The Triple Conceptual Failure: Sinwar,Nasrallah,and Khamenei—and the Underestimation of Israel’s Resilience

Introduction

This article seeks to examine the policies of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran toward Israel since October 2023. The central argument advanced here is that an ideology grounded in the aspiration to destroy the State of Israel as an independent sovereign entity—combined with an underestimation of Israel’s resilience in the face of a large-scale attack and an overestimation of the capabilities of the aggressor bloc (the Axis of Resistance)—led to a collective failure on the part of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran to achieve their ultimate objective of eliminating Israel.

The existing literature on the Axis of Evil lacks knowledge of its decision-making—jointly or individually by each actor—and its relationship to Israeli resilience, understood as surviving a broad offensive in the event of a war in October 2023. The article seeks to fill this gap, and it is based on Arab sources found in the Gaza Strip, including correspondence between Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip with senior figures in Iran and Hezbollah. We seek to analyze the three actors’ assessments of their ability to carry out a broad attack against Israel, as occurred on October 7, 2023. It also aims to understand how Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran perceived Israel’s national resilience to defend itself and to restore itself after such a massive attack. By using the term national resilience, we adopt the following definition: “the ability of individuals, groups, or systems to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity, stress, or significant challenges, while maintaining or quickly regaining functionality, stability, and well-being” (Luthar et al., 2000).

The concept of resilience originally emerged from the field of mental health. At the individual level, the term refers to the personal attributes and capacities that enable a person to cope with hardships under high-stress conditions. Accordingly, the ability to maintain stable, continuous functioning under difficult circumstances is a direct manifestation of personal resilience (Bonanno, 2004; Bonanno et al., 2011; Narayanan, 2008). When referring to a group of individuals organized within the framework of a state, the term national resilience denotes a country’s ability to manage external pressures and ultimately overcome them over time. This capacity can be defined as a state’s inherent ability to absorb, withstand, and repel repeated attacks. Such capabilities are grounded in a country’s ability to effectively deter its adversaries, the technical and psychological preparedness it maintains to protect itself during violent conflict should deterrence fail, and its overall capacity to adapt to changing geopolitical realities when confronted with disruptive transformations.

When applied more broadly to social contexts, resilience refers to a group’s collective ability to sustain community life in the aftermath of destructive events. However, the analysis of resilience levels in social settings varies significantly with group scale, ranging from small family or military units to the largest human formations (Marcellino & Tortorello, 2015). The central distinction between resilience at the individual and collective levels, particularly at the national level, is that resilience within large social groups relies heavily on symbolic and abstract components. These include political ideals, collective memories, and shared narratives with which the public deeply identifies (Vasu, 2007).

The study’s central argument is that ideological blindness influenced the decision-making of Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, and Ali Khamenei on the road to Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, and even afterward. Seeing Israel as an enemy that must be destroyed—at all costs—and underestimating Israel’s ability to absorb damage even on the home front led to a strategic failure for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. In addition, this stance led to the next failure: a self-overestimation of the chances of winning the battle and an underestimation of the opponent from military and social perspectives. The first section reviews prominent scholarly works on worldviews and underestimating and overestimating the enemy. The following section analyzes Hamas’s, Hezbollah’s, and Iran’s leaders’ decision-making regarding the conflict with Israel.

Literature Review

Conceptions or worldviews affect our perceptions of reality, giving “order and meaning to the relevant pieces of information for a correct understanding of that problem” (Bar-Yosef, 2001). This involves “deductive thinking processes—starting from the formulation of simplistic and inclusive theories, from which concrete insights and conclusions about reality are derived” (Lanir, 1983, p. 136). When a conceptual framework addresses the possibility of war, it relies on two fundamental components that must be assessed to determine whether the enemy is oriented toward war. The first component is the enemy’s intentions and the second is the enemy’s capabilities. Before assessing whether the enemy is inclined toward war, the evaluator considers four alternatives:

Alternative A: The enemy intends to go to war and possesses the military capability to do so.

It is important to recall that the enemy undertakes the same analytical process. One of the outcomes can be a war between two adversaries who strive to achieve different goals and interests, as in the case study of Israel versus Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Conception, underestimation, and overestimation are three intertwined terms in discussions of military conflicts, from low-intensity conflicts (LIC) to high-intensity conflicts (HIC). In this context, Robert Jervis has already noted that mistakes or misjudgments in assessing the enemy’s strength have, in the past, led to wars. At this point, we must distinguish between intentions and capabilities because the latter are more easily monitored, especially during an empowerment process. If the enemy army increases its number of tanks, planes, and missiles, for example, this can clearly be identified in intelligence and assessed as evidence that the enemy’s military capabilities have improved. However, despite identifying this process of military empowerment, capabilities can be misperceived. Intentions, on the other hand, are much harder to identify and are revealed in public statements by enemy leaders. Even then, there is no guarantee that the enemy’s decision-making will be in accordance with their ideology (Jervis, 1988, p. 675).

The combination of intentions and capabilities is useful for analysis, especially by intelligence and operational elements. According to professional criteria, intelligence and operational officers must present the political echelon, that is, the decision-makers, with their assessment regarding the enemy’s capabilities and intentions. The politicians do not have to accept the professionals’ assessment or their recommendations on whether to start a military conflict or to avoid a preemptive strike. Unlike the professional echelon, the political echelon follows an ideology to implement specific policies. Geoffrey Blainey has noted that if the political echelon is optimistic about its military power and convinced there is no place for negotiations with the enemy, the likelihood of war increases (Blainey, 1973).

Developing this idea, Jarvis described how this conception or perception of the decision-making level is linked to over- and underestimating the enemy’s intentions. This was the case with the USA’s involvement in Vietnam. The Americans’ conception was that the Soviet Union sought to spread communism all over the world. Since the US national interest was against communism, Washington’s decision-makers supported military action in Vietnam. Ultimately, it turned out that the USSR had no intention of spreading its communist ideology. Thus, the American overestimation of Soviet intentions led to a war in which nearly 60,000 Americans died (Jervis, 1988, p. 676). This is, of course, not a unique case: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for instance, were not just a failure of US intelligence to provide an early warning but also a misperception of al-Qaeda’s strategy and capabilities, particularly its ability to strike the US within America itself (Shapira, 2025). Leaders around the globe often decide to wage war after misjudging their foes’ capabilities and intentions, sometimes based on misconceptions, including ideological ones. Such disparaging assessments portray the opponent as weak and lacking sufficient resilience (military, national, and social) to withstand a military campaign.

Not surprisingly, when leaders or decision-makers misunderstand reality, this leads to decisions that harm the national interest and, in some cases, even cost them their lives, as happened to Yahya Sinwar (October 2024), Hassan Nasrallah (September 2024), and Ali Khamenei (February 2026). The question is why leaders repeatedly make the same mistake of forming an incorrect understanding of reality. The existing literature suggests several reasons for this: a demonic enemy image, a masculine self-image, a moral self-image, selective inattention, a lack of empathy, and military overconfidence (Levy, 1983, p. 78). It is important to recognize that these factors shape leaders’ overestimation and underestimation of both their adversaries and themselves. Four possible configurations may thus be identified:

Self-underestimation combined with underestimation of the adversary—a low probability of war.

Some of these categories are relevant to this study: all three leaders perceived Israel as a demonic enemy, believed that they were morally justified, and overestimated their own military capabilities. Furthermore, all three leaders underestimated Israel’s capacity to withstand an assault. The source of this underestimation lies in a flawed conceptual framework that did not consider a scenario in which Israel would perceive war against them as an existential conflict. Consequently, despite their perception of Israel as a Western and morally degenerate society, they failed to recognize that, in a situation of existential struggle, Israeli society would fight with determination. In this respect, Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Khamenei misunderstood the Zionist ethos, of which self-sacrifice for the homeland is a defining characteristic (Abu Toameh, 2021; Pacchiani, 2023).

This study’s starting point is the assumption that leaders are human and, as such, are prone to emotional and cognitive biases. Everyone formulates their position, which includes their ideology and conceptions, based on cognitive and emotional considerations. In this regard, decision-makers may accurately judge, overestimate, or underestimate their opponent’s ability and their own ability in relation to the chance of winning a war. The research literature dealing with this is extensive; therefore, for reasons of space, we have contented ourselves with mentioning this point, which will be further addressed in the following analysis (Janser, 2007; Williams, 2010).

Methodology

This study was conducted using a qualitative approach. It is based primarily on the analysis of internal correspondence between Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip and their liaison contacts in Iran and Hezbollah. All materials were published by the Israeli military after being collected from Hamas offices in the Gaza Strip during the war that began in October 2023 (Terrorism Information Center, 2025). These documents include Hamas officials’ situational assessments regarding developments in Israel and the likelihood of successfully defeating it in a military confrontation. Emphasis in these materials is placed on Israel’s political and social condition and its prospects for resilience and survival. In this respect, the article provides readers, for the first time, with a new analytical perspective on the assessments of Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip in the years preceding the October 7 attack.

To enhance the study’s reliability, we mapped all public statements made by leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran in the years preceding the campaign (from 2019 onward), as well as after it began. We found no positive references to the possibility of ideological flexibility or a willingness to consider dialogue with Israel. Instead, we identified statements threatening to defeat and destroy Israel. The ideological dimension shaping the situational assessments of the leaders of the so-called Axis of Resistance (Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas) is evident in the primary materials analyzed in this study. The main keywords guiding the research were: Israel, war, defeat, negotiations, dialogue, resilience, survival, and victory.

Yahya Sinwar and Hamas

Since its establishment in December 1987 in response to the First Intifada, Hamas’s vision is to free all of Mandate Palestine. The foundation of this ideology is a combination of national and religious perceptions that Israel has no right to exist as a sovereign political entity. The idea that Israel is immoral and illegitimate is anchored in the Hamas Charter, which was published in 1988. The famous words of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Society of the Muslim Brothers (better known as the Muslim Brotherhood), one of the offshoots of which is Hamas, are part of the opening paragraph of the charter: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (Hamas Covenant, 1988).

Based on this ideology, Hamas has been waging a military struggle with Israel for four decades, which has included terrorist attacks on Israelis using a variety of methods (suicide attacks, shootings, bomb chargers, car bombings, kidnapping and murdering soldiers, infiltration into Israeli communities/localities using weapons such as knives), as part of the armed resistance against Israel to achieve the goal of liberating Palestine. After Hamas forcibly took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, it waged HIC with Israel in 2008 (Operation Cast Lead), 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defense), 2014 (Operation Protective Edge), and 2021 (Operation Guardian of the Walls).

Following the 2021 round of military/security escalation, Hamas’s assessment regarding Israel’s capabilities and national resilience changed. A new book published by Hamas in 2021 called Sword of Jerusalem (saif al-quds) stated that

Defeating the enemy became like a bowshot or something close to it. With the help of Allah, the resistance (Hamas) laid out a comprehensive plan for the military campaign called “the Promise of the Second Time.” The meaning of the term according to the Quran is that Allah’s promise to end the Jewish presence in the land will be fulfilled this time. (Polka, 2024)

On the temporal axis, this moment constituted a turning point in Hamas’s strategic assessment and decision-making. The movement’s conception of liberating the entirety of the land now encompassed an overestimation of its own capabilities, as it believed it had attained sufficient military strength to defeat Israel. Simultaneously, the Hamas leadership, under Yahya Sinwar, assessed that Israel had weakened, primarily due to profound internal divisions within Israeli society.

In June 2021, Sinwar sent a short message to Ismail Ka’ani, the commander of the Quds Force in Iran, stating that the goal is a great victory and the removal of the cancer—that is, the elimination of the entity and its removal from their land and holy places (Sinwar, 2021a). Sinwar also wrote that Hamas will not turn a blind eye until this sacred goal is achieved and asked Iran for funding of $500 million for a period of 24 months. Highlighting his overestimation of Hamas’s capabilities, in one letter, Sinwar portrayed Hamas as a movement whose military strength was fundamentally sustained by Iran, noting that “Iran stood with Hamas in every missile, every rocket, and every meter of tunnel dug,” all thanks to the guidance and support of Ali Khamenei, whom he credited with playing a decisive role in building Hamas’s power (Sinwar, 2021b). Sinwar even went so far as to propose a joint agreement that would bind Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah in a “war of liberation” for Palestine. Yet, on October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its large-scale assault on Israel without direct Iranian military involvement (regarding Hezbollah, see below).

His underestimation of Israel is similarly evident in a letter dated June 5, 2021, one month after the round of hostilities between Hamas and Israel. There, he characterized Israel as an “imaginary entity” that is significantly weaker than is commonly perceived. He further asserted that, with God’s assistance, Iran’s support, and the solidarity of the broader Islamic nation, Israel could be uprooted—and soon (Sinwar, 2021b). Sinwar’s profound belief in the righteousness of Hamas’s ideology, combined with his self-overestimation and underestimation of the adversary, is further illustrated in another letter, sent in July 2021 to Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Department of the Quds Force. In this correspondence, Sinwar reiterated his conviction that God’s promise of victory was imminent, framing it as a strategic triumph that would decisively shape the region’s future (Sinwar, 2021a).

Hamas’s overestimation of its own capabilities, coupled with its underestimation of Israel’s national resilience to recover after a large-scale military confrontation, found political expression as early as September 2021. In Gaza City, a conference was convened titled “The Promise of the Hereafter—Palestine After Liberation.” At this conference, Sinwar and senior Hamas officials deliberated on various ideas for governing the future Palestinian state. Kamel Abu ‘Awad, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, declared: “Our assessment is that victory is near. The conflict can only end with Allah’s promise that our people will live with dignity in their independent state, whose capital is Jerusalem.”

The discussions in September 2021 included diverse components of state-building, such as drafting a constitution, preparing for general elections, recommendations for the return of Palestinians to their homeland, and even proposals regarding the treatment of Jews who would remain under Muslim rule. This provided clear evidence of Hamas’s conviction that it could defeat Israel on the battlefield—a conviction shaped by the movement’s overestimation of its own strength and underestimation of Israel’s societal resilience. A few months later (April 2022), Hamas launched a new television program, whose central message was that the balance of power had changed. The program asserted that it was time for Hamas to invade the enemy’s territories and that it was time to shake the earth under their feet (Rost, 2025).

Sinwar’s self-confidence intensified in the first half of 2022. He drew confidence from what he perceived as the organization’s preparations for the next military campaign against Israel. In a letter addressed to Ismail Haniyah, a senior Hamas leader, he wrote that “the jihad fighters are preparing at maximum speed; they are sure that their level of readiness for the great strategic campaign is almost complete.” This overestimation extended not only to Hamas’s own military capacity but also to the anticipated involvement of its allies in the so-called Axis of Resistance. Sinwar hoped for the participation of armed militias from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, attacks by armed factions from Jordanian territory, and a massive mobilization of Arab citizens of Israel in violent operations against the state. The central idea of this campaign was to unite all these actors around a war centered on Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa Mosque (Sinwar, 2022). However, his expectations were not fully realized, as Hamas was unable to engage all fronts in a confrontation capable of threatening Israel’s survival.

Hamas’s leadership’s assessment that Israel’s national resilience had declined was reinforced following the Israeli elections of November 2022. The establishment of a new government that sought to advance a judicial reform deepened internal divisions within Israeli society, including public declarations by reservists that they would refuse to serve if the reform were enacted, out of concern for the erosion of democracy. From Hamas’s perspective (Sinwar, 2023), this served as evidence of genuine fractures in Israel’s social cohesion, leading to the conclusion that Israel was more vulnerable than before and that the likelihood of defeating it in a broad military confrontation had significantly increased.

The judicial reform launched by the new Israeli government in January 2023 was the final confirmation for Hamas that its assessment regarding Israel’s internal weakness was correct. On January 14, Haniyah (2023) stated that Israel was experiencing internal instability. Several months later, a Hamas delegation, headed by Haniyah and Salah al-’Aruri, arrived in Tehran and told their Iranian hosts that the Gaza Strip was the resistance base. The parties agreed that Hamas was ready for the next campaign against the weaker side, that is, Israel. The then-Iranian president, Ibrahim Raisi, said that “the resistance is stronger than ever and Israel is weaker than ever” (Report on the visit of the movement’s leadership delegation to Tehran, 2023). Analysis of the documents and statements shows that the leaders of the resistance axis did not correctly assess Israel’s willingness to fight in a situation where their backs are against the wall. The question of a war of survival for the Israelis, that is, a war of being or not, is not addressed in the internal correspondence. This indicates an incorrect statement by the resistance axis regarding Israel’s ability to withstand, as it turned out

The military intelligence of the Al-Qassam Brigades closely monitored the political crisis in Israel and its effects on the IDF’s capabilities. On July 25, 2023, it recommended to the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, to avoid entering a military conflict to allow the crisis to deepen further. Subsequently, Sinwar ordered Hamas’s political department to monitor developments in Israel to find the right moment to initiate an attack that would bring about Israel’s defeat (Dahoah-Halevi, 2025; Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, 2023).

Hamas’s analysis of the situation is consistent with alternative B, in which the evaluator (Hamas) overestimated itself and underestimated the enemy (Israel). Hamas’s analysis focused on the political crisis and did not include any reference to Israel’s firepower and its history as a society fighting for its survival against an existential threat. Sinwar and his allies perceived the media discourse in Israel as reflecting an inherent weakness that would end up destroying the foundations on which the state was founded. Hence, the decision was made that it was time to attack and destroy Israel (Minutes of the call with brother Abu Omar Muhammad, 2023).

Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah

Since its foundation, Hezbollah’s ideology and vision have been to destroy Israel. Hezbollah considers Israel an imperialist creation, an abnormal entity within the Middle East. Hassan Nasrallah frequently described Israel as a “cancer” that strives to disintegrate the Middle East by initiating and cultivating disagreements and quarrels. Hence, the struggle against Israel must continue until the Zionist entity ceases to exist (Hezbollah’s Open Letter, 2011).

An integral part of Hezbollah’s strategy is to damage Israel’s image while simultaneously strengthening the motivation among its fighters to sacrifice themselves to achieve its vision, which includes the destruction of Israel. Therefore, Nasrallah made sure to present Israel as a weak enemy after becoming Hezbollah’s secretary-general. For example, in a 2000 speech in Bent Jbeil, he likened Israel to a society entangled in spider webs and about to collapse. He repeated this analogy in an interview in 2019:

All the intelligence regarding targets in the northern region [of Israel] is in our hands and within our range of fire. The most significant point, however, is in the coastal strip, which demonstrates how fragile Israel is, like a spider’s web. This relatively small area is where the majority of settlers live, and it also houses the core centers of the state: government ministries, the General Staff, Ben Gurion International Airport, the Ramat Gan Stock Exchange, facilities for non-conventional weapons production, the national electricity company’s infrastructure, and more. Ninety percent of Israel’s vital targets are located there. We will return them to the Stone Age. (Gibor, 2019)

Two months later, following an evacuation exercise carried out by the Israeli army, Nasrallah said: “The legendary and invincible [IDF] has turned into a Hollywood army, acting in movies, because it has become weak, debilitated, feeble and cowardly,” a clear expression of underestimation of the Israeli side (Times of Israel, 2019). For the Israelis, such exercises are perceived to ensure they are resilient in times of crisis, but for Nasrallah, it was perceived as an expression of Israeli weakness or fear of him.

In 2021, shortly after the military clash between Israel and Hamas in May, Nasrallah told Al-Manar TV that the next war would bring an end to the Zionist entity. A year later, Fuad Shukr, a senior member of Hezbollah, told the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar that his new mission was to build a military power with the capability of destroying Israel (Al-Akhbar, 2022; Al-Manar, 2021). Nasrallah, who regularly assessed Israeli society as fragile, declared in May 2023 that the internal front of the Israeli enemy is weak, shaky, and anxious, and that Israelis are afraid of their future (Al-Manar, 2023). Compared to Sinwar’s assessment, Nasrallah’s failure is even greater: he recognized that the Israelis were facing an existential threat; however, he failed to accurately assess their resilience, which would be reinforced by that threat. This resilience had several dimensions: rapid transition to an attack on Lebanese territory; mobilization of reservists for prolonged fighting; willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the country in a just war; mobilization of the home front to absorb blows; ongoing effort to maintain a routine of life during war; and evacuation of the population to shelters if necessary. Eventually, Nasrallah, the man who chose to exhaust Israel and launched a counter-war in 2006 after kidnapping two IDF soldiers, did not learn a lesson from the Israeli resilience two decades ago. Even the fact that Israel hit Hezbollah’s leadership following the events of October 2023 did not change his assessment of the situation, and in the end, he paid for this mistake with his life (Naor & Hitman, 2025).

Following the border tension between Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2023, Nasrallah threatened that “if the conflict erupts, Israel will cease to exist,” adding that the Israeli army had gradually “weakened” since its defeat back in 2006: “The Israeli army today is in its worst shape in history” (Times of Israel, 2023). It can be cautiously estimated that Nasrallah’s statement was also based on the advance information Hezbollah had about Hamas’s expected attack against Israel and the tripartite coordination between Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as Sinwar suggested.

Nasrallah’s underestimation concerned not only the IDF’s ability to strike Hezbollah (as happened in September 2024) but the resilience of Israeli society. In February 2023, a month after the Israeli government launched its judicial reform, he stated that Israel was disintegrating from within:

For the first time since the creation of [Israel], we hear speeches from the entity’s president and former prime ministers Lapid, Bennett, Olmert, and Barak along with former defense ministers and generals who talk about civil war and bloodshed and say that there is no solution to the challenges posed by the new government. God willing, it will not reach its 80th birthday. (Nasrallah, 2023)

This is the same view as Sinwar’s.

Ultimately, Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, a day after the war in the Gaza Strip began. Almost a month later, in a speech to his supporters, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah’s goal was to support the Palestinian front (Nasrallah, 2023). On November 3, 2023, Nasrallah again addressed Hezbollah supporters and reintroduced the ideology that his organization seeks to turn into reality:

To the families of the martyrs, I also say: your sons and loved ones have gone forth today into battle upon this earth. If we were to search, and we have always said this in the past, if we were to search for a battle that is entirely legitimate from the human, moral, and religious perspective, we would not find a battle like the one against these Zionists, the invaders and occupiers of Palestine. This is a battle beyond dispute: on the human, moral, and religious-legal levels. Therefore, it is one of the clearest, greatest, and most evident manifestations of fighting in the path of God, may He be exalted. This is what we all must know. (Nasrallah, 2023)

Nasrallah’s overestimation of the Axis of Resistance’s ability to wipe Israel out of the Middle East is apparently shared within Hezbollah. Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druze, who became close to Hezbollah after his release from prison in Israel, stated in 2008 that “The resistance will end only when the Zionist entity disappears. The idea that Israel is an invincible, secure state has become a myth” (Gross, 2008). This uncompromising ideology and belief of Hezbollah has never changed but has instead served as a moral compass for Hezbollah to display self-confidence in its ability to achieve the vision of destroying the Zionist entity. Muhammad Ra’ad, the head of the Hezbollah bloc in the Lebanese Parliament, said in April 2022 that “the resistance only needs $9 billion and there will be nothing left called Israel in the region” (Weinthal, 2022). Nabil Qaouk, deputy head of Hezbollah’s executive council, also stated in February 2024 that Israel’s appeal to international institutions and the United States to assist in returning evacuees to the northern settlement is a clear sign of Israeli military weakness:

If Israel were not weaker than a spider’s house, it would not have appealed to the US and Western countries to return settlers to northern settlements, it would not have asked the UN and world powers to implement Security Council Resolution 1701, and it would not have urged the United States and 20 other states to protect shipping safety in the Red Sea. (Press TV, 2024)

In the end, the assessment of Israel’s shortcomings based on a deeply fixed belief that may lie in the rigid ideology to destroy the Zionist entity failed the test of reality.

Ali Khamenei and Iran

Of the three failures analyzed in this study, the Iranian failure is perhaps the most surprising, because the Iranians still decided to confront Israel despite Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s failures. We offer to analyze this decision as an outcome of rigid ideology and the Iranian assessment that Israel is weak and vulnerable. The primary sources on which the following analysis is based indicate the depth of Iran’s involvement in the preparations for the October 2023 attack. The documents, which include efforts to build the Axis of Resistance’s capabilities, do not at all refer to the enemy’s (i.e., Israel’s) resilience according to the parameters we outlined above.

Iran’s underestimation of Israel’s defense capability and demonstration of national resilience have been ongoing since at least 2015. In mid-2021, shortly after the military confrontation between Israel and Hamas, Ali Khamenei stated:

The divine test of these few days made the Palestinian people proud. The savage enemy was correctly recognized to be incapable against the unified uprising of the Palestinian people. […] [T]he evil regime will become even weaker. The readiness of the Palestinian youth and the saber-rattling of the valuable jihad groups will increasingly make Palestine stronger and the aggressor enemy more powerless and despicable. (IRNA, 2021)

Khamenei was not the only one in Iran who underestimated Israel. In mid-2023, Ibrahim Raisi visited Damascus and made the following assessment: “[Israel is] weaker than ever and resistance fighters stronger than ever. […] [The enemy is] very vulnerable” (Iran Front Page, 2023). A year later, in April 2024, Raisi linked ideology with net assessment during his speech to commemorate Jerusalem (Quds) Day:

Today, thanks to the zeal and courage of the Palestinians, it has become clear to everyone that the house of cards of Zionism is weaker than a spider’s house. […] [T]he world will watch the fulfilment of God’s true promise and the destruction of the Zionist regime. (Tehran Times, 2024a)

On October 10, 2023, Ayatollah Khamenei said that Iran was not involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel, but he hailed what he called Israel’s irreparable military and intelligence defeat: “This destructive earthquake (Hamas’s attack) has destroyed some critical structures (in Israel) which will not be repaired easily” (Reuters, 2023). The Iranian leader’s statement reflects an assessment that Israel is weak and will not be able to recover from the attack. The inability to recover from a military blow is a clear expression of a lack of resilience. This assessment was based, among other things, on the extensive assistance that Iran provided to Hamas in preparation for the October 7 attack. This support had several dimensions:

Providing financial support. In December 2022, Iran agreed to transfer $7 million in monthly aid to help Hamas prepare for its next military conflict.

Iran’s overestimation of Hamas’s ability to defeat Israel was not based solely on the aid provided. Saeed Izadi, head of the Quds Force’s Terrorism Branch, was directly involved in the preparations for the October 7 attack. Immediately after the May 2021 confrontation (Operation Guardian of the Walls), Izadi was the main coordinator between all the resistance elements (Hamas, Hezbollah) to prepare the attack. The name given to the attack, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (Tufan Al-Aqsa), was intended to convey the Axis of Resistance’s great confidence that it could defeat Israel. In the summer of 2022, the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah assessed that the scenario of Israel’s destruction was realistic. Izadi asked senior figures from both Hamas and Hezbollah to examine the matter, and it was agreed that Khamenei would decide on the issue (Hanieh, 2022).

The fact that Sinwar and Nasrallah were killed by the Israeli army in September 2024 should have been an early sign for Iran to rethink its course regarding Israel’s forces and capabilities. Even the deaths of thousands of Hamas and Hezbollah operatives and the continuation of the military campaign did not change the Iranian assessment, which, as mentioned, is based on a clear ideology and vision. Based on its ideology to destroy Israel, in the first quarter of 2023, the Iranian assessment converged with that of Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran’s proxy organizations proposed three alternatives for the confrontation with Israel: crush the Israeli occupation and break its capabilities without direct Iranian involvement; exhaust Israel through rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon; or unify all fronts (including the West Bank and Arab citizens of Israel). At the same time, Iran drew excessive confidence in the ability of the Axis of Resistance as a result of the public statements made by representatives of all the organizations (the Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria) that are part of the axis and pledged to stand alongside Iran (Sinwar, 2023). Interestingly, in all primary sources that were found in Gaza, including correspondence with Iran’s leadership, there is no analysis by Iran (or Hezbollah or Hamas) of Israel’s ability to withstand a major attack, which sharpens the question of what lies behind the numerous statements by the leaders of the Axis of Resistance about the axis’s ability to destroy Israel.

In August 2024, almost a year after the war began and after Israel announced that it was responsible for the assassination of Ismail Haniyah on Iranian soil, Ali Bagheri, a senior Iranian official, said that Israel had made a serious strategic mistake: “The Zionists are in no position to start a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran” (Al-Mayadin, 2024). A month later, Iran’s foreign minister said that “Israel is on the verge of defeat” (Tehran Times, 2024b). While Israel showed both intelligence and operational capabilities through its strike on Haniyah, the Iranian net assessment was likely that Israel would fail to survive against the Axis of Resistance’s power.

Summary and Conclusion

Having understood that a perception of reality is based on beliefs, interests, and values taken for granted within a specific society, community, or organization—all of which are rigid and unshakeable—the result may be a “correct” translation of reality. In the event of a collision between two parties with different goals and visions, there is a high probability of a conflict or war. The three test cases of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran and their perceptions of reality in the face of the enemy, Israel, point to several inherent features that are the result of an uncompromising ideology and caused them to fail to achieve their goals.

In all three cases, members of the Axis of Resistance had exaggerated self-belief regarding their ability to defeat Israel. The primary sources analyzed in this study outline the process of military buildup and preparations for a large-scale campaign, as well as a belief that victory was imminent. Numerous public statements in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 2023 (and indeed since October 7) reflect the Axis leaders’ belief that victory was imminent. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran did not factor Israel’s resilience, which has been reinforced by the rally around the flag effect following the October 7 attack, into their assessment of the situation. Their (mis)conception was that internal disagreements within Israel regarding the nature of Israeli society would lead to disintegration and weaken it. This ideological feature produced two linked but different trends. On the one hand, the underestimation of Israel was used to justify their overestimation of their ability. Hamas came to express that the balance of power between the organization and Israel was now in its favor. This intensified in 2023 after the Israeli government launched its legal reforms. On the other hand, it became the fundamental error of the three elements. None of them paid much attention to the fact that for the Israelis, the October 7 attack was perceived as an existential threat.

All of the information gathered indicates that at no point since October 2023 has the trajectory been recalculated to examine Israel’s performance on the battlefield or its internal situation—for example, the freezing of legal reforms, the high percentage of people conscripted to defend the homeland, or large-scale civil society activity. It would be reasonable to imply that this is because cohesion around an external enemy as a strategic choice can be kept if they cling to their belief. The necessity to understand the ideological features of the Axis of Resistance was reinforced by the October 7 attack. It has been described as an incident that revealed Israel’s failure to deter Hamas. It has also been pointed out that Hamas gave Israel a false sense of security, letting it believe that its deterrence was working (Milton-Edwards et al., 2024, p. 9). The sources referenced in this study indicate that Hamas’s, Hezbollah’s, and Iran’s leaders adopted a strategic approach: waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack Israel while steadily consolidating their systems.

It has to be said that the reality in the Middle East as of the second half of 2025 is far from the vision of the Axis of Resistance: Hamas’s chain of command has been eliminated and the movement is struggling to maintain its grip on Gaza; Hezbollah’s leadership, including Nasrallah, has been eliminated and the organization is struggling to survive both militarily and politically in the Lebanese domestic arena; and Iran suffered from airstrikes from Israel for two weeks in June 2025 and responded with long-range missile fire, which, despite the destruction and casualties caused, did not dismantle Israeli society.

Looking ahead, the next round of military escalation is a matter of time: the rigid ideology of Iran and its proxies and the fact that the Iranians are seeking to regain national pride is a recipe for more violence between Tehran and Jerusalem. The intensity of the conflict is more difficult to predict and depends on variables such as waste of resources, damage on the home front, internal pressure (as much as it exists in Iran and Israel), and diplomatic pressure to end hostilities to negotiate a long ceasefire, which has not yet occurred since the confrontation between the sides in June 2025.