This was meant to be Mr. Netanyahu’s November surprise ahead of the national elections to secure his victory and yet increasingly it is becoming obvious that this strategy was fraught with huge risks to begin with and has already backfired. As a result, should truce hold and a ground invasion averted, then Netanyahu will likely be the main casualty of Operation Pillar of Defense.

Why? Because Netanyahu and his team simply did not anticipate Hamas’s newly-acquired long-range rocket capability threatening deep inside Israel. Put simply, Hamas’s possession of Fajr-5 rockets represent a long-term game-changer that chip away at Israel’s traditional sense of total military dominance and, as a result, Hamas should be taken more seriously as a powerful foe than ever in the past.

Of course, this is not the first time that the simple introduction of a new weapon shifts the balance of forces. We saw that with the U.S. stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahedin during the 1980s — that proved a decisive factor in the eventual withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan following their conclusion that the human and physical toll of their invasion had become too costly. Perhaps the Israelis will soon come to the same conclusion with respect to their undeclared war on Gaza.

Netanyahu

With its disciplined force of some 15,000 military personnel involved in the rocket branch alone, Hamas has evolved into a powerful fighting force that has in effect rendered useless Israel’s tall separation walls, electric fences and barb wires, by the simple fact that its rockets can paralyze normal life in southern Israel and beyond for extended periods of time, i.e., an intolerable situation from the Israeli vantage point. Even if the actual physical damage is not great, the psychological effect and other geopolitical ramifications are unmistakable.

This might explain Hamas’s new confidence illustrated in its demand for the lifting of the blockade as a precondition for a truce. As the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tours the region in a much-delayed truce initiative, the entire U.S. policy of ignoring Hamas is put under new scrutiny, reflecting a failed U.S. strategy that is simply unworkable. The U.S. must reckon with Hamas, and the sooner the better.

On the other hand, in case Israel decides to go into Gaza and the truce efforts fail, then the political and diplomatic costs will grow for Israel no matter what happens on the ground. The war is a poisonous pill for the Israeli economy and the longer it lasts it sets back its ailing economy further, thus adding to Mr. Netanyahu’s political woes. Already, his Gaza provocations eliciting Hamas’s powerful response has soured Israel’s already frosty relations with regional powers such as Turkey and, consequently, Netanyahu is deprived of ability to boast of even a half-successful regional foreign policy. Truth is that this is a government in a crisis of its own making and the sooner the voters opt for a wiser and more peace-oriented new leadership to steer their country out of the current quagmire, the better.