Uki Chowdhury, Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University

The modern Israel–Hamas war transcends conventional military paradigms, representing an evolved interplay between state-sponsored counterinsurgency and hybrid-warfare-influenced non-state insurgency and transnational corporate engagement. Hamas, the model non-state actor, integrates military capabilities with political influence and extensive social infrastructure, disrupting Israel’s security doctrine that has developed to counter less conventional state rivals and more irregular, asymmetric foes. This war is waged on multidimensional battlefields—military, informational, psychological, and economic—where private corporate interests, global supply chains, and digital technologies now take center stage (Maoz 2020). This essay examines how hybrid warfare, proxy politics, urban warfare, and corporate facilitators cumulatively redefine strategic calculation in the Israel–Palestine war, reconstructing conventional concepts of power and deterrence in 21st-century strategic studies.

HAMAS AS A NON-STATE STRATEGIC ACTOR

Hamas was created and fabricated in 1987, during the First Intifada, marking a paradigmatic shift in strategic studies; the rising importance of armed non-state actors with social and political legitimacy. The movement amalgamates Islamist ideology and national resistance, functioning at one and the same time as a military movement, a political party, and a social service provider within Gaza (Levitt 2006). Its Qassam Brigades developed paramilitary capacities that reflect a hybrid approach toward warfare, including short- and medium-range rockets, a tunnel warfare system, and improvised explosive devices (IDF 2023), thus escaping all conventional categorizations of warfare. Hamas’s military strategy is asymmetric in logic—making up for its conventional disadvantages with guerrilla warfare, fighting in urban environments, and exploiting the psychological impact of unpredictability. It seeks to maximize embeddedness within civilian infrastructure to complicate Israel’s capability to use force without incurring international condemnation (Cohen and Efroni 2019). Such dynamics manifest broader patterns of fourth- generation warfare, wherein distinctions between combatants and civilians, battlefield and home front, are blurred (Lind 2004).

ISRAEL’S STRATEGIC DOCTRINE: ADAPTING TO ASYMMETRY

Israel’s strategic culture has, for quite some time, given preemption, rapid mobilization of forces, and deterrence a supreme place, based on its historical experience of existential wars against neighboring states. However, the post-2000 security framework witnessed a re-orientation by this doctrine to focus more in asymmetric threats against state-like actors such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. The Dahiya Doctrine, pronounced during the 2006 Lebanon War and subsequently used in various operations in Gaza, is perhaps the most eloquent articulation of this shift (Inbar and Shamir 2013). It stresses the use of disproportionate force, the destruction of systemic infrastructure, and psychological deterrence to prevent these groups from fighting in the future. Yet, Hamas’s resilience and ability to adapt to every Israeli attack have shown the limits of kinetic superiority. Following that, Israel has focused on investing in intelligence fusion, urban warfare capabilities and, particularly, digital surveillance-from drone reconnaissance up to AI-enhanced targeting systems (Shavit and Kober 2021). Nevertheless, the human shields used by Hamas, the tunnel networks that lie beneath civilians, and the media-blame have undermined most of Israel’s tactical advantages with the use of issues like international scrutiny and diplomatic fallout (UN OHCHR 2024).

HYBRID WARFARE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

The Gaza battlefield illustrates the operationalization of hybrid warfare, where irregular militancy merges with information warfare, civil resistance, and diplomacy. Hamas complements its rocket attacks with psychological operations, such as spreading images of civilian casualties or Israeli strikes on infrastructure, to galvanize international sympathy and domestic legitimacy (Milton-Edwards 2018). It also weaponizes narratives of occupation and apartheid, successfully reframing the strategic contest as one between oppressor and oppressed in global discourse.

This war of narratives plays out on social media, encrypted messaging apps, and the Diaspora, where information turns into a force multiplier. And Israel, despite its own military superiority, is increasingly compelled to justify its operations in global forums, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, where legitimacy, not lethality, defines victory (Barak 2023). These are, therefore, the new psychological and symbolic dimensions of strategic outcomes.

PROXY SUPPORT AND TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS

The strategic capabilities of Hamas are fortified considerably by being part of a regional axis of resistance where it finds support from Iran, Hezbollah, and elements of the Syrian regime both materially and ideologically. Rocket designs, training, and financial assistance have been given by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), thus making it possible for Hamas to build up its arsenal further from primitive Qassam rockets-extension to longer- ranging ones-with more precision (Levitt 2019). It is this fact which transforms Hamas from that form of insurgency known as local into a proxy actor within a broader balance-of-power competition at the regional level.

Use of networked proxies thus allows Iran and other countries to raise their pressure on Israel while keeping plausible deniability, further complicating Israeli deterrent models. Since this is a decentralized form of conflict, accountability is diluted, making further action internationally difficult and strategically ambiguous. The end result being a condition of strategic entanglement, where direct action against one actor could either precipitate or cascade a regional escalation scenario (Byman 2020).

GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AS STRATEGIC ENABLERS

Yet an underexplored and increasingly central dimension of this conflict will be how multinational corporations facilitate Israeli strategic operations. These actors are not generally understood as being within the borders of the battlefield, but do condition their boundaries through technological, logistical, and infrastructural support. In July 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese published her report “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide”, identifying over 60 corporations— including Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, and major financial institutions—as materially supporting Israel’s military infrastructure, surveillance systems, occupation logistics, and settlement expansion (Albanese 2025a). Albanese asserts that these firms are complicit in an “economy of genocide,” profiting from the destruction of civilian infrastructure and suppression of Palestinian communities (Albanese 2025b).

She urges legal accountability—calling for sanctions against these corporations, investigations by the International Criminal Court and national judiciaries, and adoption of due-diligence mechanisms within corporate operations (Albanese 2025b). This corporate participation transforms the Gaza conflict into a globalized security ecosystem, where financial capital, technology platforms, and private supply chains are as instrumental to military strategy as tanks or missiles. The participation of such actors complicates issues of sovereignty, legal responsibility, and the privatization of war. Companies like Caterpillar Inc., whose bulldozers are used in demolitions and military engineering, have been criticized for facilitating the occupation and destruction of civilian infrastructure (UN HRC 2024). Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense contractor, supplies drone surveillance systems and border technologies integral to the blockade of Gaza and control of the West Bank. Similarly, Albemarle, a U.S.-based chemical company, was named in UN reports for indirect involvement through supply chains with security implications.

Moreover, Project Nimbus-a cloud computing contract of $1.2 billion between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government-prepares Israel for a future in digital infrastructure embracing the whole military and intelligence sector (Abunimah 2022). Ethical questions arise from the militarization of resident civilian tech platforms alongside the role of corporations in endorsing human rights violations. Such developments reveal a shifting strategic environment where private sector actors hold decisive influence over national security outcomes. Corporate entanglement transforms the Israel–Palestine conflict into a globalized security ecosystem, where capital, code, and supply chains matter as much as tanks and missiles.

CONCLUSION

The Israeli-Hamas conflict manifests the characteristics of modern warfare, stretching beyond national boundaries, conventional armies, or traditional theaters of combat. This warfare occurs in urban alleyways, cyberspace, corporate boardrooms, and international legal forums. Hamas’s hybrid method of armed resistance, sustained by proxy alliances and the ideological legitimacy that grounds it, challenges, and continues to challenge Israel’s conventional deterrence doctrines. In response, Israel has leaned into advanced technologies, preemptive doctrines, and increasingly controversial partnerships with global corporations. However, the strategic landscape is far more than militarized, financialized, technologized, and symbolically contested. The engagement of private actors brings to the fore what international bodies have flagged as a gray line between globalized economic interests and geopolitical alignment, prompting urgent questions about accountability, sovereignty, and the privatization of war. For the modern analysts of strategic thought in the 21st century, the paradigm should shift away from the Cold War’s state-centric terms and look more deeply at the multifaceted field of contemporary conflict-non-state insurgents, one might add, internationally multinational firms in equal parts now integrated into the theater of war.

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