Eventually the military campaign in Gaza will end. Even the US occupation of Afghanistan came to an end - but hopefully it won't take two decades. Anyways, let's game out how it can end.
There's the hopeful dreams of the brain geniuses like Sullivan and the Israeli government who believe that this time is different and you can defeat terrorist ideology by bombing the fuck out of the civilian population the terrorists recruit from. This theory is what we call "fucking stupid and shockingly inhuman" - it's the type of thing that transcends mere racism and psychopathy and enters into the realm of actual evil.
Obviously not going to happen - BUT, we need to keep this scenario in mind anyways. The reason for that is that any conclusion to the military campaign will have to be signed off on by the US and Israeli governments, so they need to have some sort of outcome that they can vaguely claim meets their goal. This might sound like it's hopeless - it's pretty obvious that there will never be conditions that could reasonably be characterized as any sort of victory for Israel and the US. Fortunately though, both the governments of Israel and the US have proven that they do not give a shit about facts or reality. They just make bullshit claims that are clearly not true all the time. That said, some sort of fig leaf to hide the abject failure of Western leadership would go a long way to getting to an end to the violence.
IOW, obviously the US and Israel are not going to "win" the war - but they are going to have to be able to claim that they did.
How about Hamas? Can they "win" the war? Yes and no. In the practical sense - they have already won. There is no scenario where Hamas is weaker and less influential after the conclusion of the "war" than they were at the beginning. This is exceptional - most wars only have losers - all sides are worse off than when they started - it's just that one side will be more worse off. And in that framing - also the US and Israel are way worse off now than they were at the beginning. Both countries have their international reputations in tatters. The BDS movement has gained enormous momentum. The default reflexive "Israel is right and everybody else is wrong" reaction is far less widespread than before. On October 6, these guys were plotting their victory lap for normalizing regional relations without addressing "The Palestine Issue" at all - and now that's clearly never going to happen. So Hamas has already achieved many big goals. It has come at immense cost to Gazans, but Hamas is a terrorist organization so it's hard for me to believe that they see this as that big of a deal.
That said - also no, Hamas cannot "win" the war. Hamas, even now that it has achieved living legend folk hero status, is really just a gang. A bunch of thugs with assault rifles and homemade rockets. Israel has cutting edge military technology, the best in the world thanks to support from the US. Their most successful attack ever was the terror strike on October 7th - and as much as that was a horrific and brutal assault, it did not actually threaten Israel's existence - and would have been stopped had Israeli leadership not been high on their own sense of hubris and racial superiority.
Hamas has been launching rockets nearly non-stop for seven months and these have done basically nothing. There have been a couple terrorist gunmen conducting attacks within Israel, but these have killed a total of five Israelis - and one of those was killed by the IDF. Hamas does not have the military capacity to actually threaten Israel so long as Israel doesn't literally abandon the Gaza fence on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War despite having detailed battle plans from Hamas, plans they knew Hamas was training for in the months before that date. And still - even with an abandonment of defense and a year of planning, Hamas managed to kill 1,139 people and take 230 hostages. Israel has been doing more than that on a weekly basis for seven months now. Hamas is nowhere close to the threat that it is being portrayed as. And it certainly is not capable of destroying Israel. Not even in their wildest dreams.
So how will this end? Just like how most of these things end - the domestic political support for it gets exhausted. Whether this be in the US or in Israel. It doesn't matter about support in Gaza, Hamas is not accountable to Gazans, so they don't need support there. Ironically though, Hamas is more popular in Gaza than Biden is in the US and way more popular than Netanyahu is in Israel.
I don't know much about Israeli domestic politics. I do know that Netanyahu was in trouble before this began, with corruption investigations and weekly large scale protests against his fascist attempts to consolidate power. Polling seems to indicate that his position has not improved and most Israelis want him gone - a sizable chunk of them wanting him out immediately as opposed to at the end of the war. This is one timer on the genocide campaign.
Biden's re-election campaign is the other. I don't know what his advisors are telling him, but I am sure he knows now that his "Bear Hug" strategy has not helped him. They don't call it this anymore and they don't even pretend that it's a thing. The idea was so ludicrously stupid from the beginning - and after the million odd times that Netanyahu has shit all over US demands, it's quite clear that it is not a thing and that pretending it is will hurt Biden's chances even more.
Summer is usually a slow time in the political cycle. All the important people are on vacation - so everything has to wait until Labor Day, when the campaign begins in earnest. Summer is also going to be unbelievably deadly in Gaza. They have no electricity, so there is no A/C. There is no fresh water getting into the strip. June through August will see daily highs in the mid 30's and an average of zero rain days.
I have to believe that there are some non-idiots on the Biden team. Someone has to know that if the situation continues as is into the summer, then shit is going to be unbelievably bad. Sadly, there's been no evidence that such a non-idiot exists. It's either that or it's full on embracing the genocide - that when they were acting indignant when questioned about how many Palestinians have to die, they were really just trying to not give their honest answer. "All of them".
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