Lead — Operation “Gideon’s Chariots” did not truly begin on May 16, 2025. Its matrix lies in the October 2011 Shalit exchange. The more the international environment tightens, the more Hamas’s actions reinforce Israel’s security posture — which in turn feeds back and strengthens itself. The biblical baptism of 2025 merely officialized a logic already at work fourteen years earlier.
In the first part of this analysis, I posed the question that jumps out at everyone but that no one asks and to which no one really wants to have to respond:
- If Israel possessed an occult power to manipulate radical Islam, it would undoubtedly not obtain anything better than what Hamas naturally offers it? The question, it is true, thus provides its own answer: Gideon unofficially began in 2011. The name given in 2025 is not a mere dressing; it is the admission of a continuity.
With increasing international intensity (geopolitical shock, diplomatic pressure, hostage cycles), Hamas’s actions expand Israel’s politico-military latitude (security, internal coalition, external image).
Conversely, certain Israeli decisions reinforce Hamas’s strategic utility in the overall narrative. This coupling forms a co-production loop, with observable consequences:
- Each « strike » by Hamas (rockets, incursions, underground operations) re-legitimizes Israel’s maximal response (ground operations, refusal of truce, displacement doctrine).
- Israeli hardening requalifies Hamas as a central actor, to the detriment of Palestinian political alternatives.
- The more the international scene ignites, the more the curve of credibility for Israel’s security narrative rises—and with it, the space for action.
It is not with a light heart—because it opens a dizzying core—that I see myself breaking the myth, but the operation « The Chariots of Gideon » did not truly begin on May 16, 2025.
Its founding act is situated much earlier: in October 2011, during the so disproportionate exchange of Gilad Shalit for 1027 Palestinian prisoners.
What seemed then like an insane imbalance—one single Israeli soldier against a crowd of cadres—was not so unbalanced in light of the facts. The Israeli prison is not a neutral space: it is a laboratory.
The long years of detention become a field of observation, profiling, sometimes conditioning.
The Shin Bet and the prison administration—to Israeli democracy to separate the wheat from the chaff—have transformed captivity into a matrix: learning Hebrew, studying the adversary’s military strategy, internal reorganization by clans. The future leaders of Hamas gained stature there, but also total exposure to the enemy’s gaze.
There is no other explanation, that is not far-fetched, in the face of the facts:
- Yahya Sinwar, released in 2011, is the glaring example: « Butcher of Khan Younis » yesterday, undisputed leader of Hamas afterward, until becoming the architect of October 7, 2023.
- Alongside him, other released individuals—Mazen Faqha, Zaher Jabarin, Fursan Khalifa—resumed key roles in finances, military direction, reorganization of the movement.
So many trajectories that prove, or at the very least give undeniable density to the bundle of presumptions, that the release was not a strategic defeat for Israel, but rather the opening of an invisible theater of control over Hamas.
Gideon, invoked to describe the terminal operation launched by the IDF, says that. There was no weakness; there was cunning.
Israel has since shown that it is a master in the art of infiltrating its enemies. The coordinated execution of Hezbollah cadres by the simultaneous explosion of their mobile phones, even in Iran, was the proud demonstration.
Why would it have acted differently in 2011?
The Shalit exchange was not a gift, but an extremely powerful maneuver. By releasing men it had deeply mapped, while being intransigent and cruel with Marwan Barghouti, publicly humiliated a week ago, we understand that Israel took the calculated risk of relaunching a dynamic it believed itself capable of controlling to produce the elements of tension and drama in the present situation.
This situation forces Israel’s destiny to align with the grand horizon.
The name came only later, like a biblical seal placed on a continuity.
Since 2011, Israel has carried within itself this logic: letting the adversary it knows intimately and undoubtedly manipulates grow, in order to better crush it at the chosen moment and complete its transformation by manifesting in broad daylight its messianic dimension, until then contained.
October 7, 2023, and the indelible « Sacrifice of the Innocents » that it fixes forever in memory, opened this gigantic fault.
En attendant la Renaissance 