No, the war is not over

That massacre, the largest suffered by Jews since the Holocaust, triggered the war that is staining the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, but also Lebanon, with no little chance of spilling over to the whole region and, therefore, to the whole world. 

With that massacre, Sinwar dealt a brutal blow to the Palestinian cause itself. His plans, overseen by Tehran, foresaw, of course, the brutal Israeli counteroffensive, and surely also took for granted that Israel's prestige would suffer a devastating setback through the narrative that has come to portray it as a genocidal power. 

In this day and age, when images are superimposed at breakneck speed, and emotions are encouraged over rational and contextualised analysis, it must be acknowledged that Sinwar and Hamas, and of course Iran, have achieved an unusual resurgence of anti-Semitism and the consequent blaming of Israel in the fickle public opinion of what we call the West. 

Western politicians and the media have focused the spotlight on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been portrayed as a leader increasingly autonomous from his main protector and supporter, the United States, whose efforts to end the war through prolonged ceasefires and negotiations are being systematically boycotted by a Netanyahu whose political survival depends precisely on the prolongation of the conflict. 

It is true that before 7 October 2023, the Israeli leader was facing growing protests against his political projects, especially the one to curtail the powers of a judiciary that had him under siege. But it is also true that, as soon as the massacre took place, the Israeli people put aside their differences and prepared to defend a homeland that they know they could never regain if they lost a single war, because for them there would be no second chance. 

So Netanyahu was not lying when, after certifying that he had achieved the goal of ‘settling the score with Yayha Sinwar’, public enemy number one, the Prime Minister said that ‘the war is not over’. 

He was then magnanimous, but again threatening: ‘I ask those who have custody of our kidnapped hostages to lay down their arms and return them to us. If they do, we will allow them to leave and live. But those who harm them will themselves be responsible for their own deaths‘. 

With Hamas decimated, even if they soon replace the eliminated leader, the Gazan population might reflect and, by returning the hostages, strip Israel of the main pretext for further bombardment of the Strip. 

On the other fronts, Hezbollah has also not let up after the systematic surgical elimination of its entire leadership, and continues to regularly launch rockets, drones and missiles against all of Israel's territory, not just the area bordering Lebanon. 

As for the Houthis, in addition to operations that have semi-paralysed maritime traffic in the Red Sea, they maintain an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones capable of reaching Israel's territory, and in their case their leadership is still intact. 

And, of course, there remains the main instigator and backer of all these organisations, the Iran of the ayatollahs, which in addition to having put the brakes on Jewish-Arab normalisation through the Abraham Accords, has embarked on an accelerated diplomatic effort to emphasise the unity of the Muslim world across Sunni-Shiite divides against not only Israel but all that the West stands for. And no one in the Iranian supreme leader's entourage has questioned that his primary and inalienable goal remains the destruction of Israel. 

Thus, the end of the war certainly does not seem very near.