Hamas is getting a bitter taste of its own medicine.

The terror group thought it could manipulate history. Now Israel is using Hamas' own tactics to defeat these Islamist barbarians.

Hamas has united Israel, destroyed Gaza, and forfeited its own future. (photo: Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash)

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There’s a certain poetic justice to what’s unfolding in Gaza — a grim symmetry in which Hamas finds itself ensnared by the very tactics it spent years perfecting.

For over a decade, Hamas saw itself as the master of manipulation — outwitting Israel, balancing diplomacy and terror, and turning Gaza into both a victim and a threat.

But now, Israel is using Hamas’ own playbook against it — and using it far more effectively.

To understand how we got here, we have to rewind to 2018. Gaza was imploding economically, unemployment stood near 50 percent, and Hamas was confronting a legitimacy crisis at home. For years, its “resistance” credentials had masked its utter failure to govern, but with the rubble of previous wars piling up and donors losing interest, something had to give.

That year, Hamas embraced a tactical shift — a seemingly pragmatic offer to Israel: allow thousands of Gazans to work in Israeli cities and agricultural areas, and in return, Hamas would moderate itself. It was not a peace agreement, but a transactional détente — economic pacification as a substitute for real diplomacy.

Israeli leaders, particularly within the defense establishment, bought into the fantasy. If Gazans could feed their families through wages from Israeli jobs, perhaps they’d choose prosperity over war. By 2022, nearly 18,000 Gazans were crossing into Israel daily, earning hard currency and easing economic pressure on Hamas itself.

Behind the scenes, Hamas’ leadership was at war with itself. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, understood that governing Gaza’s misery required some economic relief — hence the worker permits. But Hamas’ external leadership, particularly in Beirut and Doha, saw this economic thaw as a betrayal of the “resistance.” Every shekel earned in Israel was seen by hardliners as complicity with the occupation.

Sinwar’s solution was vintage Hamas: Say one thing, do another. Accept the worker permits to ease internal economic unrest, but plow the economic benefits into military preparations for the next war. Rumors had it that Hamas would confiscate 75 percent of what Gazan day workers earned in Israel.

What’s more, while Gazan day laborers crossed into Israel, Hamas was diverting construction materials to rebuild its tunnel network and importing Iranian weapons under cover of economic calm.

This internal Hamas tension — the struggle between governance and resistance — was never resolved. Instead, Sinwar gambled that a spectacular blow against Israel could unite both camps. That spectacular blow came on October 7th.

What’s most fascinating — and darkly comic — is that Hamas believed Israel’s own internal chaos had reached a breaking point in 2023.

After months of mass protests against judicial reform by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, culminating in public refusals by IDF reservists to report for duty, Hamas became convinced that Israeli society was disintegrating. Sinwar and his planners believed they would strike a fractured Israel — one too paralyzed by internal division to respond forcefully.

This was not entirely irrational. Throughout 2023, Israel appeared to be spiraling into political civil war. The streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities filled with demonstrators, military leadership publicly clashed with the government, and the national security cabinet resembled a dysfunctional family dinner. Hamas, watching from Gaza City, concluded that October 7th would not only humiliate Israel, but also shatter its already fragile cohesion.

They were catastrophically wrong.

Instead of fracturing, Israeli society fused together in the aftermath of October 7th. The judicial protests evaporated overnight. Reservists who once vowed to boycott service flooded their units, ready to fight. Political rivals who could barely sit in the same room just weeks earlier formed an emergency war cabinet. In short, Hamas’ great gamble — that Israel’s internal divisions would protect Gaza — produced exactly the opposite result.

This is where the irony deepens. Hamas’ own internal divisions had produced a similarly flawed gamble: the belief that a spectacular attack could resolve its own ideological contradictions — bridging its pragmatic need to govern Gaza with its ideological commitment to endless war.

Instead, Hamas’ internal divisions are now irrelevant. There is no Hamas governance left to speak of. Gaza is rubble. Sinwar is dead. And the very people Hamas promised to “liberate” are now enduring the consequences of Hamas’ hubris.

Enter the hostages-for-ceasefire negotiations throughout 2024 and into early 2025. Hamas assumed that Israel had no real leverage over outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden, who was withholding weapons. And Israel had long lost its friends in Europe. On January 19th, Biden’s second-to-last day in the White House, Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire despite tremendous backlash that threatened to topple his coalition.

Even though relations with Biden and Netanyahu had long been soured, Netanyahu is a professional politician; he probably wanted to give Biden a “win” on his way out — to leave, as you could say, a good taste in his mouth. Netanyahu also knew he had a much more Israel-friendly administration hours away from moving back into the White House, meaning that the end result of this hostages-for-ceasefire deal would mean whatever Israel wanted it to.

The deal included two phases: During the deal’s first phase, 33 Israeli hostages were released, eight of them dead, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including many convicted terrorists serving hefty jail sentences. Five Thai nationals held hostage in the Gaza Strip were freed separately. It lasted 42 days.

Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas were supposed to begin negotiations regarding the terms of Phase 2 a month ago. This phase requires — in exchange for the release of the remaining living hostages — a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and permanent ceasefire.

But Israel, having learned from years of Hamas duplicity, likely had no intention of proceeding to Phase 2. The hostages-for-ceasefire deal was never a peace process; it was a brilliant political, diplomatic, and military maneuver.

And suddenly, Hamas finds itself on the receiving end of the same cynical tactics it had used for years: buying time under the guise of diplomacy, only to be betrayed when the tactical value expired.

Now, Israel is sitting pretty, with increasingly more leverage to accomplish both of its stated goals in this war that Hamas started: returning all the hostages and defeating Hamas as a governing and military entity in Gaza.

For now, Israel is strategically trying to release more hostages. Over the weekend, the Israelis announced their decision to condition the continuation of the Gaza ceasefire on a new framework extending its first phase, rather than moving on to the second phase.

Minutes after midnight and following a four-hour security consultation with top officials on Friday, Netanyahu’s office declared that it was endorsing what it described as a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, which would see the ceasefire with Hamas extended through Ramadan and Passover, during which all hostages could potentially be released.

According to Israel’s account of the U.S. proposal, half of the remaining hostages — living and dead — would be released on the first day of the extended ceasefire, and the remaining captives would be released at the end of the period if a permanent ceasefire is reached.

Terror groups in the Gaza Strip, notably Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are holding 59 hostages, including the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF.

Hamas has indeed publicly rejected Israel’s proposal to extend the first stage of the deal, insisting that the deal proceed with phase two — which includes the release of all remaining living hostages, a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and a permanent end to the war.

That’s when Israel made another chess move on Saturday: to stop the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. No, this is not “collective punishment.” If Gazans are in need of humanitarian aid, they should speak to Hamas, which has hijacked and hoarded humanitarian aid from day one of this 17-month war for its own cynical benefit.

Israel is also planning to incrementally pile on pressure on Hamas to accept the new proposal extending the ceasefire deal’s first phase and securing the release of all the hostages the terror group is holding.

According to a Sunday report from Israel’s Kan public broadcaster, the next stages of Israel’s “maximum pressure” plan, said to have been drafted over the past few weeks, is to again move the Gazan population from northern Gaza to the territory’s south — as had been the case for most of the war — and later, if needed, cutting all electricity to the Strip.

The final measure is reportedly a full return to the war, this time with the heavy bombs withheld by the Biden Administration, as well as the billions worth of arms and military equipment the Trump Administration is sending Israel.

It’s worth remembering that on October 6, 2023, there was a de facto ceasefire. No rockets were flying. No Israeli strikes hit Gaza. The worker permits were still in place. This was the ceasefire Hamas itself shattered with industrial-scale barbarity on October 7th. Now, Hamas is begging for a ceasefire — the very thing it obliterated.

But Israel, burned so many times before, knows the game too well. There will be no more ceasefires that allow Hamas to reload and rearm. There will only be conditional pauses, carefully timed to serve Israel’s goals, not Hamas’ survival.

Hamas thought it could manipulate history. It believed it could exploit Israel’s divisions while resolving its own internal contradictions through war. Instead, it has united Israel, destroyed Gaza, and forfeited its own future.

Hamas is not a victim of Israeli aggression. Hamas is a victim of its own miscalculation and deceit. It spent years perfecting the art of tactical lying — and now, it’s being outplayed at its own game.

Hamas is getting exactly what it started.

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