Peloni: While the talk of victory has been a consistent theme since October 7, where is the path which will take us from where we are to that precious promise where the butchers and enablers of October 7 will be eliminated, both for the calumny which they wrought on the Jews of the Gaza Envelop on October 7, and the threat which they pose at doing the same again for all the people of Israel.
Talk of remaking the region requires a vision that goes beyond more war on multiple fronts. If Israel can’t get to the next stage, then the years of war may have been wasted.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN | MAY 7, 2026
As Iran and the US appear to be seeking an agreement that could see the Strait of Hormuz open and Iran’s nuclear program addressed, it remains unclear what Israel’s strategy will be going forward. Israel has been fighting a multifront war since the October 7 massacre. Hamas essentially enabled Iran to coordinate a larger series of attacks against Israel. Iran brought in Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq.
The war that began on October 7, 2023, has now gone through several phases. The initial phase for Israel was focused on recovering from the huge losses on the day itself and preparing for a large war.
Israel called up hundreds of thousands of reservists and then had to train some of them to prepare for urban battle in Gaza. This led to a kind of waiting period in October 2023. The ground war began at the end of October and then continued through October 2025.
The ground war in Gaza consisted of raids into areas – a slow, grinding war in which areas such as northern Gaza were partly captured and then returned to Hamas. This then led to a doctrine of razing the border areas in Gaza and seeking to control them into the future.
Why would anyone let Hamas remain intact?
This policy of creating a buffer zone of complete destruction, with areas devoid of any civilians, has become the new Israeli tactic being used in Lebanon and to some extent the Syrian border.
The challenge for Israel is that this is a tactic, not a strategy. Building a kind of Israeli Maginot Line in Gaza and Lebanon is essentially a tactic designed to keep enemies farther away. What it has led to is continued Hamas control of Gaza.
Gaza has become a huge disaster with terrible humanitarian suffering. The two million people there are still held under Hamas control. Children lack an education that is free from Hamas. There are no health services or any governance services outside of the Hamas-run area. In essence, the war has been fought for years, and the result is continued Hamas control.
An observer who saw the October 7 massacre might have thought at the time that Hamas would be removed from Gaza. Why would anyone let a group massacre 1,000 people, the worst mass killing of Jews since the Shoah, and then let the group remain?
“Hamas is ISIS,” Israeli officials told the public in the days after October 7. In truth, ISIS was removed from Iraq and Syria. It used to control cities such as Mosul and Raqqa. It no longer does because of a successful campaign by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Iraqis, and the Kurdish Peshmerga.
Israel, with an army far stronger than the Iraqis or the SDF, has not been able to remove Hamas. This appears to be due to a policy that goes back to 2007, which believes Hamas should remain in Gaza. There are no clear plans to remove it or enable a new government in Gaza to run the place and foster a future peace.
THIS ESSENTIALLY means that without a strategy, Hamas will remain. The result of October 7 isn’t a strategic shift, but rather a tactical shift. It would be as if the Nazis had invaded France and Russia in the 1940s, and the Allies had decided that the best thing would be to push the Nazis back across the Rhine River, out of Poland, and then keep them in a rump state in Bavaria, but not actually remove them from power.
No serious strategy in London, the Kremlin, or Washington would have seen that as a good result of the war.
The Gaza ceasefire began in October 2025. The hostages came home, enabling some healing in Israel. Hamas has remained, however, and the new Board of Peace and various bureaucratic entities created by the peace plan, such as the Civil-Military Coordination Center and the concept of an international stabilization force, have not been able to dislodge Hamas or disarm it.
There was more talk this week about disarming it. But no clear plan with attainable objectives and stages has been set in motion. Some members of the Albanian and Kosovo armed forces did begin initial steps toward deployment with the International Stabilization Force (ISF), but much remains to be done. Without a clear strategy, nothing will change.
Two million civilians in Gaza are continuing to suffer. Reports this week said some items would be transferred to Gaza to finally deal with the rat infestation that has taken hold because of so many people living in tents and squalor.
No journalists from abroad have been permitted into Gaza, basically meaning that two million people have no way to even describe their circumstances. Gaza is clearly a massive disaster, and the plans to fix it are moving slowly.
The question of what to do in Gaza
Meanwhile, Israel doesn’t only face the question of what to do with Gaza, it is also facing a continued conflict with Hezbollah. Hezbollah is entrenched in Lebanon, and there is no clear plan to disarm it. Like Hamas, it has suffered blows in the war, but it is still in Lebanon and in control of its area.
The Lebanese government has shown it is unwilling and unable to disarm Hezbollah. Brash statements from Jerusalem have made it seem that Israel can disarm the group “the easy way or the hard way,” but these slogans have no clear obtainable goals behind them. No one has yet suggested how a phased disarmament may occur? What weapons are included in disarming, and which are not? Which areas?
In the absence of any clear way to disarm Hezbollah, it won’t be disarmed. That means that Lebanon, like Gaza, will be subjected only to tactics. The IDF is good at tactics. It has the technology to deal with these enemies. Five IDF divisions in Gaza or Lebanon, however, have not been able to decisively remove or defeat the groups.
THIS LEAVES a big question about the political strategy and the lack of a Clausewitz-like concept of what the point of these wars has been. As the wars move toward the 1,000-day mark, this is a question that needs to be addressed. The war in Gaza and Lebanon has now stretched on longer than it took the US to get into Germany from the initial US landings in North Africa in 1942.
That should raise red flags. The fact is that in years of war, Israel has only really conquered a few kilometers of depth into Lebanon and Gaza. Hamas and Hezbollah remain.
Meanwhile, on other fronts, the threats also remain. The Houthis are in Yemen. The Iranian-backed militias remain in Iraq. Iran has been weakened, but it has shown it can close the Strait of Hormuz and withstand months of attacks by the US and Israel.
If a deal is secured with the US and Iran, it will appear to leave Israel with a lot of questions about what the point of the war was with Iran. Was the war about the nuclear program, or the missiles, or the drone threat? Was the war about regime change?
Recent articles have painted a dismal picture of planning to encourage Kurds to rise up in Iran, a plan that didn’t take into account other groups in Iran or the need for them to be armed and motivated.
The Kurds are a minority in Iran who live in one region. They don’t want to be used as cannon fodder. The Iranian regime may one day fall, but reports of its teetering on the brink may have been exaggerated.
The only real decisive success in the region has been the fall of the Assad regime. Aided by the setbacks to Hezbollah in November 2024, the Syrian rebels toppled the Assad regime.
One might have thought this would be welcomed in Jerusalem. Assad was an ally of Iran and empowered Hezbollah. Jerusalem has treated the new government of Ahmed al-Sharaa as a threat, however, and it even bombed the new government, forcing Washington to intervene to try to create peace.
The US now is involved in ceasefires and trying to prevent more war in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and apparently with Iran as well, essentially meaning Israel is now relying on the US for all these issues on its borders.
This lack of a strategy, relying instead on the US for a strategy while the IDF is involved in tactics, has left Israel in a situation where years of war leave many questions about what comes next.
There are many opportunities in the region for Israel. The desire to focus on tactics and constant conflict management, however, has left Jerusalem without the prize that it seeks. Talk of remaking the region requires a vision that goes beyond more war on multiple fronts. If Israel can’t get to the next stage, then the years of war may have been wasted.
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