Strategic Assessment

The military achievements of the campaign are obvious and significant. The IDF succeeded in attaining complete control of the operational field at every stage and dictating the campaign’s evolution. Hamas did not manage to foil Israeli military objectives and failed in its attempts to extract substantive costs from Israel in the course of the fighting. Since the diplomatic campaign is still in its early stages, it is hard to assess fully to what extent the objectives of the fighting in Gaza were achieved in terms of creating a new situation vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip, which was the government’s stated goal of the war.