There is a word that has quietly disappeared from the diplomatic vocabulary surrounding Israel’s wars, and its absence is doing more damage than any arms embargo or UN resolution. The word is “victory.” Not ceasefire, not de-escalation, not sustainable calm, not a negotiated arrangement that preserves some version of the status quo.
Victory. The complete, unambiguous defeat of the enemy’s capacity and will to fight.
The word has not merely fallen out of fashion. It has been reclassified in the minds of Israel’s partners as something dangerously close to a war crime.
This is the central strategic crisis of Israel’s current moment, and it is almost never named directly.
The debate in Washington, London, and Brussels focuses endlessly on the means of Israeli warfare: the tonnage of bombs, the fate of Rafah, the civilian casualty ratios, and the pace of aid delivery. What it almost never addresses is the question of ends. What is Israel supposed to achieve? What does the successful conclusion of this war look like? And who, precisely, decided that Israel must fight without a defined terminal condition?
The answer to that last question, if anyone were honest enough to give it, would reveal something uncomfortable. Israel’s closest allies have effectively told it to wage war indefinitely without winning. They have demanded military operations be scaled back precisely at the moments when strategic objectives were within reach. They have conditioned continued support on restraint that, applied consistently, guarantees the survival of the enemy.
They have not quite said that Hamas must survive. They have simply ensured that every policy capable of producing Hamas’s destruction has been labeled disproportionate, destabilizing, or catastrophic for regional order.
The result is a war being fought in a conceptual vacuum. Israel possesses one of the most capable militaries in the world. It has degraded Hamas’s fighting force substantially, killed senior commanders, dismantled tunnel networks, and denied the organization territorial control over much of Gaza.
By conventional military metrics, it has achieved more in 18 months than most armies achieve in five years of counterinsurgency. And yet Hamas has not been defeated. It continues to recruit, to govern in the shadows, to hold hostages, and, most critically, to survive as a political fact. An organization that cannot be destroyed because its destruction has been made diplomatically impermissible cannot be deterred. And an enemy that cannot be deterred will fight again.
The erosion of “victory” as a strategic objective
This matters beyond Gaza, and beyond Hamas, because the logic applies with even greater force to Iran.
Tehran has spent the better part of two decades constructing a regional architecture built on the premise that Israel can be bled slowly and indefinitely without ever being allowed to impose a decisive cost. The Lebanese front, the Yemeni front, the Iraqi front, the Gazan front: None of these is an independent crisis. They are theaters in a single Iranian strategic conception whose core insight is that the international community will always intervene to stop Israel before it finishes the job.
Iran does not need to win its wars. It just needs Israel not to be allowed to win.
This is why the question of victory in Gaza is inseparable from the question of Iran.
If Hamas survives this war as a governing entity, or even as a credible shadow government, Iran’s model is validated. The message to every proxy, every militia, every armed group operating under Tehran’s umbrella is that attacking Israel carries no existential risk. Initiate a massacre, absorb a military campaign, wait for international pressure to force a ceasefire, and emerge intact. The formula has now been tested at scale. It worked.
A genuine Israeli victory in Gaza would require three things that are not currently happening:
- Complete dismantlement of Hamas’s military and governmental infrastructure, not its partial degradation
- A credible alternative governing authority for the day after, one that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority in its current dysfunctional form
- That Israel’s partners stop treating the achievement of these objectives as a provocation and start treating their non-achievement as the actual threat to regional stability.
None of this is happening because the concept of victory has been quietly excised from the permissible range of outcomes. Israel is being asked to manage the conflict, not end it. Management without resolution is not a strategy. It is the slow accumulation of future wars. Every month that Hamas survives, every month that Iran watches its model hold, is a month in which the next October 7 becomes more likely, not less.
Victory is not a war crime. Its absence is.
The writer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X/Twitter: @amineayoubx