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Ask some Israelis about the war in Gaza and they can sound pessimistic. The war is a slog. It can’t keep on going. International critics complain that the war has no clear goalposts (beyond destroying Hamas) and is inherently unwinnable. What does victory even look like?

There’s one metric that they seem to have overlooked.

In 2023, 70% of ‘Palestinians’ thought that Hamas was going to win. Today, only 43% do.

After the Oct 7 attacks, 72% of them thought that the Hamas attack was a good idea. Today only half still do. The number of those who admit it was a bad idea rose from 22% to 40%.

In Gaza, 58% now acknowledge that Oct 7 was a mistake.

And these numbers have been steadily and consistently dropping as the war goes on.

Among the enemy population, victory is no longer an option and most hope for a ceasefire. 43% are willing to leave the Gaza Strip. 50%, a majority, are willing to ask Israel for help to leave.

Less than half of those in Gaza are happy with how Hamas has fought the war. In Gaza, 29% believe that Israel is winning the war. Only 23% believe that Hamas is.

While the enemy population in Judea and Samaria (known in the media as the West Bank) has more confidence in Hamas than those in Gaza do, 75% of them fear that the war will spread, 65% believe that their cities will be destroyed if war comes and 40% believe Israel will win.

Even as too many Israelis quarrel among themselves, the enemy’s morale is crumbling. And in a war against terrorists who operate among the civilian population, morale is paramount.

Insurgencies don’t win because they have superior tactics, technology or infrastructure, but because they have superior staying power. Islamic Jihadis outlasted the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hamas bet everything on being able to outlast Israel. But what if it can’t?

The only remaining Hamas strategies are to force a permanent ceasefire using perhaps 20 living hostages (and more kidnapped dead bodies) as leverage or to hide behind a ‘Palestinian’ state under the control of its rivals in Ramallah. And both strategies depend on Qatar being able to wrangle the United States and Europe into pressuring Israel and bailing out Hamas.

Without America and European intervention and Israeli defeatism, Hamas has no hope.

Israel lost 9 soldiers in Gaza in June. It lost 41 soldiers in all of 2025. Compare that to 28 fatalities in June 2024. Hamas is still able to move its 20 or so hostages around tunnels and in civilian houses, but it’s not posing much of a threat to Israeli soldiers in Gaza anymore.

On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas was part of a coalition with Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen and Iraqi Jihadis following a master plan out of Tehran. Out of that coalition, Syria is gone, Hezbollah is broken, the Iraqis are staying out of it, Iran is burning and only Yemen’s Houthis are still fighting. If Israel succeeds in using the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to direct aid away from Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group loses much of its money and control over the population in Gaza.

Even its American university fanbase is moving on to fresh causes, like protesting for illegal aliens, because a good deal of their enthusiasm for Hamas came from its Oct 7 massacres, the paragliders, the rapes at a music festival and the mass invasion, which are starting to recede into history. And Hamas hasn’t killed Jews in any hip ways lately.

No one, from the Middle East to the Harvard campus, likes a loser. And Hamas is a loser.

Some Israelis and Americans may see the war as an endless slog, but the ‘Palestinians’ are coming to recognize it as a dead end. They’re not about to give up on terrorism or even on Hamas, but they are recognizing that they lost and dealing with all that comes with it. Including the willingness by surprising numbers among the enemy in Gaza to leave Israel.

The ultimate purpose of war is to break the enemy’s morale. Muslim countries perpetuate myths of victory even in the face of total defeat. Saddam celebrated the Gulf War as a victory. Egypt annually commemorates its ‘October victory’ in the Yom Kippur War. Hamas has tried to sell Oct 7 as a victory but even its people increasingly no longer believe that they’re winning anything.

Paradoxically neither do a lot of Israelis.

Israeli media polls are suspect, but they show that a sizable percentage of the population appears willing to give up and sign a deal with Hamas, ending the war in exchange for 20 hostages. After Germany appeared to be pulling its support, a number of Israeli opinionmakers urged an end to the fighting. Such paroxysms of defeatism have become a regular feature.

A lot of Israelis are understandably tired of the fighting and willing to give up even as they approach victory. They are being subjected to a torrent of negativity from their domestic radical leftists, from their media and from the international community all of which reject the war. And the longer the war goes on, the more futile (like most wars) it seems to those fighting it, but wars are won on endurance and staying power, not just on lightning strikes and brilliant tactics. Israel has never lacked for brilliant tactics, what it lacks (like us) is staying power in a conflict.

There’s an old Jewish joke. Two elderly Jewish men are sitting on a park bench in 1930s Germany. One of them flips open a copy of a British paper while the other starts reading Der Sturmer. “Why are you reading that Nazi rag?” the first man demands. “Your paper says that we’re being rounded up and killed. Mine says that we run the world,” the second man replies.

Israelis could learn something from tuning out their own suicidal media and looking at what the enemy thinks. While Israeli media runs the gamut from defeatism (Yediot) to outright treason (Haaretz), their enemies are starting to figure out that they lost and that Israel is winning.

‘Palestinians’ think Israel is winning, but too many Israelis have come to believe they’re losing.