Last month, Dave Deptula, who commanded U.S. air-force campaigns in Operation Desert Storm and in Afghanistan, became the first American general to visit the Gaza Strip since the current war began. Deptula explains the mechanics of Hamas’s sacrifice of Palestinian lives for propaganda purposes:

Hamas counts on media coverage and attention to civilian deaths to shift blame to Israel. The tactic it uses to do this is to stash weapons, explosives, or rockets into every structure where, or near where, they will be operating—mosques, hospitals, schools, shops, apartment buildings, and personal residences. They walk the streets in civilian clothes with no weapons, then duck into a building knowing where weapons are stored and use them against the IDF. They depart the building without any weapons, resuming their civilian appearance.

The IDF takes measures to minimize destruction when feasible and often subjects its own forces to substantial risk to mitigate civilian casualties. Indeed, the IDF refrains from attacking Hamas operatives when they brazenly interdict and steal humanitarian supplies to avoid additional killings and violence.

Deptula notes another, less-remarked-upon tactic that may have considerably slowed the progress of the war:

Hamas also sought to gain a shielding effect from Israel’s obvious interest in avoiding confrontation with Egypt. I drove past Hamas rocket-launch positions located feet from Gaza’s border with Egypt. Hamas positioned them there, using the co-location of their rocket launch positions and the border knowing that the Israeli air force would not strike positions so close to Egypt.

As the war in Gaza appears to be coming to close, writes Michael Milshtein, Israelis are left with “a sense of failure and bitterness” despite the IDF’s “military successes and strategic achievements.” Meanwhile, he writes, Gazans are likely to see the war as a “historic achievement,” and thus once more fall into the cycle of ecstasy and amnesia that Shany Mor identified as the key pattern in Palestinian understanding of the conflict.

Milshtein too acknowledges how much the present results resemble what preceded them, reminding us that Arabs and Israelis felt similarly after

the 1956 Sinai Campaign when, like in the current war, Israel was pressured by the United States to withdraw from conquered territories and bring the conflict to an end. The same applies to the Yom Kippur War, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War, and the 2014 Operation Protective Edge [against Hamas]. Arab collective memory regards these events as achievements resulting from sacrifice and the ability to absorb severe blows, exhibit steadfastness (sumud), and make it impossible for Israel to declare decisive victory.

This phenomenon shouldn’t lead Israel to conclude it has been defeated but must be understood so as to formulate sober goals and courses of action in dealing with enemies in the region.

For now, there are no signs of soul-searching [among Palestinians] concerning the price of the war. Responsibility for the carnage and destruction, described as a nakba greater than that of 1948, is laid at Israel’s doorstep. This reflects a long-standing fundamental Palestinian flaw: a “bipolarity” with, on the one hand, fighting spirit and praise for the ability to harm Israel and, on the other, victimhood from the results of the war the Palestinians themselves started.