The story IS the war
How Sinwar shackled more than 30,000 Palestinians to a train track, and fooled the world into blaming the train.
When we think of war, we envision tanks, soldiers, munitions, and objectives. It’s a material definition, with material aims — take that hill, eliminate those tanks, capture that airfield — and pursue victory. Based on that understanding, countries that want to advance political aims through the means of war, evaluate their chances of success by tallying up their soldiers, armored vehicles and aircraft, compare their arsenal with that of their adversaries and reach an operative conclusion. It is a practice spanning millennia.
Not all forms of warfare require the comparable possession of military means to engage in conflict. A military strategy, which is defined as the practice of reducing an adversary’s ability to fight, can compensate for material asymmetries. Such is the case with guerrilla warfare — the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy. Many times it is the strategy that ultimately determines which side emerges victorious.
Five months have passed since the Gaza War began on October 7. Enough time to evaluate how each side has been prosecuting the war and whether the strategies deployed are advancing their objectives. Perhaps more importantly, what can now be revealed are the leadership’s intentions behind each maneuver on the strategic chessboard.
I am far from being an expert in military affairs, but in following every development in this war through a cause-and-effect perspective, I have tried to make sense of Hamas’s strategy. However, the more I delve into it, the more I encounter a glaring inconsistency between the intricacies of their strategic planning and the widely accepted interpretations of their objectives. This discrepancy provokes me to question whether I’ve been analyzing their actions through an incorrect paradigm. Could it be that what we’re witnessing is not a military strategy at all, but rather an entirely different kind of campaign?
An Improbable Strategy
Let’s begin with October 7, when Hamas decided to attack Israel the way it did — by the murdering, raping, torturing, burning, and kidnapping of more than 1400 Israelis. Any reasonable observer who managed to transcend the sheer shock and grief of Hamas’s telegraphed atrocities, had to have asked this — what the hell were they thinking? By any stretch of the imagination, Hamas is no match to Israel’s military. Did Hamas not consider that Israel’s retaliation would be immense?
Before we attempt to answer that question, let’s first get one thing out of the way. Many of us in the West, when faced with a medieval and brutal terrorist attack, are tempted to label it as ‘radical religious fundamentalism’, which is another way of saying ‘crazy’. It’s a kind of mystery-box whose contents is incomprehensible, but as long as we can place it inside a box, any box, we can maintain our grip on reality rather than acknowledge the rationality behind such malevolence, perpetrated by our fellow humans. But the painstaking precision with which this assault was planned implies that its planners had to have applied blood-freezing rational thought. Hamas doesn’t belong in the ‘crazy’ box, as their actions were not born of irrationality. The appropriate question should be — what would be the objective of such a strategy?
At this point in time, it’s safe to assume that the intention of the attack was to bait the IDF into Gaza. Militarily that appears strategically sound if Hamas had indeed long prepared for such a confrontation by setting up thousands of booby traps, street barricades and fortified ambush positions, designed to cripple the invading force and balance out the asymmetry. This was the interpretation of countless military experts during the early days of the war, warning Israel that IDF casualties would be measured in the thousands. But five months into the war, this does not appear to have been the case. Yes, there were some skirmishes, costing the IDF 150–250 casualties (many of which were unfortunately due to friendly fire), but for the most part — there were no street barricades, there were very few booby trapped structures, and there were no fortified ambush positions. The only serious preparations Hamas had made in advance were supplying the tunnels with months worth of food, water, gasoline and medicine, for the exclusive use of Hamas. As for Gaza’s civilian population, nothing was prepared for them — not shelter, not food, not even medical supplies — all very predictable needs, if in fact the strategy was to fight the IDF inside Gaza. It turns out that Hamas’s strategy involved hiding, not fighting, and to deliberately expose the population to the IDF’s wrath.
Another ‘unsolved mystery’ in regards to the October 7th attack was Hamas’s decision to intentionally arm its soldiers with cameras, and ordering them to broadcast their atrocities on the internet. For decades they have been perfecting their reputation as the ultimate victims, why would Hamas risk indefensible reputational damage by purposefully broadcasting self incriminating footage of its fighters torturing and murdering 768 Israeli civilians, and the kidnapping of 250? That risk had to have had a ‘reward’ from Hamas’s perspective. A logical conclusion could be that their intention was to induce the Israelis into a state of utter rage. To manipulate them not only to invade Gaza, something Israel has vehemently resisted doing since 2014, but also to condition them to overreact once inside Gaza.
This strategy of enraging the Israelis, retreating to hide inside Gaza’s tunnels, while leaving the population thoroughly exposed, was evidently designed by Hamas with the intention of maximizing the number of civilian deaths among its own population.
Setting aside the chilling and psychopathic nature of this plan, I would argue that this does not meet the definition of a military strategy, which again — is the practice of reducing an adversary’s ability and willingness to fight, designed to secure national interests — and should not be treated as such.
Sinwar’s Script
Sinwar, a psychopathic, but admittedly an intelligent rational actor, understood that Hamas could not defeat Israel militarily. He needed to harness the entire world as a force multiplier and fight Israel on Hamas’s behalf. This cannot be achieved militarily, but it could be achieved by crafting a story, in which Israel unwittingly plays a role in Sinwar’s script — the ultimate villain. So on October 7, despite wearing combat uniforms, firing assault weapons and deploying tactical units, Hamas was not actually engaged in a military strategy, it was engaged in a storytelling strategy. Sinwar loaded the gun on his own people, and let Israel pull the trigger.
The success of this strategy hinged on one metric — the number of Palestinian casualties had to wildly exceed previous rounds of violence between Hamas and Israel (the highest being 2100 casualties, in 2014). What number Sinwar had in mind remains unknown, but considering that the number should be high enough to fool the world into believing that what it had witnessed on October 7 was ‘nothing’ compared to what Israel had done in retaliation — it had to be in the tens of thousands. Sinwar would likely consider 8000 Palestinian casualties to have been a failure, as it would not meet the threshold needed to sway enough of the world, just a minority of far-left extremists and spirited antisemites.
One cannot blame the military experts who warned the IDF from entering the Gazan death-trap Hamas had prepared. The alternative was just unfathomable — to sacrifice the lives of 30,000 Palestinians and destroy the Gaza Strip for the sake of a PR stunt. It is so devious and counterintuitive, that it still hides in plain sight.
Twain’s Equation
Sinwar’s script played out exactly as he had written it — hundreds of millions in the West have been seduced into advocating for Hamas, hideously — in the name of liberal values. “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled”, Mark Twain once said. Now, when Hamas supporters are confronted with Hamas’s own footage of its atrocities, they render them as deep-fakes, just as Twain had predicted.
I doubt that Sinwar has read Mark Twain, but it’s likely that his role model, Vladimir Putin, has. Like Putin, Sinwar too had deployed an army of cyber soldiers to infiltrate and galvanize thousands of online communities. From gamers on Stitcher, to environmentalists on Reddit, to social justice groups on Instagram — all have been fed Hamas messaging, binding their cause to that of Hamas. The ground had been sowed for years, right under Israel’s nose, who is now stuck on the doomed side of Twain’s equation — trying to convince people that they have been fooled.
Yuval Noah Harari recently said in an interview that in the post-truth world we live in, humans no longer fight over territory or food, they fight over imaginary stories in their minds. Judging by Israel’s communications strategy of ‘explaining the truth’ to a post-truth world, it seems that Israel’s leaders have not yet realized that Sinwar had opted for a different battlefield than the one in which they have been fighting. On this battlefield, the story IS the war, and Israel has ceded it to Hamas by playing the role Sinwar had written for it, instead of tenaciously authoring it.
Sinwar has reversed the role of propaganda — from a tool in service of war, to war being used in service of propaganda. His story has infiltrated the minds of entire generations in the West. Some Gazans have tried to expose Sinwar’s plot, but most don’t question his motives to sacrifice so many of them on the altar of storytelling. Ultimately, the stark reality is both simple and profound: Sinwar effectively shackled 30,000 Palestinians to a train track, only to lay blame at the train, rather than at the architect of their peril. It is entirely possible that the harsh truth of Sinwar’s strategy is so horrifying, that the lie is simply irresistible.
