A few weeks ago, I met a senior officer of the Israeli Defence Force at the military HQ in Tel Aviv. The conversation turned to the then campaign in the West Bank against Hamas. He suggested a kind of normality about the situation. After all, he added, the Israeli military had been fighting Hamas for many a year.

It was only later, thinking about what he had said, that his comment stood out, as did the question I should have asked; the question that should be answered not only by Israel's generals and political leaders but by Hamas's leadership as well.

Why, in the midst of the third war of its kind since late 2008, does either side believe there will be a different outcome than the two conflicts in Gaza that preceded it, most recently two years ago? Because the towering, venal stupidity of the current conflict in Gaza is that it will change nothing at all. Despite the rhetoric from both sides, Israel cannot win, any more than Hamas can lose.

Perhaps worse than that is the fact that many Israeli officials understand that a defeat of Hamas in the terms regularly trotted out to the Israeli public is not, in any case, in the country's interest, since it would allow the emergence and empowerment of other more radical groups.

What we have witnessed in the past few days, in a conflict that has seen residential areas targeted by bombs, missiles and naval gunfire, is a conflict of limited and murky ambition – war as an act of retaliatory grandstanding and violence as a form of negotiation. On the Israeli side, Binyamin Netanyahu, despite being lukewarm about the operation in its run-up, has been pushed by the more hardline members of his cabinet to hit Gaza hard. In that respect, it has been a war of politics as much as Israeli public safety.

The rocket fire out of Gaza, the claimed cause of the conflict either, did not come out of the blue. It escalated out of a growing tit-for-tat exchange that saw ceasefire violations on both sides, the worst of them being triggered by a night of heavy air raids that followed the discovery of the bodies of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers. There was also the massive clampdown on Hamas – blamed for the teenagers' murders – on the West Bank that saw hundreds of Palestinians rounded up in night raids.

Behind all that, however, almost forgotten now was another fateful calculation. Pushed again by domestic political considerations in his coalition, Netanyahu gambled – as the US-sponsored peace talks collapsed – that no peace process would mean a return to the status quo. But the absence of a peace process has brought a dangerous escalation of tension and conflict.

From Hamas's point of view, the calculation has been equally cynical and short-term. Weakened by its increasing isolation, including the blockade imposed by the new, military-led government in Egypt, it has found itself in an increasingly difficult political and financial situation.

Hamas has rationalised that inviting a conflict, while potentially bloody, will see Israel struggle to defeat it. For despite Israeli claims that Gaza is "a hostage of Hamas", the truth is that a large enough percentage of the population – perhaps as much as 30% – supports it, enough to make that claim nonsensical. And Hamas has rationalised, too, that when ordinary Gazans are suffering under Israeli bombs, they are more likely to support it.

Figuring that the war will end shortly with mediation, as previous wars have done, it has set out its stall of equally limited demands: a return to the status quo ante of the last ceasefire arrangement negotiated with Egypt in 2012; an end to Israeli meddling in the unity government backed by Hamas; and an Israeli cessation of hostilities.

So what will this war buy with the blood of the all dead? Not an end to the conflict but a period of calm for Israelis that will end again, necessarily, because the underlying conflict still exists. Politically, perhaps, it will guarantee that the febrile rightwing coalition of Netanyahu lasts another year or longer with him at its helm.

And it will end as the last two Gazan conflicts have ended. Egypt, a historic broker of ceasefires in Gaza, will calculate a point when Hamas has been hurt enough and public opinion over its inaction is beginning to become damaging. It will step in with a deal that will see it talk once again, albeit in a limited fashion, to Israel – and at last to regulate a situation it does not want to see spiral out of control.

Then this stupidest of wars will stop.

Israel's tanks will pull back to their bases. The Gazan rocket teams will lick their wounds, rebuild their arsenals in the metal shops and commission new murals for the walls to sanctify their fallen dead in the public memory.

And the civilian dead will stay dead, discarded pieces in a pointless game of chess.