The war in Gaza has settled into a mind-numbing pattern of violence, bloodshed, and death. And everyone is losing—except Hamas. When Israel invaded the territory last fall, its stated military objective was to destroy the terrorist group so that it could never again commit acts of barbarity like the ones it carried out during its October 7 attack. But although the war has culled Hamas’s ranks, it has also vastly increased support for the group—among Palestinians, throughout the Middle East, and even globally. And even though Israel was fully justified in taking military action after the attack, the way in which it has done so has caused immense damage to its own global standing and put intense strain on Israel’s relationship with the United States, its most important partner.

Israel’s overwhelming, unfocused military response has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mainly women and children, even as Israelis taken hostage on October 7 languish or die in the custody of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian groups. By limiting the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, Israel has produced near-famine conditions in parts of the territory. Late last year, South Africa, with the eventual support of dozens of other countries, filed a complaint at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. In May, the Biden administration halted some U.S. arms shipments to Israel, signaling its displeasure with Israeli plans to invade the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than a million civilians had taken refuge.

Worse yet, although Israel claims to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, there is little evidence to suggest that the group’s ability to threaten Israel has been significantly compromised. In some respects, Israel’s response has even helped Hamas. A March 2024 opinion poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed support for Hamas among Gazans topping 50 percent, a 14-point rise since December 2023. It’s upsetting to see that the slaughter of Israeli civilians—including children and elderly people—could indirectly build sympathy for Hamas. As a nonstate actor that deliberately targets civilians with violence for symbolic and political ends, Hamas meets all the criteria for being considered a terrorist organization. The group is composed of self-serving, violent extremists who prioritize armed struggle over effective governance and the welfare of Palestinians. There is no question that eliminating Hamas would be good for Palestinians, Israel, the Middle East, and the United States.

But the Israeli government’s highly lethal response to the October 7 attack and seeming indifference to the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians has played into Hamas’s hands. Among the audiences that the group most wants to reach, including Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Arab populations throughout the region, and young people in the West, the heinous deeds of October 7 have receded from view, replaced by images that support the Hamas narrative, in which Israel is the criminal aggressor and Hamas is the defender of innocent Palestinians.

Simply put, despite some tactical victories, the Israeli war in Gaza has been a strategic disaster. For Israel to defeat Hamas, it needs a better strategy, one informed by a deeper understanding of how terrorist groups generally end. Fortunately, history provides ample evidence on that subject. Over the course of decades of research, I have assembled a dataset of 457 terrorist campaigns and organizations, stretching back 100 years, and have identified six primary ways in which terrorist groups end. These pathways are not mutually exclusive: frequently, more than one dynamic is at work, and multiple factors play a role in the termination of a terrorist group. But Israel should pay close attention to one route in particular: groups that end not through military defeat, but through strategic failure. Since October 7, Israel has been trying to crush or repress Hamas out of existence, to little avail. A smarter strategy would be to figure out how to chip away at the group’s support and hasten its collapse.

The least common pathway to termination is success; a small number of groups cease to exist because they achieve their goals. One familiar example is uMkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress in South Africa, which carried out attacks on civilians early in its campaign to end apartheid. Another is the Irgun, the Jewish militant group that employed terrorism in an effort to push the British out of Palestine, force many Arab communities to flee, and help lay the groundwork for the establishment of Israel.

But it is exceedingly rare for a terrorist group to achieve its core objectives: in the past century, only about five percent have done so. And Hamas is not likely to join that list. Israel is much stronger than Hamas in every military and economic dimension, and it has the support of the United States. The only way Hamas could succeed in achieving its goal of “the complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” would be if Israel so undermined its own unity and integrity that it destroyed itself.

A second way a terrorist group can end is by transforming into something else: a criminal network or an insurgency. Criminality and terrorism overlap, so that particular shift is more like moving along a spectrum than like morphing into something new as a group stops trying to catalyze political change in favor of exploiting the status quo for monetary gain. A shift to insurgency happens when a group mobilizes enough of the population that it can challenge the state for control of territory and resources. That, unfortunately, is a possible outcome in Gaza—and perhaps the West Bank and even Israel proper—if Israel maintains its current strategy.

A third way terrorist groups end is........

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