In 22 days of fighting that ended with a unilateral Israeli cease-fire Sunday, 1,285 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. By contrast, the Israel Defense Forces lost only 10 soldiers and three civilians killed during their three-week operation, and several of the soldiers were killed accidentally by their own side in "friendly fire" incidents.

Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, therefore proved itself to be militarily vastly inferior to Hezbollah, the Shiite Party of God in southern Lebanon that was able to stand its ground and inflict unexpectedly high casualties on the Israeli army during the brief miniwar of July 2006.

Further, as we have noted in previous analyses, the Israeli army performed far more effectively during this conflict in Gaza than it did against Hezbollah 2-1/2 years ago. This was in large part due to the vastly improved training programs of the army and the far superior leadership it enjoyed in the current conflict.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, proved far more competent and successful than their hapless predecessors, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and former Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, during the Hezbollah miniwar.

Halutz, a former Israeli air force commander, was confident that airstrikes alone would pulverize Hezbollah in its well-prepared positions, and he showed no competence at all in directing ground forces in the land war. Ashkenazi, by contrast, a tough and highly experienced ground combat soldier, mastered all the complex tactical dangers of urban fighting and used his overwhelming firepower in ways Hamas had no answer to.

However, as we warned and predicted in these columns, the Israelis proved ignorant of several crucial principles of war at the strategic level, and, as a result, having won all the battles in Gaza easily, they look likely to suffer far more from the political and strategic consequences of their partial victory.

First, the Israelis pulled out of Gaza without having evicted Hamas from control of the densely populated territory of 1.4 million people. Hamas therefore had the last laugh. It survived the overwhelming Israeli military onslaught and lived to tell the tale.

Second, as a result, Hamas soared in popularity on the West Bank, which is ruled -- feebly -- by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The 27-nation European Union, the new U.S. government of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference all want Abbas to stay in power and become a credible leader of the Palestinian people in a revived peace process with Israel.

However, all these 85 governments ruling more than 1.8 billion people will fail for a simple reason: Abbas has almost no credibility left with the Palestinian people on the West Bank, and if elections were held there tomorrow -- and they are scheduled to be held before the end of this year -- Hamas would sweep to a landslide victory, just as it did in Gaza in 2006.

As if that is not enough, Israel's very success in killing a significant number of key Hamas leaders during this three-week war did not decapitate the organization but likely will energize it with the blood of martyrs. That has been an all too common consequence of this kind of military operation, carried out without either sufficient ruthlessness or any real political strategy to accompany it.

The lessons for Hamas and Israel from Irish history
In April 1916 an unrepresentative handful of Irish Republicans, widely regarded at the time as extremists, staged a desperate, gallant and utterly doomed rising in the city of Dublin, capital of Ireland, against the British Empire. They never had a chance.

The British Empire was then the largest in the history of the world. It controlled the resources and military potential of one-quarter of the land territories of the Earth and one-quarter of the human race. The rising was crushed within days. Those leaders who were captured alive were rapidly executed by firing squad. One of them, James Connolly, already a dying man from wounds he had received during the fighting, could not even stand on his own feet when he was shot.

Within two years those dead nationalist leaders were revered martyrs, and after World War I their example inspired the first successful guerrilla war of modern times against any occupying imperial power. In 1921 a British government led by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill was forced to give most of Ireland its independence.

This Irish example contains sobering lessons for the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that approved the three-week military incursion into Gaza to stop the bombardment of Israel by rockets fired by Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.

The Israelis, like the British in Dublin in 1916, were fighting for their own national security. Like the British, they had overwhelming conventional military superiority, and like the British, they inflicted far heavier casualties than they suffered. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 1,285 Palestinians were killed in the conflict. Israel lost only 10 soldiers, several of them killed by friendly fire, plus three civilians.

However, the Israelis in Gaza, like the British in Dublin in 1916, devastated heavily populated areas with heavy weapons to win their victory. At a tactical level, as we have noted in previous analyses, their performance was vastly superior to their bungled miniwar against Hezbollah in July 2006. Unlike Hezbollah, Hamas was extremely unimpressive in its military response, and it lost at least three of its key leaders, killed in Israeli strikes.

If you kill enough leaders of any political or guerrilla movement, you will decapitate it. But as the IRA showed after 1916, losing an entire cadre of older, more conventional leaders with no regard of military effectiveness behind them often can clear the way for far more deadly, ruthless and efficient leaders to rapidly rise up in their place. That was what happened in Ireland, where the place of Patrick Pearse, Connolly and the other gallant but doomed leaders of 1916 was taken by the brilliant, relentless Michael Collins, the founding father and architect of modern guerrilla war. Within five years of the Easter Rising being crushed, the British Empire had been driven out of most of Ireland after a presence there of almost 800 years.

The Israelis, in fact, do not want to reoccupy Gaza, which they rapidly conquered in their 1956 and 1967 military victories against Egypt. But they do want to end Hamas' control of it and the use of Gaza to continually bombard Israeli settlements, towns and vital installations across the border. However, with Hamas riding high from its landslide victory in the 2006 Gaza elections, achieving those aims is easier said than done.

The Israelis hope that by leveling so much of Gaza, inflicting such significant casualties on Hamas and killing some of its leaders, they have taught a lesson of deterrence to their enemy. In the very short term, that may well prove to be the case. But Hamas' leadership cadres have not suffered in depth from their tactical defeat, and with 1.4 million people in Gaza to recruit from, the loss of a few hundred youthful fighters looks unlikely to inconvenience them for long.

The Irish example from more than 90 years ago teaches the salutary lesson that whatever the superiority of one's army and weapons system, winning tactical battles without any competent political strategy to take advantage of the success is only a recipe for more and worse wars.

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