Abstract
The Gaza conflict is frequently discussed through a binary framework in which Israeli military conduct is examined independently of Hamas’s political, military, and coercive role inside the Gaza Strip. Such a framework is incomplete. Hamas is not merely an armed organization operating in Gaza; since its violent seizure of power in June 2007, it has exercised de facto governmental authority over the territory while simultaneously retaining an organized military structure committed to armed confrontation with Israel. This dual role creates a fundamental problem of governance: the same organization that claims political authority also maintains an armed system whose central strategic function is confrontation with an external state. (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025; Freedom House, 2026; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], 2007).
The comparison with India’s experience of cross-border militancy from Pakistan is useful, but only within clear limits. India and Israel confront different geographical, legal, demographic, and political circumstances. Nevertheless, both illustrate a recurring security problem: an armed non-state group can use territorial sanctuary, civilian density, tunnels, dispersed infrastructure, rockets, drones, guerrilla tactics, surprise attacks, and political ambiguity to impose security costs on a more conventionally powerful state. India’s response has increasingly emphasized layered border management, fencing, surveillance, intelligence, and interdiction. Israel similarly relies heavily on physical barriers, surveillance, and military defence, but the 7 October 2023 attack exposed the limitations of a strategy that depends too heavily on technological deterrence and remote control. (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2023; Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 2023; United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2024).
This article argues that three issues must be considered simultaneously. First, Hamas’s authoritarian governance and repression within Gaza are genuine subjects of human-rights concern and cannot be made invisible by criticism of Israel. Second, Israeli military actions and the humanitarian consequences of those actions must likewise be examined under international humanitarian law and cannot be excused by Hamas’s conduct. Third, border security is an indispensable component of civilian protection where armed groups repeatedly exploit territorial access, but physical sealing alone cannot resolve the underlying political and institutional problem. A durable security order requires that civilian government, armed coercion, and external military power cease to operate as overlapping and competing systems.
I. Terminology: Hamas Did Not “Occupy” Gaza in 2007
A basic historical distinction is necessary. Hamas did not occupy the Gaza Strip in the conventional international-law sense in 2007. It won the largest bloc in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections and subsequently fought Fatah forces in an internal Palestinian conflict. In June 2007, Hamas forcibly took control of Palestinian Authority security installations and government institutions in Gaza and thereafter operated as the territory’s de facto governing authority. The United Nations described Hamas as being in de facto control of Gaza from June 2007, while subsequent observers have characterized the political system as increasingly authoritarian. (OCHA, 2007; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], 2007).
The Israeli position must be distinguished from this internal Hamas takeover. Israel withdrew its permanent ground forces and settlements from Gaza in 2005. Nevertheless, the International Committee of the Red Cross continues to regard Gaza as occupied territory because, in its assessment, Israel retains sufficiently extensive control over key elements of the territory, particularly airspace, territorial waters, and major aspects of access through land borders. Israel disputes the proposition that Gaza remained occupied after the 2005 disengagement. The distinction matters because the legal obligations of an occupying power are different from those of an ordinary neighboring state. (International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC], n.d.-a).
The blockade was intensified after Hamas’s 2007 takeover. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs records that Israel imposed land, sea, and air restrictions following the Hamas takeover, while Egypt also restricted movement through Rafah. Consequently, Gaza developed into a territory governed internally by Hamas but simultaneously subject to extensive external restrictions and military control. Neither condition can be analytically substituted for the other. (OCHA, 2007; Freedom House, 2025).
This produces one of the central contradictions of Gaza: Hamas exercises political and coercive authority over Palestinians while lacking control over many of the external conditions normally associated with sovereign statehood. Israel exercises extensive security and access control without functioning as the ordinary civilian government of Gaza. The Palestinian Authority claims national political legitimacy but has not exercised effective governmental authority in Gaza since the Hamas takeover. The result is neither ordinary sovereign governance nor a simple conventional occupation.
II. Hamas as Government, Militant Organization, and Coercive Authority
The distinctive feature of Hamas is its combination of political, military, ideological, and social functions. Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamist political movement and developed an armed wing alongside its political and social organizations. Its 1988 charter explicitly endorsed an Islamic political order covering historic Palestine and rejected recognition of Israel; its 2017 political document modified some of its language but did not recognize Israel and continued to affirm armed resistance as a central component of the movement’s political identity. (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025).
After taking control of Gaza, Hamas inherited and transformed portions of the Palestinian Authority’s administrative machinery. It ran police, courts, ministries, and public institutions while also maintaining the Qassam Brigades and dealing with other armed factions such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It therefore cannot accurately be described simply as a “terrorist group that happens to live in Gaza.” It became a governing authority whose armed organization was inseparable from its political power. (United Nations, 2009; Freedom House, 2025).
The governance problem arises from this dual structure. A normal civilian government is ultimately expected to monopolize legitimate coercion, maintain public order, permit political competition, and subordinate armed force to constitutional authority. Hamas instead maintained an armed movement as a central element of its political identity. Elections in Gaza have not been held since 2006, Hamas has suppressed political opposition, and rights organizations have documented arbitrary detention, intimidation of journalists, and repression of demonstrations. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment describes Gaza’s political rights and civil liberties as severely constrained and states that Hamas has governed in an authoritarian manner while actively suppressing criticism. (Freedom House, 2026; Human Rights Watch, 2019).
Human Rights Watch documented similar patterns before the 2023 war. During the 2019 “We Want to Live” demonstrations, Hamas security forces detained large numbers of protesters, journalists, and activists. The repression was directed not only at Israeli policy but also at Palestinians criticizing Hamas itself. (Human Rights Watch, 2019).
This point is important because it challenges the assumption that Palestinian civilians and Hamas represent a single political actor. They do not. A population can simultaneously suffer from external military action, internal authoritarianism, economic restrictions, and the coercive policies of an armed organization claiming to govern it. In addition, a governing system organized around persistent armed confrontation can place survival and security ahead of ordinary developmental priorities. Where political legitimacy is continually reinforced through resistance and military organization, the institutional emphasis can shift from building a stable civilian society toward preserving organizational survival, territorial control, recruitment, deterrence, and the capacity to resume fighting.
Such a structure can also generate a constant state of intimidation—a relentless menace that need not take the form of continuous full-scale warfare. Surprise attacks, sporadic rocket fire, infiltration attempts, threats, hostage-taking, and the continuing possibility of renewed violence can impose a permanent psychological burden on the population on the other side of the boundary. The significance of guerrilla warfare is therefore not limited to the physical damage produced by each individual attack. Its strategic effect can lie in keeping civilians and governments in a continuing state of uncertainty, forcing them to allocate substantial resources to survival and defence rather than normal development.
III. Gender, Social Conservatism, and the Repression of Women
The internal social order established under Hamas also deserves independent analysis. It should not be reduced to the claim that “Palestinian culture” as a whole is responsible for restrictions on women. Gaza’s legal and social environment results from a mixture of Palestinian law, religious conservatism, customary practices, Hamas policy, and the broader political fragmentation of Palestinian institutions.
Women nevertheless do not enjoy equal political or social power in practice. Freedom House reports that Palestinian women possess formal political rights under Palestinian Authority law but have been largely excluded from Hamas leadership and public political activity. Hamas has imposed restrictions on attire and behavior regarded as immoral and has promoted conservative religious practices. At Hamas-run Islamic University, women were required to cover their hair and students were separated by gender. (Freedom House, 2025).
The problem extends beyond clothing. Freedom House reports that women face disadvantages in marriage and divorce, continuing social pressure, domestic violence, and weak mechanisms for protection and redress. It also notes that some of these problems are rooted in Palestinian legislation and social norms rather than exclusively in Hamas policy. (Freedom House, 2025).
The appropriate analytical conclusion is therefore not that every aspect of female inequality in Gaza originated with Hamas. Rather, Hamas governed within and reinforced a broader patriarchal social environment while providing few institutional mechanisms capable of challenging that hierarchy. The result is a political system in which women’s formal legal status and their practical political autonomy remain substantially different.
This is significant because the character of government cannot be assessed solely by whether it supplies schools, hospitals, or civil administration. The quality of a government is also determined by whether its citizens can criticize it, organize independently, participate politically, obtain due process, and live without coercive restrictions based upon sex or political affiliation.
IV. 7 October 2023: The Collapse of Israel’s Deterrence Model
The Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 represents the decisive turning point in the modern history of Gaza. Palestinian armed groups breached Israel’s heavily fortified perimeter by land, sea, and air while firing thousands of rockets. More than 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 were taken hostage according to later international and government assessments. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups deliberately killed civilians, injured and mistreated people, took hostages, and committed other serious violations of international humanitarian law. (United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2024; U.S. Department of State, 2024).
The military significance of 7 October was not simply the number of casualties. It demonstrated that a technologically superior state can become strategically vulnerable when an adversary succeeds in penetrating a heavily fortified boundary, overwhelms surveillance assumptions, creates simultaneous points of attack, and prevents the defender from rapidly identifying the distinction between infiltrators and surrounding civilians.
In that limited operational sense, the attack demonstrated the success of Hamas’s immediate assault doctrine: surprise, massed fire, multiple axes of penetration, small-unit mobility, and the exploitation of weaknesses in the defensive perimeter. That observation is not an endorsement of the attack; it is an explanation of why the event fundamentally altered Israeli security thinking.
The description of the 7 October assault as “genocide,” however, requires legal precision. Genocide is not synonymous with mass killing, terrorism, or atrocity. Under international law, it requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The UN Commission of Inquiry’s principal findings concerning 7 October were war crimes including murder, intentional attacks against civilians, torture, hostage-taking, and related abuses; it did not issue a genocide finding concerning the 7 October assault itself. (United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2024).
A different legal question concerns Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed acts constituting genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and found the requisite specific intent. Israel rejects the allegation. The separate genocide case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice remains pending; as of 2026, it has not produced a final merits judgment establishing Israel’s liability for genocide. (United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2025).
Thus, a rigorous account must be capable of holding two propositions simultaneously: the 7 October attack involved grave international crimes attributable to Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups; and Israel’s subsequent conduct can independently be examined for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide allegations. One proposition does not cancel the other.
V. The Urban Guerrilla Problem: Why Civilian Infrastructure Becomes Central
The military problem becomes particularly difficult in a densely populated territory such as Gaza. Armed groups that lack conventional air forces, armor, and open military bases tend to compensate through dispersion, tunnels, concealed command structures, improvised weapons, mobile rocket units, and movement among civilian environments.
This creates an acute targeting problem. International humanitarian law does not provide that the presence of militants in a civilian area automatically makes everything around them a military target. The foundational rules require distinction between civilian objects and military objectives, while the principle of proportionality prohibits attacks expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. (ICRC, n.d.-b).
Conversely, the use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes does not immunize an armed group from scrutiny. If a civilian facility is actually used in a way that satisfies the legal definition of a military objective, its status can change. Yet the attacking force retains its obligations concerning distinction, proportionality, and precautions. The presence of civilians never becomes legally irrelevant merely because an armed organization operates nearby. (ICRC, n.d.-b, n.d.-c).
The evidence concerning particular hospitals and civilian facilities must also be treated carefully. Israeli forces have alleged extensive Hamas military use of hospitals and other sites, while Hamas has denied many of these allegations. The UN Commission of Inquiry reported that some Israeli claims concerning widespread military use of hospitals were not substantiated by evidence supplied to the Commission, while other investigations and individual testimony raised allegations requiring further examination. (United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2024).
The broader point is structural. Remote warfare appears attractive because it reduces the exposure of soldiers, but it can increase the danger of civilian harm when combatants operate inside dense civilian environments and intelligence is incomplete. Ground operations expose soldiers to greater risk but may permit more precise physical identification of targets. Neither approach is inherently lawful or unlawful; legality depends on the target, circumstances, precautions, and proportionality in each attack.
Guerrilla warfare can therefore produce a particularly difficult cycle of insecurity. The weaker force can survive by dispersing among the civilian environment, using surprise and concealment rather than conventional battlefield formations. The defending force is then confronted with a dilemma: refraining from action can permit continued attacks, while acting against concealed combatants may place military objectives within or immediately adjacent to civilian infrastructure. In a dense urban territory, defensive operations can consequently be drawn into the very civilian spaces in which the guerrilla organization has chosen to operate. This does not make attacks on civilians lawful, nor does civilian presence make the militant organization immune; it explains why the conflict can become structurally difficult to terminate.
The consequence is also broader than individual engagements. A guerrilla organization can maintain a constant state of intimidation by preserving the possibility of sudden violence even when it lacks the capability or intention to conduct conventional war every day. The resulting relentless menace forces the opposing state to remain permanently prepared for infiltration, rockets, drones, sabotage, hostage-taking, or other surprise attacks. The strategic objective can therefore become one of survival and persistence rather than territorial conquest in the conventional sense.
VI. The India–Pakistan Frontier: A Comparable Security Logic, but Not an Identical Conflict
The comparison with India and Pakistan is useful as a study of asymmetric security, not as a claim that Gaza and Kashmir are legally or politically identical.
India has experienced repeated attacks involving Pakistan-based organizations, including Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. The UN Security Council lists Lashkar-e-Tayyiba as a Pakistan-based terrorist organization and attributes the 2008 Mumbai attacks, among others, to the group. Jaish-e-Mohammed is likewise listed as a Pakistan-based organization with a history of attacks in India. (United Nations Security Council, n.d.-a, n.d.-b).
The Indian government has consistently described Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism as a major security problem. India’s 2024 Ministry of External Affairs annual report stated that India continued to face cross-border terrorism and alleged the existence of a state-supported terrorist ecosystem directed against India. Pakistan disputes Indian accusations concerning state responsibility and has itself undertaken counterterrorism measures against some militant organizations. (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 2025).
India’s response has increasingly moved toward layered border security rather than reliance upon military retaliation alone. The Ministry of Home Affairs describes a system combining fencing, floodlighting, surveillance cameras, thermal and night-vision systems, intelligence, patrols, border posts, and integrated command-and-control technologies. Its 2022–23 annual report stated that approximately 2,065 kilometres of the sanctioned 2,098 kilometres of fencing along the India–Pakistan border had been completed. (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2023).
Official Indian data also indicate a reduction in detected infiltration over earlier years. In July 2023, the government reported net infiltration figures falling from 141 in 2019 to 14 in 2022, with zero recorded net infiltration through 30 June 2023 under the metric it was using. A subsequent parliamentary response recorded 41 detected infiltration attempts on the India–Pakistan border in 2024, illustrating that fencing reduced but did not eliminate the phenomenon. (Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 2023).
The lesson is not that fencing solves terrorism. It is that physical access to territory is itself a strategic variable. If an attacker requires personnel, weapons, explosives, or logistics to physically cross a defended boundary, the defender gains opportunities for detection, interdiction, and intelligence exploitation. Border barriers therefore reduce the operational freedom of guerrilla organizations even when they do not eliminate their capacity to attack.
There is another important difference in the India–Pakistan comparison. India does not depend on Pakistan for its own national development and, at present, does not organize its economic or developmental future on the expectation that Pakistan will provide or facilitate such development. This remains true despite the very large and contested border between the two countries. Consequently, Pakistan cannot be treated as the party responsible for India’s general level of development merely because the two countries have a long history of conflict. Where armed confrontations have occurred following terrorist attacks, or where links between such attacks and Pakistan-based actors have been established or alleged by India, the resulting military crises have generally remained geographically and temporally limited rather than becoming a permanent condition determining India’s existence as a state.
India’s scale, territory, and population—well above 1.2 billion people—also mean that individual terrorist attacks, however serious, do not ordinarily constitute a realistic existential threat to the continued existence of the country as a whole. India does not ordinarily experience such attacks as a potential “end of days” event for the country’s existence, even though particular attacks and military escalations can produce severe loss of life, political shock, and bilateral crisis.
The strategic contrast with Israel is therefore significant. Israel is a geographically small state with a much smaller population and a correspondingly narrower margin for absorbing a catastrophic attack. A successful large-scale infiltration or sustained projectile attack therefore carries a different strategic and psychological significance than a comparable terrorist attack against a very large country such as India. Israel’s security problem cannot be understood solely through the Indian experience, but the comparison illustrates why protection of the territorial boundary becomes particularly important for a small state whose civilian population and critical infrastructure are concentrated within a relatively limited geographic area.
The comparison also highlights the different implications of a prolonged guerrilla threat for state priorities. For a large state such as India, recurring militant attacks can be severe security problems while remaining episodic threats within a much larger national system. The state can continue development, maintain large geographic and demographic buffers, and treat individual episodes of violence as crises that are contained and eventually brought to an end. For a small state such as Israel, particularly when the threat originates immediately adjacent to its population centres, a successful attack can have disproportionately large consequences. The perceived risk is therefore not merely another isolated terrorist incident but the possibility that a surprise assault could temporarily overwhelm local defences and expose a highly concentrated civilian population to catastrophic consequences.
The lesson is not that fencing solves terrorism. It is that physical access to territory is itself a strategic variable. If an attacker requires personnel, weapons, explosives, or logistics to physically cross a defended boundary, the defender gains opportunities for detection, interdiction, and intelligence exploitation. Border barriers therefore reduce the operational freedom of guerrilla organizations even when they do not eliminate their capacity to attack.
VII. Proxy Warfare and the Logic of Deniability
The strongest conceptual similarity between Hamas and Pakistan-based militant organizations is not ideology but structure. In both contexts, a materially weaker armed organization can impose disproportionate costs on a stronger state by operating through dispersed networks rather than conventional battlefield formations.
The difference is equally important. Pakistan is a sovereign state, while Hamas is a non-state organization exercising de facto control in Gaza. Pakistan has armed forces, police, and formal constitutional institutions, whereas Hamas’s authority is the product of political victory followed by an armed internal takeover. The degree and nature of state responsibility therefore cannot simply be transferred from one case to the other.
The strategic attraction of proxy or guerrilla warfare is nevertheless similar: it can impose security costs while making attribution, retaliation, and escalation more complicated. Hamas is simultaneously a political organization and an armed movement; other armed groups have operated from Gaza as well. Before 2023, Hamas sometimes tolerated or permitted attacks by other factions, while Israel frequently treated Hamas as responsible for the overall security environment in Gaza because it exercised de facto governmental authority. (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025).
This produces a recurring strategic dilemma. A state confronting an organization embedded in a territory may believe that targeting the organization’s personnel and infrastructure is necessary for self-defence. Yet each strike can also create civilian casualties, destruction, and political grievances that make the militant organization harder rather than easier to eliminate. The security problem therefore reproduces itself.
VIII. Iran and the Regionalization of the Conflict
Iran’s role adds another layer to this structure. The U.S. State Department’s 2023 terrorism report states that Iran provided Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups with weapons and other support, and that its longstanding material, financial, and training assistance enhanced Hamas’s capabilities. The same report states that there was no evidence Iran had advance knowledge of the specific 7 October operation. (U.S. Department of State, 2024).
The October 2023 attack consequently did not remain a confined Israel–Hamas confrontation. Hezbollah opened a northern front against Israel, the Houthis attacked Israel and maritime shipping, and Iranian-aligned groups elsewhere in the region increased their activity. Iran and Israel exchanged direct attacks in April and October 2024, while the regional confrontation subsequently expanded into a direct Israel–Iran war in June 2025. It is therefore more precise to say that 7 October was a major catalyst in an existing regional network of confrontation rather than the sole cause of every subsequent Iran–Israel conflict. (U.S. Department of State, 2024; Reuters, 2025).
The strategic principle resembles the proxy dynamic seen elsewhere: the sponsor can extend military pressure through geographically separated armed organizations without initially committing its own conventional forces to the frontline. The danger is escalation. What begins as an asymmetric proxy conflict can become a direct state-to-state confrontation.
IX. Can Hamas Govern and Develop Gaza?
The answer depends on what “govern” means.
Hamas has demonstrably been able to govern certain administrative functions. It has operated police forces, courts, public services, and political institutions. It has therefore not been incapable of governance in the administrative sense. (United Nations, 2009; Freedom House, 2025).
The more important question is what kind of governing model it has institutionalized. Hamas’s system has not produced regular competitive elections, an independent judiciary, meaningful freedom of assembly, fully independent media, or durable mechanisms for political accountability. Its security apparatus has frequently been used against critics and opposition. In this sense, the central problem is not an inability to administer territory; it is the fusion of government with a militant organization whose political legitimacy and military identity are mutually reinforcing. (Freedom House, 2025; Freedom House, 2026).
It would nevertheless be analytically unsupported to claim that Hamas has absolutely no interest in development. Hamas has operated schools, charitable networks, and administrative institutions, and political movements can possess multiple motives at once. What can be established is that armed resistance and confrontation with Israel have remained central to its organizational identity, while civilian institutions have operated under authoritarian restrictions and recurring war. That institutional structure is poorly suited to the requirements of a modern pluralistic civil society.
A related problem is that prolonged guerrilla conflict can alter the time horizon of governance itself. A movement operating under continual military pressure may prioritize organizational survival, concealment, recruitment, weapons, internal control, deterrence, and preparation for the next confrontation over long-term institution building. This does not establish that no development occurs or that every administrative decision is subordinated to warfare, but it helps explain why a territory can possess functioning civic institutions without those institutions developing into a stable, accountable, development-focused state.
The distinction also matters for assessing Israel. Israel is not simply the ordinary sovereign government responsible for Gaza’s prosperity. Yet where international law recognizes Israel as an occupying power because of effective control, that characterization generates specific obligations toward the civilian population. The assertion that Israel has no responsibilities whatsoever toward Gaza therefore goes too far legally. The stronger argument is narrower: Israeli security obligations and occupation-law obligations do not transform Israel into the legitimate sovereign government of Gaza, and they do not remove Hamas’s own responsibility for its governance and armed conduct. (ICRC, n.d.-a).
X. Border Security: The Lesson and Its Limits
The India–Pakistan experience suggests that border security is not a secondary administrative matter. It is a central component of national defence where armed groups attempt to move personnel, weapons, or logistics across a frontier.
Yet “sealing the border” cannot literally solve every threat. Gaza illustrates why. The 7 October attack involved rockets, drones, explosives, tunnels, ground infiltration, and maritime access. A border can be physically formidable and still fail if the defender suffers an intelligence failure, underestimates an adversary, neglects unusual indicators, or allows a technologically advanced barrier to create false confidence.
India’s experience similarly demonstrates that fencing must be combined with surveillance, intelligence, patrols, rapid response, and adaptation to tunnels, drones, and other methods of infiltration. The Ministry of Home Affairs explicitly describes border security as an integrated system rather than a fence alone. (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2023; Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 2023).
The strategic lesson, therefore, is not that borders are the only solution. It is that a state cannot sustainably protect a civilian population if a hostile armed organization retains an unrestricted capacity to insert personnel and weapons into the state’s territory. Border control is a necessary layer of defence; it is not a substitute for intelligence, diplomacy, deterrence, political arrangements, or internal governance.
The 7 October attack demonstrated the cost of getting that distinction wrong. Israel possessed extensive surveillance, technological barriers, and military power, but the barrier was breached and the resulting surprise produced a strategic shock far beyond the scale of the physical breach itself. India has spent decades progressively converting its western frontier into a layered security system precisely because historical experience demonstrated that preventing infiltration is often less costly than repeatedly attempting to neutralize infiltrators after they have crossed the boundary. (Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 2023; Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 2023).
There is a further reason why physical border protection becomes especially important under persistent guerrilla warfare. The objective is not merely to prevent a single attack. It is to reduce the adversary’s ability to generate repeated surprise and thereby create a constant state of intimidation. Where infiltration, projectile attacks, sabotage, kidnapping, or sudden raids remain operationally feasible, civilians may remain psychologically exposed even during periods without major combat. A sufficiently hardened border can therefore change the strategic environment by forcing the attacking organization to confront detection and interdiction before it reaches the civilian population.
At the same time, the border problem is complicated when the attacking force operates from within a dense civilian territory. Once militants are embedded in houses, public buildings, tunnels, hospitals, schools, roads, or other civilian infrastructure, a defending state cannot simply treat the entire surrounding territory as a military zone. Any defensive response must continue to distinguish military targets from protected civilian objects and must comply with proportionality and precautions. Thus the very success of guerrilla concealment can create the conditions in which defensive action becomes more difficult, dangerous for civilians, and politically and legally contested.
XI. The Problem of Selective Moral Attention
Public debate about Gaza often becomes fragmented because observers begin from different moral premises. Some focus primarily on Palestinian civilian casualties and Israeli military conduct; others begin with Hamas’s 7 October attack, hostage-taking, and the continued threat to Israeli civilians. The existence of different emphases is not itself evidence of bad faith, but an analysis that excludes one side’s documented abuses becomes incomplete.
There is also evidence that Palestinians themselves have opposed Hamas. Human Rights Watch documented large anti-Hamas protests in 2019, and Reuters reported another rare series of demonstrations against Hamas in northern Gaza in March 2025. Such events are important because they demonstrate that criticism of Hamas is not synonymous with hostility to Palestinians. (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Reuters, 2025).
The converse principle is equally important. Acknowledging Hamas’s repression, terrorism, hostage-taking, or military use of civilian environments does not remove the legal obligation to examine Israeli conduct. The international legal framework is deliberately designed to impose obligations on all parties independently. An atrocity committed by one party neither licenses another party to commit a separate atrocity nor removes the latter from legal scrutiny. (ICRC, n.d.-b; United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2024).
This is particularly relevant to the word “genocide.” It should not become a rhetorical substitute for evidence. The UN Commission of Inquiry’s 2025 finding regarding Israel is legally and politically significant, but it remains a finding of that investigative body rather than a final judgment of the International Court of Justice. Similarly, calling the 7 October attack genocidal requires evidence of the specific intent required by the Genocide Convention, not merely evidence of extraordinary brutality. (United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2025).
XII. Conclusion
The central lesson of Gaza since 2007 is not that one side possesses all responsibility and the other none. It is that a territory can become trapped when armed resistance, authoritarian governance, external military control, and unresolved national claims become permanent substitutes for ordinary political institutions.
Hamas’s rule demonstrates the difficulty of expecting a movement founded around armed resistance to become a conventional civilian government while retaining an autonomous military apparatus and refusing meaningful political accountability. Its record includes repression of political opponents, restrictions on civic activity, authoritarian security practices, and a conservative social order that disadvantages women and other vulnerable groups. These are not secondary details. They are part of the political structure that developed inside Gaza. (Freedom House, 2025; Freedom House, 2026).
The 7 October 2023 attack demonstrated the corresponding vulnerability of Israel. A state can possess a sophisticated military and still suffer catastrophic consequences if an armed organization succeeds in crossing its defensive perimeter and exploiting gaps between intelligence, surveillance, and physical defence. The Indian experience with cross-border militancy provides a useful comparative lesson: hardened borders, surveillance, intelligence, and rapid interdiction can materially reduce infiltration, although they cannot by themselves eliminate the political or ideological conditions that produce militant movements. (Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 2023; United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, 2024).
The ultimate problem is therefore institutional rather than merely military. Gaza requires a political order in which the government is accountable to civilians, armed organizations are subordinated to legitimate political authority, women and minorities possess meaningful rights, elections can occur, and civilian institutions are not permanently reorganized around warfare. Israel requires a security environment in which its civilian population is not exposed to recurring attacks from an adjacent armed territory. Palestinian civilians require protection from both external military violence and internal coercion.
None of these propositions makes the others unnecessary. The defensible analytical position is precisely the opposite: Hamas’s violence must be examined without erasing Palestinian civilian rights; Israeli security concerns must be examined without erasing Israeli and Palestinian civilian protections; and humanitarian suffering must not be used as a reason to suspend scrutiny of the political organization that governs a population.
The comparison with the India–Pakistan frontier ultimately illustrates one principle: a state that fails to control access to its territory can become vulnerable to repeated asymmetric attacks, but a state that relies only on military containment without a credible political settlement can also reproduce the conditions of perpetual conflict. Borders can prevent infiltration. They cannot, by themselves, create legitimate government, civic freedom, or peace.
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