Newsweek: Hamas's Victories as Narrated One Year After War with Israeli Occupation

Newsweek obtained an exclusive interview with a senior Hamas official who gave his assessment of the year of war with Israel, listing a series of strategic, tactical and political victories that have been amplified by intensified attacks by Iranian-aligned groups across the region, the magazine said.

Newsweek initially mentioned Hamas's unprecedented attack in the "Battle of the Flood of Al-Aqsa" from the Gaza Strip on Israel, and the war that followed as the longest and bloodiest, noting that the Palestinian Ministry of Health counted, after a year, the killing of more than 42,600 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, while the Israeli forces reported the killing of 350 of its soldiers and the remaining of about 100 Israelis detained in Gaza.

Hamas and other Palestinian factions continue to announce new operations against Israeli forces and cities, according to the newspaper, while the axis of resistance allied with Iran and active in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen has escalated its attacks on Tel Aviv, and Tehran itself has launched the second largest barrage of missiles on Israel.

Amid the ongoing violence and chaos, Hamas politburo member and spokesman Bassem Naim told the magazine that insecurity will continue in the Middle East and beyond until the group’s goals regarding the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict are achieved.

Unmet goals

"The message of the Al-Aqsa Flood was clear from the beginning," Naim said, "that no one in the region or outside it will enjoy security, stability or prosperity unless the Palestinian people obtain their rights to freedom, dignity, independence, the right to self-determination and the return of refugees."

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has fought wars with Arab states and faced an ongoing Palestinian rebellion, until the Oslo Accords in the 1990s granted limited self-rule to the Palestinians but ultimately failed to achieve a two-state solution and resolve the core conflict.

Hamas, which was formed in the 1980s, opposed peace agreements with Israel and clashed with the traditionally dominant leftist Fatah movement after winning elections in 2006, before establishing control over Gaza in 2007, the magazine said.

Netanyahu announced four goals for the current war, which include neutralizing Hamas as a military and political organization, making Gaza incapable of posing a threat to Israel in the future, recovering all detainees still in Gaza and returning his citizens from communities affected by the conflict in the north and south.

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told Newsweek of the progress Israel has made so far in achieving these goals. “We are on the right track, we still have a long way to go,” he said. Despite its losses, Hamas was able to launch a major rocket attack from Gaza on the anniversary of the war, he said, and 101 of the captives remain in Gaza.

For his part, Naim pointed to three goals set by Netanyahu: “destroying the resistance, especially Hamas, displacing the Palestinian population from the Gaza Strip, and recovering the prisoners inside the Strip.” He believed that “any observer or follower of this battle after a year will find that Israel has failed to achieve any of these three goals.”

Disable normalization

Regarding the elimination of Hamas, Naim says that Israel “may have been able to kill thousands, destroy homes, schools, mosques and churches, and destroy water, communications, electricity and other infrastructure and networks, but it was not able to defeat the resistance,” and it was not able to recover the prisoners, but rather to kill many of them.

The ICC investigation into Israel, along with a separate investigation by the International Court of Justice, has highlighted another major setback for Israel, “destroying the narrative it has woven over 70 years of occupation and conflict,” Naim said. “No one is fooled anymore by the story that Israel is the most civilized country in the region that respects human rights, democracy, etc.”

“More importantly, such investigations have made it impossible for Israel to integrate into the region and continue the normalization project based on the Abraham Accords,” launched by the United States in 2020, which saw Israel establish diplomatic relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, Naim added.

Today, Naim says, “if this project has not stopped, it has at least been delayed for many years. When Hamas launched this operation, it saw that the Palestinian cause was at stake, and that it was planning to completely erase it, in conjunction with Israeli plans to expand control over the West Bank towards eventual annexation, as well as to consolidate its authority in the city of Jerusalem, including Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Now, not only have many of these plans been disrupted, Naim said, but Israel has yet to recover from the initial “devastating blow” dealt to it a year ago, neither “at the level of the military, which failed to repel this attack, nor at the level of the intelligence, which failed to predict it,” and thus Israel no longer enjoys the image of “a superpower, an invincible military, and intelligence with a long arm.”

External factor

However, there is another external factor that has proven its importance in the context of the war, which is the American role in providing extensive military aid to Israel and even carrying out strikes against resistance axis groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen throughout the war.

The Biden administration unveiled a three-stage ceasefire plan that won the backing of the UN Security Council, and both Israel and Hamas expressed readiness to accept it, but soon after offered differing interpretations of what the agreement actually entailed, and each blamed the other for obstructing progress.

While American frustration with Israel's position appeared to be growing, the expansion of the war to the Lebanese front and the growing risk of a direct clash between Iran and Israel have sidelined ceasefire talks for the time being, and the impending presidential election has weighed heavily on White House calculations.

“The United States, due to its loss of leadership balance during the election period and its constant bias in favor of the Israeli occupation, is working in the long run against its strategic interest,” Naim said, adding that “this region, which represents a strategic interest for the United States, will not be stable, and no country will be stable, until the Palestinian issue is resolved and the Palestinians obtain their rights to freedom, independence and the return of refugees.”

Naim added, "Hatred of the United States is growing in the region every day, and the young generations in the region and beyond clearly realize that the United States is lying when it claims that it is moving in the world to spread democracy, equality and freedom, and that this battle has proven the falsity of all these claims."

Source: Newsweek