Is the War in Gaza Over?

The Israeli historian Amotz Asa-El believes that the “war in Gaza is over” and Israel has won. His hopeful piece can be found here: “The war is over: Israel declares victory in region-shaping conflict – opinion,” by Amotz Asa-El, Jerusalem Post, January 24, 2025:

The war is over. The catastrophe that began with 6,000 gunmen’s surprise attack on 32 Israeli communities is over, because even if Gaza returns to spew fire, as it likely will, it will not reignite the regional war that it sparked in October 2023.

The 15-month war that ended Sunday had three tiers: the military, the geopolitical, and the ideological.

The military war was between the IDF and the jihadist armies that attacked the Jewish state, one from its south, one from its north, and two from afar. The geopolitical war pitted Israel against the jihadist axis and its two supporting superpowers. And the ideological war was about the jihadist idea that drove this war’s engineers.

The ideological war is far from over, but that war isn’t against Israel alone, and it isn’t Israel’s to win. It’s mankind’s. In the two other wars, the result is unambiguous: Israel won….

It is the forces of Islam who are conducting their never-ending war — jihad — against all non-Muslims, with Israel merely the most salient example. Dar al-harb — the house of war where Infidels still prevail — remains under assault from Muslims, whose most effective weapon now is demographic conquest from within. There are now 44 million Muslims in Europe, who believe both because they continue to flood into Europe, and because the fertility rates of Muslim women in Europe are much higher than those of non-Muslim women, the Muslim share of the population in every country in Western Europe will inexorably rise, and Muslim numbers eventually come close to those of the indigenous non-Muslims. Long before that point is reached, however, Muslims who are united in their goals will be able to politically dominate a fractured non-Muslim electorate.

Hamas’s assumption, that Hezbollah would invade the Galilee while it invaded the Negev, was dashed, but that was the smaller miscalculation. Hamas failed to predict that Hezbollah would be floored, as it was in multiple ways: its leadership was annihilated, its troops were decimated, its hardware was incinerated, and its outposts were razed.

Hezbollah entered the war against Israel on October 8, 2023, to help Hamas, but it had to content itself with lobbying missiles and drones into Israel; Hezbollah fighters were unable to invade the Galilee, as Hamas had assumed would happen. What’s more, Hamas was amazed at the tremendous success the IDF had in fighting against Hezbollah, even while focused on destroying Hamas in Gaza. The IDF took on Hezbollah not just in southern Lebanon, but also in Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. Just from its “exploding pagers” alone — those pagers were manufactured by Mossad, and then sold to Hezbollah customers — Israel managed to kill dozens and severely wound many thousands more. The total number of Hezbollah fighters killed is about 4,000. Hezbollah’s prewar arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles were reduced, through IDF attacks, to less than 20% that number. Most of Hezbollah’s command-and-control centers, its hideouts of weapons and men both in aboveground buildings and in tunnels, have been located and destroyed. Finally, the Israelis killed all of Hezbollah’s leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah, his likely successor Hashem Saffiedine, the commander and deputy commander of the most elite unit in Hezbollah, the Radwan Forces, and ten of the twelve members of the Jihad Council. The battering made Hezbollah eager for a ceasefire, which is what Israel agreed to: it was to last for 60 days, after which peace would presumably prevail. But just now, due to Hezbollah violating its commitment to pull completely out of all the Lebanese territory that lies south of the Litani River, Israel has decided to delay its own pullout of troops in order to keep the pressure on Hezbollah to pull out of southern Lebanon, as agreed.

Hamas certainly failed to predict Hezbollah’s political crash, as its Lebanese rivals installed a president whom Hezbollah opposed, and thus broke Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanese politics….

Hezbollah has been so weakened militarily by Israel that its Lebanese enemies have been emboldened to criticize the terror group. They have been further strengthened by the appointment of Joseph Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese Army, to be Lebanon’s new president. Aoun is an avowed enemy of Hezbollah, determined to end its former “stranglehold on Lebanese politics.”