In a closed-door meeting during his recent visit to Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to sell a final, desperate vision: that Israel still has a chance to deliver a decisive strategic outcome in Gaza. Deep analysis suggests that Netanyahu framed the conflict as approaching a pivotal opportunity—to eliminate Hamas and force or induce the displacement of Gaza’s population through the Morag axis. According to this narrative, once Palestinians are cleared and filtered, and Hamas is decapitated, Israel will enter a new era of security and deterrence.
Trump, burned and embarrassed by past Israeli intelligence assurances about Iran that failed to deliver clean outcomes, was skeptical. Still, he appears to have given Netanyahu a listening ear, perhaps hoping that alignment with Israel’s maximalist goals could serve his broader ambitions in the region.
But this strategy, if “successful,” may mark the beginning of a catastrophic intelligence and geopolitical failure. Contrary to prevailing fears of displacement as a crime that must be prevented, we must now consider the scenario no one dares to articulate: What if Israel succeeds?
The Illusion of Intelligence Superiority
Netanyahu’s plan hinges on the belief that Israeli intelligence and military dominance will ensure a controlled, one-directional outcome. The assumption is simple: once Hamas is eliminated and Gaza is emptied of combatants and potential resisters, Israel can manage the aftermath from a position of overwhelming strength.
Yet history warns us that this is the very logic that precedes major intelligence failures. Israel’s intelligence doctrine—much like that of the United States—has historically overestimated its ability to control human landscapes through technological surveillance, border control, and targeted elimination.
The October 7 surprise attack by Hamas exposed the frailty of this confidence. Much like the Yom Kippur War of 1973 or the U.S. misjudgments preceding 9/11 and the Iraq War, Israel’s institutions misread the enemy’s capability, underestimated their will, and assumed that dominant power negates asymmetric surprise.
Historical Precedent: PLO in the 1980s
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon under the pretext of expelling the PLO. The operation succeeded militarily: Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership were evacuated from Beirut under international supervision. But their forced relocation to Tunisia did not end their influence. Instead, the PLO reorganized politically, mobilized diplomatically, and eventually returned to lead the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Israel’s belief that expulsion would neutralize the movement proved profoundly misguided.
Similarly, a displaced Hamas is not a defanged Hamas. On the contrary, displacement could grant it the very conditions required for reinvention and expansion: ideological martyrdom, global mobility, and the embrace of states eager to utilize its knowledge.
Scenario One: Strategic Absorption by Regional Powers
Unlike common belief that no country would welcome Hamas leaders, the real risk lies in selective, strategic hospitality. Iran, as the movement’s primary backer, would gain unprecedented access to a hardened, experienced cadre of commanders. Egypt, despite its public rhetoric, may quietly tolerate their presence under controlled conditions, particularly if it serves to monitor them or use them as leverage against Israel.
This would not reflect endorsement of displacement—rather, it would represent the intelligence calculus of states seeking advantage over Israel. A dispersed Hamas leadership with safe residency across multiple countries, trained in surveillance evasion and ideological discipline, would constitute a severe regional intelligence nightmare for Israel.
It makes perfect sense for these countries, which oppose Israel’s colonial policies, to host the leaders, embrace their efforts, provide them with a suitable environment for planning, and obtain all the information they possess. Iran will employ the exiled Palestinians in projects that compensate for the absence of its arms in the region, which means reviving the arms using a faction that has the right to try to regain the land from which it was expelled once again.
Scenario Two: Global Mobilization of a Stateless Resistance
With Gaza cleared, Hamas and associated activists would initiate an unprecedented mobilization across the Muslim and Western worlds. Freed from the constraints of local governance, Hamas would assume a role akin to a transnational movement, capable of operating through NGOs, student groups, media outlets, and decentralized cells.
This is not speculative. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the dismantling of the Ba’athist regime, former military officers and Islamist actors formed the nucleus of what became ISIS. Statelessness, far from weakening them, created a terrain of ideological and tactical innovation.
Scenario Three: The Collapse of Normalization’s Moral Foundation
Netanyahu’s larger gamble ties into the Abraham Accords and the hope of normalization with the Gulf. A “cleansed” Gaza may be offered as a precondition for broader regional peace. But even if normalization deals are signed, their legitimacy would collapse in the eyes of Arab publics.
A new Palestinian exile community—especially one comprised of politically committed, ideologically sharpened youth—would undermine Gulf regimes’ credibility. Hamas-led mobilizations abroad would actively work to block joint projects, threaten embassies, and spark civil unrest. These would not be fringe actors. They would become the face of Palestinian resistance in the diaspora.
It is not unlikely that the movement abroad will confront the new Middle East plan, attempt to influence Syria once again, address the Islamic Jihad movements, and exploit the openness and international projects planned for the Gaza Riviera, which it wants Israel to lead, to carry out separate operations that will undermine all these Israeli plans.
Scenario Four: The Stateless Enemy With Global Reach
Israel’s current intelligence doctrine is territorial: control the land, manage the threat. But what if the threat is no longer tied to land? With Hamas dispersed, Israel would face enemies embedded across Jordan, Turkey, Sudan, Yemen, and perhaps even Europe.
Tracking a movement that no longer holds territory but operates through encrypted platforms, financial networks, ideological media, and indirect proxy warfare would stretch Israel’s intelligence capacities thin. It would also expose American assets to retaliatory or preemptive attacks in regions assumed to be under control.
The American Factor: Trump’s Gamble
Trump may hope that supporting Netanyahu’s plan offers a fast track to foreign policy relevance. But the blowback would be immense. As with the Iraq War, the U.S. could be seen as complicit in triggering a regional insurgency. American embassies, NGOs, and troops across the Middle East and Africa would become targets of the new resistance.
If escalation occurs under a Trump presidency, he will face the same accusations that haunted George W. Bush: empowering an enemy by misreading the consequences of “success.”
Turkey will play a very significant role in embracing Hamas leaders and youth, especially given the inevitable future battle between Turkey and Israel if the two countries’ policies remain unchanged. It is not unlikely that Turkey will fund the movement to operate in several areas against Israel, such as Syria, Libya, Sudan, and perhaps in the countries of the Côte d’Ivoire and the Sahel. Turkey’s adoption of this movement will enable it to pursue Israel in many other areas to besiege and pressure it. Over the years, we cannot rule out a multinational military buildup formed by Hamas in various countries, operating in an organized manner against Israeli interests.
I believe that the coming decades will prove—certainly because measuring the impact takes years and decades—that Israel committed the greatest intelligence blunder in its history, which has barely exceeded 50 years of working to end the Palestinian state project. The coming decades will also prove that Trump, the US president who seeks to establish a self-proclaimed prophet, made a grave mistake in believing that liquidating the Palestinian cause and displacing Palestinians would achieve his dreams of peace.
Conclusion: The Coming Strategic Rupture
A successful displacement of Gaza’s population would not secure Israel. It would export its crisis, multiply its enemies, and sabotage its alliances. Netanyahu’s overconfidence and narrow vision of intelligence success obscure the broader reality: asymmetric actors do not disappear when expelled—they evolve.
If Trump is implicated in such a strategic miscalculation, it may mark the beginning of the end of unconditional U.S.-Israeli alignment. What appears as victory may in fact be the final intelligence failure: mistaking operational control for strategic foresight.
The greatest threat to Israel and the U.S. is not that displacement fails—but that it succeeds.
