Martin Kramer writes, in part:

There is something perverse in the notion that Hamas “won” by merely surviving. Robert Malley has said that that “for Hamas, it was about showing that they could stay in place without giving way, and from this point of view it has achieved its main objective.” This was not its “main objective” by any stretch of the imagination. Rashid Khalidi has written that “like Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, all [Hamas] has to do in order to proclaim victory is remain standing.” But Hamas had a specific objective—lifting the “siege”—which was altogether different from the objective of Hezbollah. This objective Hamas manifestly failed to achieve. It also failed to achieve the secondary objective it shared with Hezbollah: inflicting Israeli military casualties. It defies logic to declare the mere survival of Hamas to be a triumph, given that Hamas openly declared a much larger objective, and Israel never made the military destruction of Hamas an objective.
War is only the pursuit of politics by other means, and anything could happen going forward. Israel could forfeit its war gains by inept diplomacy—something for which there is ample Israeli precedent. Hamas could parley its setback into a diplomatic gain—something for which there is ample Arab precedent. But I think there is little doubt that at the end of the war, Israel had achieved many of its stated objectives, and Hamas had not.
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If the “siege” of Gaza is signficiantly eased or lifted (which I still think is unlikely), it won’t be because Palestinian “resistance” forced Israel’s hand. It will be because Palestinian suffering has weighed on the conscience of others. That’s a very old story, and there’s nothing new or “heroic” about it. Those who’ve promised to liberate Jerusalem and Palestine by arms are (again) begging the world for sacks of flour.