Sinwar’s Script

On the Gaza battlefield, the story is the war. Israel has ceded it to Hamas by playing the role Sinwar wrote for it.

By Ilan Benatar

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, leaders who seek to advance political aims through war evaluate their chances of success by tallying up their soldiers, armored vehicles, and aircraft, comparing their arsenal with that of their adversaries, and reaching an operative conclusion. It is a practice spanning millennia.

Not all forms of warfare require the possession of comparable military means. A military strategy—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 important, what can now be discerned are the leaders’ intentions in their maneuvers on the strategic chessboard.

I am far from 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 prompts me to ask 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 murdering, raping, torturing, burning, and kidnapping 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—what the hell were they thinking? By any stretch of the imagination, Hamas is no match for 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 are 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. The painstaking precision with which this assault was planned implies that its planners applied blood-freezing rational thought. Hamas doesn’t belong in the “crazy” box, as their actions were not born of irrationality. The appropriate question is: What would be the objective of such a strategy?

It’s now safe to assume that the intent of the attack was to bait the IDF into Gaza. Militarily, that would be 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 military asymmetry. This was the interpretation of countless military experts who during the early days of the war warned Israel that IDF casualties would be measured in the thousands.

Five months into the war, this does not appear to have been the case. Yes, there were some skirmishes, costing the IDF between 150 and 250 casualties (many, 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, all for their own exclusive use. As for Gaza’s civilian population, nothing was prepared for them: not shelter, not food, not even medical supplies. These would all be very predictable needs, if in fact the strategy was to fight the IDF inside Gaza. But it seems Hamas’s strategy involved hiding, not fighting, and deliberately exposing the population to the IDF’s wrath.

Another “unsolved mystery” of October 7 is Hamas’s intentional decision to arm its soldiers with cameras and order them to broadcast their atrocities on the Internet. For decades, they have been perfecting their reputation as the ultimate victims: Why would Hamas risk irreparable damage to this reputation by deliberately broadcasting incriminating footage of its fighters torturing and murdering 768 Israeli civilians and kidnapping another 250? That risk must have had a reward, from Hamas’s perspective. A logical conclusion would be that their intention was to induce in Israelis blind rage. To manipulate them not only to invade Gaza, something Israel has vehemently resisted doing since 2014, but also to overreact once inside Gaza.

This strategy of enraging the Israelis and 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, so better to secure one’s national interests. It should not be viewed as such.

Sinwar’s Script

Yahya Sinwar, architect of the October 7 massacre, is a psychopathic but admittedly intelligent and rational actor. He understood that Hamas could not defeat Israel militarily. He needed to harness the entire world as a force multiplier to fight Israel on Hamas’s behalf. This could not be achieved militarily, but it could be achieved by crafting a story in which Israel would unwittingly play a role in Sinwar’s script: the ultimate villain. So on October 7, although they wore combat uniforms, fired assault weapons, and deployed tactical units, Hamas did not truly have a military strategy. It had a storytelling strategy. Sinwar loaded the gun, pointed it at 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 2,100 casualties, in 2014). What number Sinwar had in mind remains unknown, but the number had to be high enough to persuade the world that what it witnessed on October 7 was “nothing” compared to what Israel had done in retaliation, so it had to be in the tens of thousands. Sinwar would probably have considered 8,000 Palestinian casualties a failure, as it would not have met the threshold needed to sway enough of the world—only a minority of far-left extremists and spirited antisemites would have been impressed.

One cannot blame the military experts who warned the IDF against entering the Gazan death-trap Hamas had prepared. The alternative was too unfathomable—sacrificing the lives of 30,000 Palestinians and destroying the Gaza Strip as 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 a hideous advocacy for Hamas 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 explain 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 deployed an army of cyber soldiers to infiltrate and galvanize thousands of online communities, from gamers on Stitcher and environmentalists on Reddit to social justice groups on Instagram. All were fed Hamas’s messaging, binding their cause to that of Hamas. The ground had been sowed for years, right under Israel’s nose. Israel is now stuck on the doomed side of Twain’s equation: trying to convince people that they have been fooled.

Yuval Noah Harari said recently in an interview that in this post-truth world, humans no longer fight over territory or food, they fight over imaginary stories. To judge by Israel’s communications strategy of “explaining the truth” to a post-truth world, 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 wrote for it instead of tenaciously becoming its author.

Sinwar has reversed the roles of propaganda and war. Usually, propaganda serves the aims of war, but here, war serves the aims of propaganda. His story has infiltrated the minds of an entire generation in the West. Some Gazans have tried to expose Sinwar’s plot, but most don’t question his motives in sacrificing them on the altar of storytelling. Ultimately, the stark reality is both simple and profound: Sinwar shackled 30,000 Palestinians to a train track, then laid the blame for the ensuing catastrophe on the train, not the architect of their peril. It is entirely possible that the harsh truth of Sinwar’s strategy is so horrifying that the lie is irresistible.

Ilan Benatar is a documentary filmmaker and producer of the Call Me Back podcast.