In Gaza, Israel Is Fighting Not a Counter-Terrorist Operation, But a War

West Point Professor of Urban Warfare John Spencer, who has been studying closely the war in Gaza, its origins and how it is being conducted, both by Hamas and by Israel, believes that Israel is not engaged in a “counter-terror operation,” but rather, in a war. And, he argues, that designation of the Gaza conflict as a “war” is important. More on his views can be found here: “Hamas Is Not Just a Terrorist Organization,” by John Spencer and Solomon Moshkevich, Mosaic, May 1 2025:

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters from Gaza launched one of the most brutal assaults on Israeli soil since the country’s founding—killing civilians, seizing hostages, and briefly occupying territory. The attack was quickly labeled a “terror attack,” and Hamas, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, was cast once again in the role of a group of religious extremists operating outside of the system of sovereign states. This framing, though familiar, is flawed. It creates misperceptions about the scale, nature, and legal classification of the conflict Israel now faces. And it misleads both policymakers and the public about the rules that govern this conflict, the expectations of response, and the real meaning of proportionality.

It is time to stop calling Hamas just a “terrorist organization.” This argument is, of course, heard most often from those who would claim that Hamas consists of “freedom fighters” and that the term terrorist is unfairly biased or even a sign of racial prejudice. The case we make here is very different, and not moralistic, but legal and strategic. Undoubtedly, Hamas is a terrorist organization that has committed countless acts that fit any standard definition of the term. But in addition it is a political-military entity with governing authority, territorial control, and a functioning bureaucracy. It maintains a trained army, organizes military campaigns, and conducts operations that resemble traditional armed conflict far more than they resemble isolated acts of terrorism. Labeling Hamas a terrorist group undermines the legal clarity and strategic understanding necessary to fight and win a war. It also distorts public perception of what Israel is actually doing—and what it is allowed to do under the law of armed conflict.

The term “terrorism” has political, legal, and operational meaning. Under U.S. law, a terrorist act is politically motivated violence by non-state actors targeting civilians. These acts of violence traditionally involve bombings of civilian buses or buildings, hijackings, and similar tactics; the appropriate response to such violence, accordingly, is counterterrorism, which refers to limited, targeted actions—drone strikes, special operations, law-enforcement responses—aimed at disrupting such threats. This framework does not fit the events of October 7, the lead-up to that attack, or its aftermath.

These misapprehensions are not limited to Western commentators and diplomats. In the IDF’s recent nineteen-page report on the intelligence failures leading up to October 7, its “perception probe” highlighted the flawed assumptions about Hamas, noting a failure to recognize Hamas’s shift from a standard-issue terrorist group to one actively planning a large-scale offensive, aimed at occupying Israeli territory and destroying Israel. This perception gap led to a lack of preparedness as well as failures to respond appropriately on the day of the attack. And the same misunderstanding continues to persist across the international community.

The attack of October 7 was not an isolated act of terror; it was a cross-border, combined-arms military operation, that is, an invasion. This invasion involved thousands of trained fighters who breached Israel’s air, land, and sea defenses; killed civilians and soldiers alike; and seized territory, while operatives in the rear simultaneously fired rockets deep into Israeli territory. Hamas attempted to coordinate its assault with Hizballah to open a northern front. They filmed and broadcast their battlefield activities as psychological warfare, and it took days for the IDF to uproot them from ground they held in several Israeli kibbutzim and border towns. Like any conventional military invasion, the attack posed an immediate, existential risk to the state of Israel, and the IDF has since admitted that its Gaza Division was initially overrun and defeated by the enemy. This was an act of war—a traditional one, albeit one that involved countless war crimes, executed by a force that defies easy classification under norms that have governed warfare and diplomacy in the West for the past several centuries….

The semantics matter. They always have. But in war, they can mean the difference between legitimacy and condemnation, between clarity and chaos, between victory and defeat.

According to John Spencer, Hamas is not just a “terrorist organization,” but a full-fledged state actor, that rules over Gaza like any sovereign government. It employs terror tactics as only one arrow in its quiver. It also engages in battlefield combat with IDF soldiers. In Gaza, Israel is being forced to fight not just an anti-terrorist campaign, but a war, albeit one where the enemy chooses to hide its operatives and its weapons in and among civilians.  John Spencer argues that such a re-naming of the conflict as a “war” rather than an “anti-terrorist operation” undermines the charge that the Jewish state is engaged in over-reacting to a mere “terror group.” And it means that the laws of war apply to both sides, but only one side, Israel, is meeting its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention and customary international law.