The latest ceasefire in Gaza looks, at first glance, like the beginning of a new era. After an unbearable daily tension, Israel moved toward days of calm and hope.
The return of hostages, the warm visit of the US president to Israel, and commitments from several countries in the region to engage constructively in Gaza all ignited a real sense of achievement and meaningful change after over 700 grueling days of fighting.
Yet Hamas immediately demonstrated that it has no intention of allowing a moment of quiet that would enable real change.
Like a predator whose instincts are stronger than any attempt at domestication, it returned at once to the tactics and agenda it has cultivated for years: rebuilding its capabilities and continuing to wage long-term war against Israel.
For Hamas, this is not the start of a new organization but a transition to a new phase of protracted warfare aimed at restoring control, power, and coercive capacity.
Learning from Hezbollah
Hamas has concluded that if concentrating force failed, dispersing force will work. It seeks to turn Gaza into a model of south Lebanon, an area where a terrorist organization holds weapons while portraying itself as the population’s true defender, exercising limited civil governance and political influence under the cover of an international “arrangement.”
Hamas learned Hezbollah’s lessons well. It watched how a relatively small group, after the First Lebanon War (1982), embedded a military apparatus within a civilian population – without controlling that population outright – retaining freedom of action and turning southern Lebanon into a bleeding battleground that the state found difficult to reach.
That is precisely how Hamas intends to operate in Gaza: Under a veneer of calm, it will continue to restore tunnels, stockpile weapons, and preserve the image of a “beleaguered victim,” while building three central survival mechanisms.
1. Control of civilian resources: Hamas activists are already positioning themselves around humanitarian distribution points, managing lists and dictating priorities. By doing so, they reclaim local influence – just as Hezbollah did in south Lebanon when it set up clinics, schools, and NGOs that doubled as cover for arms smuggling.
2. Creation of international dependency: Hamas understands that the international community does not want an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza, so it aims to present Gaza as a humanitarian problem requiring external assistance, which it will, in practice, administer. This arrangement neuters real oversight and restores Hamas’s political legitimacy.
3. Psychological warfare against Israel: Hamas knows Israeli society intimately. It understands how sensitive we are to the lives of our soldiers and how personal grief quickly becomes public pressure.
Therefore, it will continue to set ambushes, plant IEDs, and wear us down slowly, not to achieve decisive military victory but to push the media and public opinion to demand that the government “pull our children out of Gaza.” This is a targeted psychological weapon designed to make Gaza a persistent cognitive nightmare for any government attempting to establish a stable security presence there.
How Israel must combat this
Israel’s challenge now is to prevent the “Lebanonization” of Gaza. It must maintain stringent oversight mechanisms: continue kinetic operations against any Hamas entrenchment, refuse to entrust the Gaza Strip’s borders to third parties, and convert the states that signed the ceasefire into accountable guarantors by imposing uncompromising conditions for the fulfillment of their commitments.
International pressure must be mobilized to ensure the agreement’s implementation, and all assistance must be channeled only through transparent international bodies, not through Hamas’s networks.
Beyond these measures, Israel must also wage the battle for public perception. It must explain to citizens why a measured security presence is not “occupation” but a necessary stabilization mechanism that prevents Hamas from regaining strength.
Just as the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 initially seemed like the right move but, due to its hasty execution and the unrealistic promise of tranquility, laid the groundwork for Hezbollah’s growth and the 2006 war, an unplanned pullback from Gaza could produce an even bloodier round of violence.
The struggle over Gaza will not be decided by agreements alone but by long-term strategic resolve. Hamas is betting on Israeli material and political fatigue; Israel must demonstrate that October 7 is not a recipe for further exhaustion but a call to awakening and national responsibility.
The writer, an IDF lieutenant-colonel (res.), is CEO of the Israel Defense & Security Forum (IDSF), and serves as the operations officer of the Gaza Division in the IDF reserves.