Omar Lafi, a Palestinian man, weeps by the body of his nephew, October 9, 2023.

When Hamas carried out a bloody assault on Israeli citizens just outside Gaza, killing hundreds and taking hostages, veteran cynics were quick to point out the terrorist group had given a ferociously right-wing driven Israeli government precisely what it wanted: an excuse to extract “mighty vengeance” and eradicate Hamas forces using Gaza as staging ground. Such an operation would in essence purge Gaza of its militants while giving the Israeli military license to carry out a protracted occupation that would all but bar the once-entrenched Palestinian population from returning home, though just whose home the area is remains at the heart of the struggle.

More than four months into Israel’s reprisal-become-war, it’s all over but the shouting.  Israeli might has decimated Hamas and parked its forces deep into its enclaves, all the while routing civilians who have nowhere to go.  The ruthless efficiency of the operation – Israel is doing what the United States could and would not do in Iraq – continues to elicit questions about the genesis of the conflict itself, the most salient debate centered on whether Israel’s sterling intelligence agency Mossad could really have been entirely unaware of an operation as coordinated as the one conducted by Hamas in October. This in turn raises questions about how much happened by chance, through utter ignorance, and how much was allowed to happen, perhaps as a result of Mossad negligence. Yet the matter remains an elephant in this already very shattered room.

But as Israel stands poised on the brink of a Gaza victory, one which makes it Gaza’s lone landlord, another question arises: what next?

But as Israel stands poised on the brink of a Gaza victory, one which makes it Gaza’s lone landlord, another question arises: what next? Not necessarily in Gaza but in the newly expanded Israel.

For now, the phrase pyrrhic victory is both unmentioned and unmentionable. It seems to have no bearing on so thorough (and mismatched) a military rout.

And yet if one thing is sure it is that Hamas, the revised and reconstituted successor to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization – whether backed by Syria and Egypt, as the PLO once was, or Iran, the Hamas benefactor – will never be entirely obliterated, no matter how many hospitals Israel levels to get at enemy tunnel structures. Small groups will survive and rebuild, and deprived of their previously war-ready “battalions,” will once again turn to systematic acts of terrorism both inside Israel and elsewhere to again stake a claim to legitimacy and power. In a word, Israel’s smashing triumph will leave it open to years of attacks against civilian and military targets. This new “PLO” will now have little need to express remorse for its acts since Israel’s horror show invasion will deprive it of any moral high ground.

So Israel is closing one door while opening another, in its view squashing the rats while taking no account of the cockroaches to follow. All this may seem a little silly right now, and remote, but it will not be in the coming months and years. Those who is wounded have always been regarded as more likely to lash out, and this situation suggests nothing different.

Israel and its Western allies, some already unsettled by the at times inhuman zeal of the Israeli military incursion, will no doubt be drawn into the second wave of vengeance, much the way New York City and Washington were once targeted by Al Qaeda militants in a spectacular effort to make the U.S. aware of its transgressions in the Middle East,  including its unwavering support for Israel and its coziness with regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia, which by now had countless economic and military ties with the infidel West.

The reworked Hamas-PLO will have no interest in righting infidel wrongs but it will take out its Gaza wrath in ways no one can properly predict and that no one can underestimate. If Trotsky spoke of “permanent revolution” while spinning his version of early Communist dogma, the post-Gaza reality will sooner or later end in endless war, the words triumph and victory meaning little in a cramped region where elbows and knees are constantly tangling.

So, when Israel claims victory in Gaza, which it will in the coming months, cynics should not be alone in taking it as a grain of salt. Landlord Israel has chased loathed vagrants from its Gaza apartment complex, but those vagrants are anything but, and what they’ve been dislodged from they will still and always consider theirs.

Get ready for Gaza, The Sequel. It won’t possess Israel’s scene-eating cinematography, but it will be possessed of lethal special effects.