If this were a normal war, Israel would be on the cusp of victory. On the Israel Defense Forces’s figures, some 14,000 Hamas militants have been killed, at a cost of 614 Israeli soldiers. Israel has operational supremacy by land, sea, and air. Hamas’s tunnel network has been degraded, its rockets spent or captured.

But, as Israel learned on Oct. 7, military dominance is no guarantee against terrorism. There is little purpose in eradicating Hamas’s fighters but leaving Hamas’s ideology in place.