the Meaning of Success in Irregular Warfare.”

Game, Hamas.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)