Wars sometimes end decisively and sometimes peter out. In the case of the war that Israel has been fighting on multiple fronts since Oct. 7, 2023, there’s an argument to be made that it is now over—that it ended with the cease-fire signed between the United States and Iran on June 17. If so, this might be a moment for some accounting. How to evaluate these 984 days and assess what comes next?
Of course, the fighting isn’t fully over. Israeli troops still occupy a little over half of the Gaza Strip and stage regular attacks on the rest of the territory. In Lebanon, the army occupies a “security zone” that extends some 6 miles deep into the country and regularly exchanges fire with Hezbollah. Israel continues to occupy a large chunk of the Syrian territory it seized shortly after the collapse of the Assad regime in 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to resume the war on Iran with or even without the United States and may try to create enough trouble in Lebanon to disrupt the U.S.-Iran talks.
Wars sometimes end decisively and sometimes peter out. In the case of the war that Israel has been fighting on multiple fronts since Oct. 7, 2023, there’s an argument to be made that it is now over—that it ended with the cease-fire signed between the United States and Iran on June 17. If so, this might be a moment for some accounting. How to evaluate these 984 days and assess what comes next?
Of course, the fighting isn’t fully over. Israeli troops still occupy a little over half of the Gaza Strip and stage regular attacks on the rest of the territory. In Lebanon, the army occupies a “security zone” that extends some 6 miles deep into the country and regularly exchanges fire with Hezbollah. Israel continues to occupy a large chunk of the Syrian territory it seized shortly after the collapse of the Assad regime in 2024. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to resume the war on Iran with or even without the United States and may try to create enough trouble in Lebanon to disrupt the U.S.-Iran talks.
Nevertheless, the odds of Netanyahu manipulating U.S. President Donald Trump back into a war are slim. The steady stream of threats Trump issued to bomb Iran into submission has long since ceased to be convincing; it is clear he wants to make a lasting deal, and so long as the Strait of Hormuz remains open, he’s willing to keep talking. Netanyahu has been very careful not to test Trump too much and risk a confrontation. And, as their relations grow increasingly strained, the prime minister’s room for maneuver has narrowed. Iran, for its part, has too much at stake with Hormuz and sanctions relief to let Netanyahu seriously disrupt its negotiations with Washington.
When Hamas forced its way across the border from the Gaza Strip 32 months ago in a campaign of murder, pillage, and kidnapping, it was clear Israel would retaliate massively. It was not just a matter of revenge but the need to restore its shattered deterrence. The pre-Oct. 7 tactics of relying on intelligence to protect a lightly manned border and engage in periodic limited wars with Hamas (“mowing the lawn,” as it was known) had proved a failure. This time, Hamas would have to be eliminated as a fighting force.
But the original mission quickly expanded in three directions. The first was driven by the far-right component of the Netanyahu government, which turned the assault on Gaza into a war of vengeance, conquest, and resettlement. It was no longer about defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages held by the group but reversing what the far right regarded as the error of Israel’s original withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the dismantling of the settlements there. Starting sometime in 2024, the war became chiefly about making Gaza uninhabitable, clearing the way for permanent Israeli control and the return of the settlements. That meant perpetuating the assault long after its original purpose had been achieved, draining the army’s human and material resources and doing immense damage to the country’s international standing. Netanyahu repeatedly promised “total victory” against Hamas. Along the way, tens of thousands of Palestinians would be killed—mostly civilians.
The war expanded in a second way, as Netanyahu and the army adopted a new, proactive (even aggressive) defense of Israel’s other borders. It wasn’t enough to contain the threat of Hezbollah and the militias in Syria because they, too, might attempt their own Oct. 7 rampages. Given the demands of the Gaza war, this took time to emerge, but when it did, it took the form of occupying parts of Lebanon and Syria, a campaign of assassinations against the Hezbollah leadership, and the infamous pager attack in September 2024. That facet of the war looked like an unalloyed victory when Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire in November 2024. That is, until the fighting started up again this March in parallel with the Iran war. Hezbollah showed that it still had enough fight left in it to entrap Israel in a costly war of attrition.
The third expansion came to the fore later in 2025 as Israel turned its sights on Iran, the patron of Hezbollah and the rest of the so-called Axis of Resistance. This was, of course, a much taller order. Unlike Israel’s other enemies, Iran is an actual country with a population nine times that of Israel, located some 1,100 miles away. It had much more firepower than the nonstate actors Israel had confronted until then. Netanyahu had long dreamed of a combined U.S.-Israeli assault on the country to eliminate its nuclear program and perhaps the regime as well. For the first time, he had a U.S. president who was open to the idea.
The two assaults that followed, in June 2025 and in February-April 2026, degraded Iran militarily and caused serious damage to its economy, which may one day lead to the collapse of the regime. But for now at least, Iran’s leadership is still standing and taking a tough line on a postwar settlement. The war revealed that it could hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage. Trump has had his fill of Middle East wars. Even if Netanyahu wants to go at it with Iran for a third round, the president won’t let him. Israel now faces an Iran that is militarily untouchable.
There were valid reasons for Israel to go to war as it did over the last two and a half years. But there were some bad ones, too, a function of purely domestic political considerations. Netanyahu was able to return to power in the 2022 elections by allying with the far right. If he didn’t keep fighting in Gaza to realize the far right’s resettlement fantasies, Netanyahu feared that his partners would bring down his government. He also has personal reasons for continuing the war: As much as he has tried to shake off responsibility, Netanyahu could not help but recognize that the disastrous Israeli response to the Oct. 7 attack was his (or at least the great majority of the public thought so). He hoped to erase that stain with a huge military success.
Propelled by these political calculations that prolonged and expanded it, the war took on growing human and political costs for Israel.
It’s true that the Israeli economy was able to weather the conflict, in part due to periodic breaks in the fighting that gave it a chance to recover and in part because the government covered a lot of its costs by taking on debt and through U.S. aid. But the economy, too, will be burdened by the costs of elevated defense spending in the years to come, without recourse to continue borrowing. The human cost, meanwhile, is already in evidence, mainly in terms of the strain of constant army duty. It would be challenging enough for Israel’s population of just 10 million to fight a long war, but in fact the manpower is drawn from just two-thirds of the population because Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews aren’t subject to conscription. The Israelis who do serve are burdened to this day with weeks and even months of annual reserve duty, a level that is simply unsustainable.
The war also made Israel more reliant on the United States than perhaps at any time in its history. It began with unprecedented amounts of arms and financial aid and, in the Iran phase, with direct U.S. involvement in the war. That dependence now limits Israel’s room to act unilaterally. Trump is no longer willing to bankroll Israel’s open-ended conflicts and barely conceals his anger at Netanyahu for entangling him in them. Meanwhile, the brutality of the offensives in Gaza and Lebanon has taken a heavy toll on Israel’s international standing, both in public opinion and among world leaders. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance wasn’t far off the mark when he said recently that “Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”
The single clear positive outcome for Israel from Netanyahu’s long war was to demonstrate the Israeli army’s capabilities in intelligence and execution and its ability to deploy force as far away as Iran. But that success also underscored the limits of military power in the absence of diplomatic strategy—or realistic expectations. The targeted killings of Iran’s leadership were a remarkable intelligence and military achievement, but they may have turned into the biggest political blunder of the war by bringing even more hard-line leaders to power in Tehran. On other fronts, Netanyahu was unable or unwilling to translate military successes into political arrangements. He prefers to keep the army stationed in Gaza rather than allow Trump’s Board of Peace to begin reconstruction efforts. He has dragged his feet on reaching a security agreement with Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government in Syria. Talks with the Lebanese government are proceeding but only due to heavy U.S. pressure.
Netanyahu’s post-Oct. 7 Plan A bought Israel a degree of security by degrading Hamas and Hezbollah militarily. But as he perpetuated the war, the costs soared, and the achievements remained limited. To this day, Netanyahu has no Plan B that focuses on diplomacy and aims to extract Israel from the entanglements he created. With elections due to take place later this year, he’s unlikely to come up with one and risk angering his far-right coalition partners—which means the unenviable task of undoing the damage will fall on the next government.
