I keep watching the images of wretched children eating dogfood, houses collapsed upon occupants, and doctors trying to cure bleeding patients with little more than a dirty towel and a prayer, and I wonder: is Hamas’s strategy working? Do the victims of the greatest political rampage since Pol Pot console themselves with the vision of a Palestinian flag raised over their own territory?

What exactly is Hamas’s strategy? This paragraph by John Spencer, an expert on urban and subterranean warfare, sums it up:

“Hamas’s strategy, then, is founded on tunnels and time. This war, more so than any other, is about the underground and not the surface. It is time-based rather than terrain- or enemy-based. Hamas is in the tunnels. Its leaders and weapons are in the tunnels. The Israeli hostages are in the tunnels. And Hamas’s strategy is founded on its conviction that, for Israel, the critical resource of time will run out in the tunnels.”

Time will run out — theoretically — as international condemnation rises and Israel is forced to come to some kind of accommodation with the Palestinians. The condemnation rises on the bloated stomach of that child drinking tainted water. On the rising pile of corpses. Yes, it’s one hell of a strategy that Hamas has dreamed up, one that only a small group of hard-eyed men would impose on their millions of compatriots. No wonder they didn’t trouble the Iranians with their plan.

What does a Hamas fighter tell a Palestinian father who hasn’t eaten a scrap of food in three days because his kids are hungry?

“Cheer up, man: we’re livin’ the dream! Yeah, you’ve lost your apartment and everything in it, but your next apartment is going to be in East Jerusalem, just down the block from the French Embassy in Palestine. Um, sorry: I can’t spare you any food or water, man. We need it for the fighters: this is all going to go on for some time. You know, we’d hammer those family-of-hostages s.o.b.s blocking aid, but we need them: they’re just about the only Israelis pressuring the government for pauses and a prisoner exchange. You know, come to think of it, we should have put some tunnel entrances over there where the aid trucks are parked. Then we could smuggle the stuff in straight off the trucks. Damn. Someone should have thought of that.”

Are the Palestinians any closer to the famous two-state solution — or any solution — than they were on October 7 last year? I don’t see it. Only to talk with Israel about hostages and the entry of humanitarian aid is difficult, as the diligent Qataris have complained. To no avail Secretary of State Antony Blinken blabs and blabs and blabs with various Middle Eastern leaders; Netanyahu swats aside all of his suggestions about a humanitarian gesture. Blinken has ended up looking like the referee in one of those fake-wrestling shows, reminding the heel that grabbing the other guy’s hair and ramming his head into the turnbuckle is not permitted; this is just a warning, but I mean it. And like the referee, a nagging Blinken is likely to find himself getting thrown over the ropes by the Israelis.

After months of his hand-wringing shtick, Blinken is now making happy talk about how the Israelis have an “extraordinary” opportunity to normalize relations with other Arab countries — if they’d just let the Palestinians form their own country.

A quite different extraordinary opportunity is perceived by Israelis, utterly unwilling to draw the obvious parallel between what they are doing to Palestinians and what Germans did to their great-grandparents. Carpe diem to Netanyahu and his Cabinet means driving the Palestinians out once and for all. The IDF has been at it for five months, and surely after another five the deed will be done, at least in Gaza, with the groundwork well-laid for a West Bank expulsion (“transfer,” “displacement,” “relocation,” “evacuation” — such a garden of sterile terms for journalists and bureaucrats to pick through).

So has Hamas’s strategy worked? They have dumped their people into the starkest destitution, hostages to their strategy as much as the hundred Israelis stuck down in the tunnels, though the latter can at least count on a meal or two a day and a cup of water now and then, even medical care, since it won’t do for Hamas to return mouldy, mildewed hostages. Are Palestinians getting their suffering’s worth?

No. They are not going to get their own country, for their opponents are fanatics of the worst kind: ones backed by a religion. Palestinians are going to end up living in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, or moving on to Europe, where they will clean streets under the watchful eye of immigration officials and Mossad passers-by.

Israel will not give them a square inch of land. Pull out of the West Bank? Allow Gaza to rebuild and fester again? Impossible, and Biden won’t muster the cojones to force it on Israelis — least of all in an election year — though to give him his due, neither would the other two candidates, Trump and Kennedy, if either won the election in November. They all know which side of the bread gets buttered, and by whom.

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Besides, even if Biden did have an attack of cojones and threatened to cut the Israelis off and then did cut them off, they wouldn’t stop. Much is made of how the Yankees could halt them in their tracks tomorrow — bombs, spare parts, etc. — but these savants overlook something. Israelis — their citizens solidly on board with the present project, according to every poll — and their supporters around the world are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. After six decades of putting up with those crabby Arabs across the wall, they are finally going to throw them out: Israel from river to sea. They will pull the bombs and spare parts out of their marrow if they have to.

Hamas fighters popping out of tunnels to zap a tank or mow down a squad of IDF must surely have noticed by now that there aren’t many folks around anymore. The once-buzzing streets have gone nearly quiet. Hospital hallways are laden with plaster dust. The stink of decomposing bodies rises from every pile of rubble. Rats are making a comeback. Can fighters really still believe that this is all going to be revived and turned into a Palestinian center of commerce, learning, culture and some type of sovereign political order?

Hamas soldiers will someday sneak out of their tunnels and see that they’re not fighting for anyone anymore. Everyone has gone, or at best a broken, ragged remnant scurries amidst the rubble. Their vaunted tunnel strategy and revolt, complete with paragliders, has turned out to be the catalyst for Israel’s final victory. Worldwide disgust with Israel might manifest itself in UN declarations and and the spectacle of Bolivia cutting relations, but these won’t alter their plans.

For Israel is not South Africa; it has for decades tended to public relations through its hold on the news media, Hollywood films and a long slew of Holocaust documentaries. Public opinion in the West might be running against Israel, but Eurovision, the annual Pan-European (plus Israel) song contest, just announced that Israel would be allowed to compete this year. In 2022, Russia was banned on the day after its invasion of Ukraine. “[Director General Noel] Curran said it was not [Eurovision’s] place to make comparisons between wars,” The Guardian remarked drily.

And unlike South Africa, Israel can always respond to any bans by playing the you-know-what card.

“How far has human nature changed in the course of history?” wrote historian-philosopher Will Durant in his book “The Lessons of History.” “Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind. The Greeks of Plato’s time behaved very much like the French of modern centuries; and the Romans behaved like the English.”

The rape of Gaza is but another dark iteration of human fanaticism. Which is, I think, Hamas’s real mistake: they underestimated just how cruel Israel could be and how the rest of the world would ultimately shrug and turn away.