After two years, the war in Gaza appears to be over. Following the Trump administration's active mediation last week, a tenuous ceasefire deal was struck over the weekend, and Israel's hostages have returned home. Of course, only time will tell whether this agreement will truly hold. Even so, it's not too early to draw some preliminary lessons from the conflict that just ended.
A primary one is that conflicts tend to breed innovation as adversaries scramble to gain strategic advantage. So it was with Gaza, where Israel's efforts to eradicate the Palestinian terror group confronted it with new strategic fronts for which the Jewish state found itself ill-prepared.
One was informational. While Israel unquestionably dominated the military battlefield, Hamas masterfully controlled the larger narrative surrounding the conflict. The Islamist group, in the words of one expert, successfully managed to "delete itself" from coverage of – and discourse about – the war, despite its role in precipitating it through a campaign of atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.
It did so through an extensive, and extremely effective, campaign of information manipulation – one that was spearheaded by the group's chief propagandist and spokesman, Abu Obeida, until his elimination in late August. Its extent, revealed not long ago in a report on Israel's Galei Tzahal radio and subsequently covered widely in the Israeli press, was formidable, encompassing some 1,500 dedicated operatives, "propaganda command centers" embedded with every Hamas brigade and division, extensive messaging for every Hamas combat protocol, and even a "psychological warfare plan" directed at shaping the decision-making of Israeli officials.
In these efforts, moreover, Hamas wasn't alone. Turbocharged by social media platforms and the support of ideological fellow travelers in the international community, the Islamist group managed to fundamentally transform the terms of the debate not only over the war, but over the larger Israeli-Palestinian question as well. In the process, Gaza became the first true information war: where what happened online and in the "hearts and minds" of global publics was truly as important as what transpired on the ground, if not more so.
Another front was legal. The use of "lawfare" – that is, the weaponization of legal concepts and proceedings for strategic objectives – has become increasingly common in recent years. It can be seen in the South China Sea, where Beijing is using maritime claims to reshape regional norms, and in the context of Ukraine, where Russia has fabricated assorted legal justifications for its ongoing war of aggression. Even so, the use of lawfare in the context of the Gaza war stands out.
Particularly egregious was the weaponization of the term "genocide" against the Jewish state. Originally formulated by Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin to describe Nazi Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jews, the concept was enshrined in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, which defines it as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" through killing, collective torture, the suppression of births, or forcible population transfer.
Israel's military conduct in Gaza didn't remotely approach this standard. However imperfect its actions were, the Jewish state took great pains throughout the two-year conflict to avoid targeting Palestinian civilians, as numerous studies have confirmed. It also provided extensive humanitarian assistance to the Strip's civilian population. When tallied this summer, Israel was estimated to have delivered nearly 1.8 million tons of aid to the Strip's two million person population, the majority of it in the form of food. Thereafter, in response to charges of famine, aid deliveries were stepped up further still.
Nevertheless, charges of "genocide" persisted. And, to add insult to injury, even Lemkin's name was hijacked to promote them. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, a Pennsylvania nonprofit with no connection to the Lemkin family itself, carried out an activist campaign that, among other things, backed anti-Israel campus protests, decried Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon as "terrorism," and agitated against American support for the Jewish state. All of which led members of Lemkin's family to launch legal proceedings against the group. According to Fox News, its lawyers filed a complaint with PA Gov. Josh Shapiro and the state's Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations arguing that the Institute is violating both state and federal law. The list of potential violations is long, among them unauthorized use of name and likeness, identity theft and false endorsement.
That brings us back to the Gaza war. To be sure, the fight against Hamas was always going to be difficult. Prior to Oct. 7, the Islamist movement had spent a generation embedding itself into the Palestinian population, even as it refined its eliminationist agenda. Even so, the most recent war saw the group and its supporters harness both propaganda and lawfare to major strategic advantage.
To truly persevere in the conflicts to come, Israel will likewise need to learn how to engage in earnest on these new fronts.