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In 2017, Raphael Cohen wrote “Five Lessons from Israel’s Wars in Gaza” for War on the Rocks, in which he looked at how the Israel Defense Forces’ “operations in Gaza provide an example of the challenges that advanced militaries face when confronting determined, adaptive, hybrid adversaries in dense urban terrain,” especially after Operation Protective Edge, in 2014. In light of the current war in Gaza, we asked him to look back on his piece and reflect on those five lessons. Read more below.Image: IDFIn your piece from 2017, you wrote that “as much as Israel may disdain Hamas, Israel cannot simply get rid of it, both because it does not want to govern Gaza itself and because it fears what may come next.” Now, Israel is promising to destroy Hamas. Why did this calculation change? And do you think Israel has plans for governance in the territory or an idea of what might come next?In a nutshell, the Oct. 7 attack was orders of magnitude larger and more brutal than any previous Hamas attack. The attack killed more than 1,200 people and resulted in Hamas taking more than 200 hostages. Relative to the population size, it would be the equivalent of the United States suffering more than 40 Sept. 11 attacks. And as someone who has seen the video that Israel compiled of the attack, it’s more than just the numbers. The attack showed a level of depravity and sadistic cruelty that’s hard to fathom. As a result, the Israeli strategic calculus changed. Hamas could no longer just be contained and deterred. It needs to be destroyed.Israel’s plans on what comes next, though, are less clear. It wants to see Gaza demilitarized and cease to be a sanctuary for Palestinian militant groups, but how that translates into concrete actions is more uncertain. The Benjamin Netanyahu government has stated