Nothing remained the same after October 7, 2023, or after “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” Israel seized upon the attack launched by Hamas as an opportunity to wage a brutal, destructive, prolonged, and unprecedented war in its history, first under the name “Operation Iron Swords,” and later “Chariots of Gideon” 1 and 2.
That war ultimately reshaped the realities of Palestinians, the Gaza Strip, the Hamas movement, and the broader Arab East, including Iran, in ways that largely served Israel’s interests.
Now, two years into the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has managed to destroy 90 percent of the urban infrastructure and built environment of Gaza’s cities and towns, erasing their landmarks and rendering the area entirely uninhabitable.
Today, around two million Palestinians live without shelter, resources, or access to the most basic necessities of life—water, food, electricity, medicine, or fuel—in what has become the world’s largest cemetery, largest ruin, largest concentration camp, largest firing range, and largest open-air spectacle, with more than a quarter of a million victims killed, wounded, detained, or missing beneath the rubble.
The devastation is not confined to Gaza. Israel’s war also entrenched its occupation and dominance over the West Bank by expanding settlements, arming settler militias, and erecting hundreds of military checkpoints to sever communication between Palestinian towns, cities, and villages—isolating them from one another. It has also destroyed parts of several refugee camps, most notably in Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarem, while creating new realities that further marginalize the Palestinian Authority’s role and legitimacy.
In the end, Israel, under the most extremist government in its history since its establishment in 1948, managed to impose its domination over the Palestinians from the river to the sea, extinguishing any attempt to establish a Palestinian state. It now seeks to separate Gaza from the West Bank under the current realities on the ground and to impose structural and political changes on the Palestinian Authority itself.
As for Hamas, which launched its attack under slogans such as “ending the siege of Gaza,” “liberating the land,” and “shaking Israel to its core,” portraying it as “collapsing” and “weaker than a spider’s web,” it became clear that these slogans were built on illusions, miscalculations, and catastrophic errors. Israel succeeded in dismantling Hamas’s military capabilities, eliminating many of its leaders and cadres, and eroding its legitimacy within Gaza due to the hollowness of its claims — whether in repelling Israel’s assault, defending Palestinians, or even providing for their most basic needs. The movement also failed to recognize the necessity of developing an exit strategy or a plan for de-escalation.
More importantly, Hamas’s leadership, unable to deliver a realistic or convincing discourse during the war, revealed a complete detachment from reality through statements like “the resistance is fine,” “Israel has not achieved its goals,” “we have nothing left to lose,” and “our losses are tactical, theirs are strategic,” while Israel was massacring, starving, and displacing Palestinians, destroying their cities to rubble.
Hamas, which later accepted Trump’s deal despite its blatant bias, could have chosen a better path during the first ceasefire in late 2023, sparing Gaza and its people from destruction and thwarting Israel’s designs. During the first year of the war, it also had opportunities to negotiate a deal to release Israeli hostages, yet it remained trapped in delusions of “unity of fronts,” and faith in the “support of the Arab and Islamic worlds” and its own ability to resist Israel — failing to see that the Netanyahu–Smotrich–Ben-Gvir government was determined to continue a genocidal war of unprecedented brutality, aimed at killing as many Palestinians in Gaza as possible, turning their lives into unending misery, eliminating the Palestinian dimension from any political settlement, and crushing not just the idea of resistance but the entire so-called “axis of resistance.”
Later, and by the end of the first year of the war, Israel succeeded in forcing Hezbollah out of the battlefield — or, as the party phrased it, “the battle to support Gaza” — following the Pager Operation (September 17, 2024), the assassination of the leadership of Hezbollah’s “Radwan Force” (September 20, 2024), and the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah (September 27, 2024). Two months earlier, Israel had assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran (July 1, 2024).
Despite all this escalation, and despite Israel’s overwhelming military, technological, and intelligence superiority, Hamas’s leadership still showed no initiative to pursue, through mediators, a deal that could have spared Palestinians the horrors of war, as if the “resistance” mattered more than the people, or as if Hamas mattered more than Gaza.
Thus, Hamas persisted in its delusions, repeating its empty slogans — that “Israel has not achieved its goals” and “the resistance is fine” — even after the assassination of Yahya Sinwar, the new head of its political bureau and architect of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood; even after the collapse of the Syrian regime (late 2024); and even after the twelve-day Israeli war on Iran (June 2025) — a war carried out with U.S. participation that expelled Iran almost entirely from Lebanon, Syria, and nearly Iraq as well.
Still, Hamas continues to imagine that it holds leverage through the “Israeli hostages file,” and that Israeli protests and domestic crises will pressure Netanyahu’s government.
But by now, matters have spiraled out of control. Hamas’s position has effectively collapsed, especially as Arab and Islamic states, including those closest to it, have agreed to Trump’s plan. The movement now faces a full agreement of surrender, with its funding, armament, and political support all drying up, forcing it to accept what it had long rejected — under worse terms — including its withdrawal from the scene and the release of all Israeli captives.
In truth, that “hostage card” was never really in Hamas’s hands, but rather a tool in Netanyahu’s. Even Israel’s protests failed to dislodge him, as most Israelis rallied around him, viewing him as the defender of Israel’s very existence while Israel held the lives and sustenance of over two million Palestinians under its mercy, trapped in an existence closer to pure hell.
Ultimately, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and Israel’s investment in it — as a genocidal war in Gaza, a campaign of domination from the river to the sea, and a project to reengineer the region and eliminate Iran’s influence in the Arab East — plunged Palestinians into a new historical phase:
From the first Nakba (1948), which produced the refugee crisis and Israel’s birth,
To the second Nakba (1967), when Israel seized all of Palestine from the river to the sea,
To the third Nakba, embodied in the genocide of Gaza — the most brutal, devastating, and dehumanizing of them all.
This war also closed a chapter in the history of the Palestinian national movement; the era of armed struggle that began in the mid-1960s and passed through many milestones: its expulsion from Jordan (1970), then from Lebanon after Israel’s 1982 invasion; its internal split following the emergence of Hamas in 1987 as an Islamist armed movement; its transformation into a national liberation movement in the West Bank and Gaza under the Oslo Accords (1993); and finally, its geographic and political division in 2007.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (2023) was thus both the culmination and collapse of Palestinian armed struggle, built on false assumptions and blind to Israel’s military, technological, and intelligence supremacy, as well as its unlimited U.S. backing.
At this stage, it is still too early to determine how the Palestinian cause and national movement will reconfigure themselves. Much depends on how Israel positions itself internally and regionally, how the Arab world responds to the Israeli challenge, and how the world chooses to engage with an Israel that has never been more exposed, isolated, and shunned — as a colonial, racist, and genocidal state.
All this comes amid a Palestinian landscape weakened beyond measure, politically, institutionally, and socially, and ill-equipped to confront the massive transformations and consequences of this horrific war.
