For all the killing, destruction and displacement wrought upon Gaza over the past 10 months, Israel is likely to be less safe when military operations end than when they began. Nobody denies that Israel had a right to defend itself in response to Hamas’s own terrorist bloodletting against Israeli civilians, but vengeance is not a strategy. And too much of the Netanyahu government’s decision-making has been driven by a short-term desire for vengeance rather than a long-term need to provide for Israel’s future security.

At present, Israel is militarily engaged on multiple fronts, and has shown that it has excellent regional intelligence capabilities and the technical means to exploit that intelligence to achieve tactical victories. But those short-term tactical victories have disguised, and in some cases increased, the strategic threat Israel will face in the future.

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system fires interceptors at rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, in the days after the October 7 attacks. Credit: AP

The most obvious threat will be from Gaza. In the absence of a post-conflict plan for the governance or security of Gaza, tens of thousands dead and many more wounded, and more than half the buildings destroyed or damaged, the physical reconstruction of the Palestinian coastal strip will take a generation. Everyone in Gaza’s population of 600,000 will have been affected by the conflict.

And while Israel’s actions were in response to an attack by Hamas, any blame that may have been aimed at Hamas’s leadership is likely to be........

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