Between the slaying of one Hamas military leader and the slaying of the next, the Israeli intelligence machine was operationally brilliant and strategically ambiguous. The attack on Tuesday, 26 May, that toppled the upper storey of an apartment block and killed a group of civilians taking shelter in another part of the Rimal western Gaza City block, also "killed Mohammed Odeh, who had recently been promoted to the head of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades following the death of Izz al-Din al-Haddad in a strike on 15 May", according to a joint statement issued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz ahead of Wednesday's dawn.

In full, Odeh would be the fourth commander of Hamas's armed wing to be assassinated by Israel since the 7 October 2023 attacks. Mohammed Deif. Yahya Sinwar. Mohammed Sinwar. Now Haddad and Odeh sent within two weeks. The arithmetic of the kill list is impressive. What it actually does is the more difficult question, which the Israeli political class has been hesitant to pose out loud and the international community has been happy to leave to the columnists.Odeh's life story follows a familiar trajectory of the Gaza war. His age is reportedly late 40s or early 50s and he was born and raised in the strip, and reportedly worked his way up through the ranks of Hamas's internal security, the unit responsible for arresting alleged collaborators with Israeli intelligence, before falling into the ranks of military intelligence under Deif's wing. As of 7 October 2023, he was the director of the intelligence directorate of the armed wing. Israelis claim he was involved in the planning of the cross-border attack which killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. Hamas-affiliated outlets in Gaza say he died along with his wife and at least one son. Gaza's health ministry reported that the Rimal strike claims six lives, including a woman, and caused over 20 injuries.

The assassination was characterized by the Israeli government as cosmic accounting. “To meet his partners in the depths of hell” is where we sent “Odeh,” who “led the October 7 massacre,” as Katz wrote on X. The message was preceded by hours by a statement from Netanyahu's office: "We will reach all of them. In a report the previous week, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) had reported on the intelligence services' running lists of every Palestinian involved in the attacks of 7 October and how they were going through it systematically.

The doctrine in plain sight. If it is a strategy, is another thing.

The ceasefire that isn't is in effect.

Start by discussing what the term 'ceasefire' is being used for in the media at present. After two years of grinding warfare, a truce has been in effect in Gaza since 11 October 2025 and was brokered through the Trump administration's Board of Peace framework. But the Palestinian health authorities have reported over 906 Palestinian dead in Israeli attacks since the truce went into effect. In the same window, four Israeli soldiers have died. Hamas has handed over some heavy weaponry, albeit in drips and draps, and Israel has not withdrawn to the agreed-upon written borders. The litany of allegations of bad faith plays like a metronome on both sides.

But the Israeli argument is that each attack the one that took Odeh's life included is either an attack against a Hamas provocation or a "pre-emptive strike" against a person that was involved in the October pogrom. The Palestinian counter-position is that the ceasefire has been reduced to a euphemism for an asymmetric campaign of killing in which one side is free to do what it wants and the other side is asked to lie down. The word ceasefire was in scare quotes, as was the case with much of the Arab press and much of the press in the global south by Al Jazeera.

According to the Gaza health ministry, 72,803 people have been killed since 7 October 2023. The actual figure is undoubtedly higher once indirect deaths from disease, displacement and the collapse of medical infrastructure are taken into account, as has long been suggested by epidemiological estimates from around the world. No matter which number you choose, the course of the conflict has gone on for two and a half years and created a humanitarian crisis that is unprecedented in the region's history.

A war that has changed two economies.

The economic ledger is equally unimpressive and this is where the talk of Israel's tactical genius butts up against uncomfortable realities. The recently released final Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) report by the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union estimated the cost of reconstruction and recovery in Gaza at $71.4 billion over 10 years. Of that, $26.3 billion is needed in the initial 18 months just to bring services back to the level they were previously. The damages to physical infrastructure are estimated at $35.2 billion. Approximately 1.2 million Gazans (60 per cent of the population) are homeless. The cost of housing reconstruction is estimated at more than $16 billion and agriculture, commerce and industry are estimated at $19.5 billion. The strip shrank by 83 to 84 per cent in 2024, its worst performing year since the complete state failure.It's been paid in another currency in the Israeli economy. Direct defence expenditure on the multi-front wars in Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran, according to the Bank of Israel, has already surpassed $116 billion, amounting to roughly 18% of the nation's GDP, which stood at approximately $660 billion prior to the war. The 2026 budget included NIS 144 billion for defence taking military expenditure to 8 per cent of GDP at its peak, and lowering it to some 6 per cent on IMF forecasts. That is still higher than the baseline of 4.5 per cent, which was observed prior to October 2023. The fiscal balance has turned from a surplus of 0.6 per cent in 2022 to a deficit of 4.7 per cent in 2025, while public debt has risen from 60 per cent of GDP to 68.6 per cent expected to peak at over 70 per cent at the end of this year and, according to some Calcalist estimates, to reach 83 per cent in 2035 if the security doctrine of permanent mobilisation remains intact. VAT has been bumped to 18 per cent. Tax exemptions are being eliminated. The middle class is indeed under pressure and we feel it.

The economy of Israel was not brought to a halt; in fact, the shekel has been appreciating in recent months and the rate of inflation has slowed to approximately 2 per cent. However, success for a country that once touted itself as the innovation leader of the OECD is a bit of a stretch for “did not break.” Reservist mobilization had long-lasting impacts on productivity, drawing skilled tech and service workers away from the civilian economy. The post-Oct 7 defence doctrine unveiled top secret guidelines for the military to prepare itself for a prolonged and multi-front battle until 2026, effectively putting the country on a war footing for the entire decade.

The real story behind what killing chiefs really buys.

Here one must reckon with the achievements and failures of the Israeli operation. What's really impressive is the intelligence work that led to the tracking of Odeh and Haddad within 11 days of each other. Not trivial accomplishments are the Shin Bet's penetration of Gaza's communications infrastructure, the human intelligence networks that survive in a sealed enclave, the precision of the strikes themselves. Israeli authorities can refer to them as that.

But the strategic situation is more dire than the press releases imply. Since October 2023, Hamas has seen the deaths of four military chiefs, and several senior commanders, and it retains enough control of Gaza for negotiating, hostage-taking and to launch fighters who still hide in the undefined ceasefire area, wounding Israeli soldiers. To change the strategic equation with Hamas, as one Jerusalem Post analysis admits, “the Israeli press itself concedes that Odeh's death is 'far from clear.'”

Grievance-based movements that are based on ideology and territorial dispossession do not break down when their leaders die. It is something the British found out in Ireland, the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Russians in the Caucasus for two hundred years. If there is no parallel political solution to a decapitation campaign, then it is a war without an exit ramp, almost by definition. Every new chief becomes the next target and every blow is collateral dead, with surviving family members the next recruitment pool.

The timing has a less comfy truth. The killing of Odeh coincided with the eve of Eid al-Adha, the most important of the Muslim family holidays. Residents told Arabic-language media that the Rimal neighbourhood was crowded in the hours before the strike, as it is a commercial district and traditionally sees people come and go on holiday eves. There's no Eid,' a grandmother of the displaced prayed with her granddaughter while telling the Associated Press in Gaza City, 'My children were killed. Eid is only for the people who lost no one. Its symbolic impact in Gaza and the rest of the Muslim world, if it had any military worth, is one way only.

The outlook from the outside in two capitals

The international political environment is in itself a problem. The Shin Bet chief has been reported to have visited Abu Dhabi, where he met Mohammed Dahlan, the former Palestinian security commander in exile widely backed by the UAE, in a clear sign that Israel and several Gulf countries are quietly discussing what a post-Hamas, nonPalestinian-Authority rule of Gaza might look like. On November 2025, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803, which tacitly approved the Trump-led reconstruction plan, but made its implementation contingent on a credible path toward a Palestinian statehood which Netanyahu's government have opposed. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is in the news again, as the Israeli military launched over a hundred attacks in southern and eastern Lebanon overnight, causing 12 deaths, including children, according to Lebanese media reports, as a result of one attack alone in the Beqaa Valley.

The image is thus of a quasi-war zone, made up of a zone of ceasefire, shown to the world. The death of a Hamas military chief on the eve of Eid, the Israeli military's hike in operations against Hezbollah and the reconstruction bill for Gaza pushing past $71 billion, amid an Israeli debt curve rising past 70 per cent of GDP, is not a “closure” story. It is a tale of a war that has metamorphosed and not yet come to a conclusion and a doctrine of permanent kinetic pressure whose tactical strengths continue to obscure its strategic confusion.

Four chiefs of the army have died. The chain of command will produce a fifth. Tonight, somewhere in Gaza, whatever happens to the next name on the list, his predecessors did not survive. It continues until the politics catch up with the kill list.