What Israeli “Victory” Looks Like -- Peter Beinart in Jewish Currents
Sid Shniad
Jewish Currents October 14, 2025
What Israeli “Victory” Looks Like
The Trump deal doesn’t destroy Hamas but it does further Palestinian dispossession.
Peter Beinart
Israeli soldiers on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, October 5th, 2025. Ariel Schalit/AP Photo
“Yes, we won.” So declared the influential Israeli commentator Amit Segal in a column in Israel Hayom after Israel and Hamas reached a US-brokered ceasefire deal last week.
On the surface, Segal’s confidence appears strange. Yes, the current agreement returns all the remaining hostages—an official war aim, and an achievement that Israelis value immensely. But Israel could have retrieved all the hostages much earlier, when more of them remained alive. “This deal could have been done a long time ago,” writes longtime Israeli hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin, “Hamas agreed to all of the same terms in September 2024.”
Back then, Israel justified its refusal to accept such a deal because it claimed Hamas was not yet “demolished,” which Netanyahu had pledged to do after the October 7th attacks. But if demolishing Hamas means destroying its fighting force, that goal remains unfulfilled today. Israel has killed many Hamas leaders and fighters. But by slaughtering as many as 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, it has also pushed more Palestinians in Gaza to take up arms. As former Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested this January, “Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” And even as Israel has destroyed much of Hamas’s arsenal, it has also supplied the group with the components to replenish it. A December 2024 report by the European Council on Foreign Relations noted that Hamas has been “recycling unexploded Israeli rockets, bombs, and artillery shells to use as improvised explosive devices and produce new projectiles.” Israel delivered these munitions to Gaza by dropping more bombs there than were dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg during World War II. According to the New York Times, the Israeli military also believes that Hamas’s tunnel network has withstood its assault.
In theory, Hamas will surrender its weapons in the third phase of the Trump deal—thus fulfilling Israel’s longstanding demands. But a top Hamas official last week denied that this will happen. It’s not hard to see why. For decades, the Islamist group has attacked its political rival, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, for abandoning armed resistance while Palestinians remain occupied. It’s unlikely Hamas would abandon that principle now, absent any hint of an acceptable political solution. Even Israeli security experts consider the prospect implausible. Segal himself has declared that “there is no chance” that Hamas will disarm.
So if victory does not mean that Israel has saved as many hostages as possible and if it does not mean that Israel has destroyed or disarmed Hamas, what does Segal mean when he proclaims “we won”? Understanding this statement requires assessing Israeli victory in different terms. In his column, Segal notes that “In the War of Independence, one percent of Israel’s population was killed, yet everyone understood that it ended in victory—a victory that is still celebrated to this day. This war, too, though it has yet to be given a name, will be remembered the same way.” In 1948, Israel’s victory entailed clearing roughly 750,000 Palestinians off their land in order to create a state with a large Jewish majority. This has been Israel’s template ever since: control as much land as possible with as few Palestinians living there as possible. Segal views Israel’s current victory in that light. The Trump deal may not destroy or disarm Hamas, but it will likely fragment Gaza, forcing the Palestinians living there into smaller and less habitable enclaves and leaving more territory in Israel’s hands. For Israel, that’s a dramatic step forward.
Over the last two years, Israel has often signaled its intention to pressure Palestinians in Gaza to leave. According to the Washington Post, within days of October 7th, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu urged Joe Biden to lobby Egypt to open its border and permit a mass influx of refugees from Gaza. That same month, Israel’s intelligence ministry produced a document suggesting that Palestinians in Gaza be evacuated to Egypt’s Sinai desert. When Donald Trump proposed this February that Palestinians leave so that Gaza could be remade as a beachside resort, Netanyahu enthusiastically embraced the idea, and his government began talking with Libya, South Sudan, and Syria about whether they might take Palestinians in.
While the new Trump deal does not propose mass expulsion from Gaza, it furthers that goal by ratifying Israel’s takeover of much of the Strip. Last fall, Segal—who is close to Netanyahu—predicted that if Trump won, Israel might be able to “change the borders of Gaza as a disciplinary act because of what happened on the 7th of October.” That aim now looks within reach. In the deal’s first phase, Israel retains approximately 53% of Gaza. (Some news outlets put the figure as high as 58%.) In the second phase, Israel is expected to withdraw to roughly 40% of the Strip, once an Arab-led stabilization force moves into the territory. Even in the third and final phase, Israel will still maintain direct control of 15% of the territory. But the final withdrawal probably won’t occur. As Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter explained last week, it depends on “the disarming of Hamas and the demilitarization of Gaza. If that does not happen, then this peace plan is not going anywhere.” Given that Israel’s own security experts consider disarmament unlikely, and that the Trump plan so far provides no mechanism for forcing Israel to withdraw, Israel looks poised to occupy at least 40% of the Strip.
The 40% that Israel directly controls is unlikely to contain many Palestinians. The Abu Shabab clan, which Israel has been supporting as an alternative to Hamas, plans to remain in Rafah, which is currently behind Israeli lines. Another anti-Hamas force, based in Khan Yunis, is also reportedly located in the Israeli-held zone. Muhammad Shehada, a Gaza-born political analyst and visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that a few thousand Palestinians civilians live there as well. But Khalil Sayegh, another Gaza-born analyst, told me that Palestinians have been displaced from most of the territory that Israel will now control. And Shehada considers it unlikely that Israel will allow them to return, since it would deem them a security threat. The section of Gaza that Israel retains could thus turn into the equivalent of Area C of the West Bank, a territory in which few Palestinians are permitted to live. It’s unclear if Donald Trump, or another future US president, would allow Israel to build settlements there. But given America’s decades-long failure to prevent settlement building and expansion in the West Bank, it’s a distinct possibility.
Meanwhile, the 60% of Gaza without Israeli troops will likely remain an extremely grim place. It is almost totally destroyed: Israel has razed 90% of Gaza’s homes and 80% of its farmland. The Strip now contains 17,000 unaccompanied children. The United Nations estimates that the last two years have “set back human development in Gaza by as much as 69 years.” Even with additional aid, it may be difficult to provide enough food. As Eyal Weizman, director of the human rights research group Forensic Architecture, points out, under the Trump deal, most of Gaza’s farmland will be in Israel’s hands.
The UN estimates that making Gaza habitable will cost $50 billion dollars and could take at least 15 years. If Gaza’s homes are rebuilt at the rate that followed prior conflicts, the process could stretch into the 22nd century. But under the Trump plan, Israel remains in control of all access points into Gaza, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt, which means it will determine what goes in and out. Segal predicts that Israel will follow a simple principle: “Reconstruction,” he argues, “will come only in exchange for demilitarization.” Since the latter is unlikely, the former is too.
Israel’s defenders might argue that Israeli forces would willingly leave much of Gaza if Hamas laid down its arms. But resistance organizations rarely disarm before gaining some assurance that their people’s oppression will end. The African National Congress and Irish Republican Army were both adamant that they would only hand over their weapons when a new political system was in sight. And Israel’s actions in the West Bank—where the Palestinian Authority has largely abandoned armed resistance for the past two decades—suggest that Palestinian disarmament does not prevent further dispossession. Last year, Israel expropriated more Palestinian land in the West Bank than it has in any year since it conquered the territory in 1967. The UN estimates that since October 7th, 2023, Israel has pushed more than 10,000 West Bank Palestinians off their land.
So while it may be tempting to believe that Hamas’s disarmament would halt Israel’s takeover of Gaza, it’s more plausible that Israel’s land seizures are part of a historic pattern of dispossession that began long before Hamas was born. Before 1948, Jews owned roughly 7% of the land in Mandatory Palestine. In its War of Independence—which Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe—Israel created a state on 78% of the former British colony. It designated most of that new country’s territory—much of it seized from Palestinians—as “state land,” which it overwhelmingly parceled out to Jews. Since occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has designated at least a quarter of that territory as “state land” as well, and developed it for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
The Trump plan ratifies something similar in Gaza. The Strip, which comprises less than 2% of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, holds roughly 30% of its Palestinian population, largely because so many Palestinians fled there when they were expelled from their homes in 1948. Their descendants will now likely live in an enclave that has not only been reduced to rubble, but as a result of last week’s deal, will be close to half its former size. The message from both Washington and Jerusalem is clear: There is no future for you here. No wonder Amit Segal thinks Israel has won.