With the Israeli army surrounding the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza strip and the Israel-Hamas war assuming a grim regularity, I wanted to note a few developments which give perhaps a glimpse of how this all ends and what comes after. To frame the question, I want to flag to your attention this article by Hussein Ibish in The Atlantic. It’s one of the most clear-eyed discussions of the war and its aftermath I’ve seen over the last two months. Ibish’s central argument is that the war certainly won’t end with any kind of final defeat of Hamas or its destruction as an organization. This is an impossible standard since under almost any scenario at least some remnant of the group will emerge from its tunnels at the end of the war and declare victory on its own terms for having survived. But, as Ibish argues, that will be a hollow and pyrrhic victory … unless Israel decides to remain in Gaza with the goal of permanently or indefinitely delaying that hollow declaration of victory. In that scenario either Hamas, or some future reconstituted version of itself, really will have managed a major victory, placing itself at the head of the Palestinian national movement in a permanent state of war with Israel.

This is a fascinating story amidst the general tragedy and bleak carnage of the last two months. Two scholars analyzed trading in the days just before the October 7th massacres in southern Israel and put together a pretty strong case that someone essentially shorted the Israeli economy based on foreknowledge of the attacks. Specifically, they tracked short selling of an exchange traded fund, which gave investors broad exposure to the Israeli economy.

I’ve mentioned a few times over the last eight weeks that one of the key challenges in reporting on or making sense of events in Gaza right now is that at the most basic level we don’t know what is happening in the military engagement or even precisely what the aims are. According to the latest reports, some 15,800 residents of Gaza have died in the fighting over the last two months, just a staggering number. Some percentage of those are Hamas combatants. The Gazan health ministry doesn’t disagree. But the great majority are civilians. (The Gaza health ministry is run by Hamas but in previous conflicts there numbers have proven generally accurate.) At the same time Israel has estimated that it has killed some two or three thousand Hamas fighters, just a tiny percentage of a fighting force reputed to total 30,000 or more.