At the Gama Junction, a few kilometers from the Gaza border, I met Gadi Mozes. Among the crowd of people waiting to greet the convoy bearing the last 13 of the living Israeli hostages from Gaza. Gadi, who is 80 years old, is a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz. He was standing amid a group of residents of the kibbutz. They had a banner bearing the name of their community and a Hebrew message saying “We aren’t tired—we are the pavers of the path.”
Mostly, there was that unreachable gravity about him that people who have suffered the unimaginable often have.
Tiny Nir Oz was the community perhaps hardest hit of all in the massacres of October 7. Forty-seven of its 400 residents were killed on that day, and another 76 taken hostage. Gadi’s long-term partner, Efrat Katz, was among those murdered. Gadi was held as a hostage for 482 days, most of it in solitary confinement, by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He met my gaze steadily when I approached him after recognizing him, and politely declined to be interviewed. “You can photograph me, though,” he said, so I did. I was lucky because Gadi’s son made a joke just before I pressed the shutter, so he’s smiling warmly in the photograph. That isn’t what he looks like most of the time. Mostly, there was that unreachable gravity about him that people who have suffered the unimaginable often have.
A few minutes later, the convoy bringing the 13 hostages came down the road. The shouting was unexpectedly loud. I stood at the front to get a clear line for photographing, so I couldn’t see people for a moment, and it was like a great wave of sound behind me. A sort of wall of cheering and applause. “You’re heroes,” someone called out. It was over quickly and the convoy moved on, on its way to Tel Aviv. It occurred to me that we had just witnessed the last act of the two-year war between Israel and Hamas.
It affected me more than I had expected. Perhaps it was the ride down from Jerusalem, and the point at which we entered what I think of, as Paul Simon says in ‘Graceland’, as the cradle of the war. The names, once just nondescript Hebrew locations, have now become signifiers of something monumental and somber, that is already solidifying into history. One after another. Kibbutz Beeri, the scene of one of the most terrible massacres. And then Alumim, which the Hamas men failed to enter. A desperate attack by a few self-mobilized men from the air force commandos held them up, and bought time. One of the commandos, who was killed in that fight, was Ido Rosenthal, a relative of some good friends of mine from Jerusalem. I remembered him from when we were younger. A preternaturally calm man, with the unmistakable look of an elite fighter, and no interest whatsoever in making a thing out of it. Except when it mattered.
And then, further south, the site of the Nova festival. This has already become a kind of shrine. There are portraits and little messages about many of the people killed there, all arranged in what was the main dancing area of the festival, where much of the slaughter took place. Mainly you’re struck by how impossibly young they all were. Some of the messages have a kind of sweetly exhortary tone which, for those who know the country well, is immediately identifiable as quintessentially Israeli. Not the Israeliness that gets talked about and that people think they know, but another element. The memorial for Dor Hanan Shafir, for example, exhorts the reader to “do good deeds, which were characteristic of Dor, in his memory: 1. Check in on a friend, especially if they are going through a tough time. 2. Complete tasks fully. 3. Honor your parents.” Shafir, who was 30, and his fiancée Savyon were both murdered at the Nova site.
The arrival of the last 13 living hostages to Israel effectively brings the curtain down on the war that the massacres of October 7 initiated.
The names, once just nondescript Hebrew locations, have now become signifiers of something monumental and somber, that is already solidifying into history.
The conflict has been of monumental dimensions. Western coverage has concentrated on Gaza, and on the plight of its civilian population. At its height, however, in the 15-month period between April 2024 and July 2025, this was a region-wide, state-to-state conflict. Gaza was the spark that ignited it. The narrow coastal strip then formed a single front within the larger picture, before returning to be the sole arena of combat in the final months. The region-wide conflict came about because of the alliance system of which Hamas was and is a part, namely the group of states and movements aligned with and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The most immediately striking outcome of the war is the very significant weakening of this alliance, though not yet its destruction.
Evidence which has emerged since October 7 suggests that the attacks were not part of a coordinated effort by Iran and its allies. Rather, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar chose to act alone. So from Hamas’s point of view, October 7 was something of a leap in the dark. A handwritten document authored by Sinwar and recovered by the IDF during the fighting in Gaza indicates that the Hamas leader expected, without knowing for sure, that bold action by his movement would launch a much wider regional conflagration. It also appears that he expected that the attacks would trigger a wider uprising west of the Jordan River, bringing in both West Bank Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel.
A passage from the document reads: “There may be indications of enemy collapse already at the outset, and the movements of our people “inside” in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as Hezbollah’s attack, may encourage this. Therefore, we must be prepared to expand the attack to the maximum.” Elsewhere, Sinwar writes of the need for images “which will trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum among our people, especially among the residents of the West Bank, the “internal” [Israeli Arabs], Jerusalem, and our entire Islamic nation.”
Sinwar got his images, all right, but they didn’t produce the results he expected, or hoped for. In the event, there was no joining of the fray by Arab Israelis or Arab Jerusalemites, or West Bank Palestinians. The Hamas leader’s hope wasn’t absurd. In the events of May 2021, there had been some stirrings in these areas in sympathy with Gaza and the supposed defence of Al Aqsa Mosque. But not this time.
The regional response, Sinwar’s ‘Hezbollah attack’ did come, but it came late, and piecemeal. This appears to have been the product of the Hamas leaders’ decision to go it alone, without seeking the prior assent or approval of their allies. This left the allies in the position of either being seen to desert Gaza in its hour of need, or risking entry into a major war with Israel before they were completely ready (ie mainly before Iran had gone nuclear, but also before their various assets and forces had reached the needed levels of capacity and power).
The result: Iran and its allies tried to split the difference, entering the war, but not, they hoped, to a level that would bring down major Israeli retribution. They also seem to have failed to coordinate their response. The result was that Israel was able to focus on each of the component parts in turn, rather than being forced to deal with all of them simultaneously.
It’s plain that the main result of Sinwar’s decision to launch the October 7 attacks has been the decimation of the area he controlled, and the profound weakening of the alliance of which he was part.
Hezbollah in Lebanon entered the war as early as October 8. Israel responded defensively for a year, even as 70,000 Israelis were forced to leave their homes in the north. A major operation began against the organization in September 2024 and by the end of the year, Hizballah was pulverized, its leadership dead, with the IDF deployed in five outposts north of the border.
The Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthis) organisation began its attacks on Israel on October 19, 2023. The Houthis achieved their main successes, however, against international shipping on the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route. They hardly penetrated Israeli airspace. Israel, in response, destroyed large swathes of infrastructure in the Houthi-controlled part of Yemen, killing also the Houthis’ prime minister and a large part of his Cabinet.
Iran itself chose to enter the war in April 2025, with a ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel, repeated in October of that year. Israel’s major response came in June 2025, in coordination with the US, causing massive damage to Iran’s nuclear sites, destroying its air defenses and killing a number of senior officials, before Tehran accepted a ceasefire.
In a historically significant by-product of the weakening of the Iran-led axis, the weakened Assad regime in Syria was finally overrun in December 2024 by the Islamist insurgency under way against it since 2012.
Finally, with the war once more reduced to a single front, Hamas in October 2025 agreed to a ceasefire which would include the release of all Israeli hostages, while leaving Israel in control of part of Gaza.
From this quick tour, it’s plain that the main result of Sinwar’s decision to launch the October 7 attacks has been the decimation of the area he controlled, and the profound weakening of the alliance of which he was part.
In the specific context of Gaza, however, Israel has not achieved a complete victory. Hamas is already re-emerging in the 47 percent of the Strip from which the IDF has withdrawn. The organisation still musters somewhere around 20,000 fighters. The clan-based Palestinian militias operating in cooperation with Israel will seek to stand against them. This means that the reassertion of de facto control in part of Gaza by Hamas, or renewed strife as other elements seek to prevent this, looks likely. The ‘International Stabilisation Force’ envisaged by President Donald Trump’s plan does not yet exist. In the meantime, other forces will fight in the vacuum. Hamas has not surrendered or disarmed, and will not do so of its own free will. This matter remains to be settled.
Hamas has not surrendered or disarmed, and will not do so of its own free will. This matter remains to be settled.
So the outcome of the war on the ground, across the region, is very favourable for Israel. The country, its defence forces and its civil society recovered quickly from the shock of October 7, re-sealed the border, and went on to deliver crushing, though not yet terminal blows against a regional axis arrayed against them. That’s the way it looks from the Middle East, where hard power and its uses are understood by both friend and foe.
On the diplomatic and international stage, the picture is different. Western media coverage concentrated on Gaza throughout the war. The framing of the coverage often, somewhat surreally, depicted events as a kind of senseless assault by Israel on a civilian population. This picture bears no resemblance to the truth. Israel’s Gaza operations in many of their details and in their results resembled the global coalition’s war against the Islamic State. I say that not as a passive observer, but as a correspondent who covered both those wars on many occasions from the front lines.
But the extent to which this false depiction has penetrated large swathes of public consciousness in the west gives reason for pause. The crowds of thousands in western capitals calling for the destruction of Israel, and the strong support afforded those crowds by powerful political forces up to and including governments in the west, and up to and including rewarding Hamas with recognition of a Palestinian state, all form troubling elements of the picture of the last two years.
There is a point at which this shades into the area of the intangible. Why does a disproportionate, furious anger against the Jews seem to re-surface, in altered form, generation after generation? But there is also something deeply tangible here. It is the growth of Islamist political power, as a result of ideological currents and demographic changes, in a series of western countries. This phenomenon, and its alliance with a part of the political left, lies behind these developments in the west. Israel needs, and has lacked, a diplomatic and political strategy for addressing these matters. Perhaps, now there is time, such a strategy may be assembled.
The rise of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in the west, the emergence of Hamas as a force, and the Iran-led alliance are ultimately products of the same source. This source is the revolutionary political Islam which has erupted to prominence over the last half century. When seen from this point of view, it is clear that the root cause that led to the October 7 massacres has not yet been vanquished, even if some of its manifestations have been severely weakened. So there are undoubtedly many chapters to come. But this is a chapter now concluded, with considerable success and achievement, from the Israeli point of view.
But this is a chapter now concluded, with considerable success and achievement, from the Israeli point of view.
The day the last hostages came home was the festival of Simchat Torah. Two years exactly in the Jewish calendar from the day of the massacres in 2023. The first day of the war, and its last. I came home from reporting on the Gaza border to my neighborhood in Jerusalem. At the local corner store, Max, the owner, a veteran immigrant from Kharkov in Ukraine, was giving out free drinks of some powerful-smelling spirits, poured in plastic cups, to his customers. “My father’s moonshine,” he answered when I asked what it was. “He makes it out of sugar, with aniseed, and a bit of ginger.” I drank a shot of it and departed. Further down the road, at one of the neighborhood synagogues, I watched through the window for a while as the young, black-bearded Rabbi and some of his congregants danced with the Torah scrolls, in the brightly lit room, as is customary on this festival.
I remembered a time, a few days after October 7, 2023, when this rabbi and I had taken part in a hurried meeting at an apartment in the neighborhood. The meeting was about efforts to form an emergency response unit, in case the late Yahya Sinwar’s vision of intercommunal war began to look like coming true in our seam-line neighborhood of Jerusalem. They were looking for people with the right military background to register a local unit of this kind. After the meeting, the rabbi and I and four or five others had walked around the neighborhood, mapping out places where such a unit might deploy in the event that an October 7-type attack erupted here. I remember the urgency and the strangeness of it all. Two years later, almost to the day, the rabbi is dancing with his Torah scroll, and I’m drinking Max’s father’s homemade vodka. There will be further chapters to be written in this, no doubt. Good that this one’s over, anyway.
Published originally on October 17, 2025, under the title “War in the Middle East: Journey’s End After Two Years of Sizeable Wins, from Israeli Point of View.”
