Israel’s security services are now wrestling with what Donald Rumsfeld famously called a series of “known unknowns.” They consider Hamas severely hamstrung (even after reaffirming its ties to the West Bank–based Palestinian Authority by forming a unity government), having abetted the suffering of its citizens and having lost substantial regional prestige. (Many Arab nations remained uncommonly silent as the Israelis struck Gaza.)

Mishal, however, remains defiant. He contends that the world, repulsed by the carnage, has rushed to support the Palestinian cause and the people of Gaza. In contrast to Israel, he says, “we won the ‘moral’ battle. We focused on targeting the troops who attacked us, while they killed the women and children. . . . This is the real image of the battle.” Mishal’s unity-government partner Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, takes an antithetical view. Last week he told Egyptian television, “I don’t delude myself by saying, ‘It was a victory.’ What victory? . . . For what did we suffer through those 50 days? We had 2,200 fatalities, 10,000 injured, 40,000 homes and facilities and factories destroyed. Tell me, what did we achieve?”

When asked how Hamas’s purported desire to spare civilians comported with the fact that it fired 4,600 rockets at population centers in Israel, Mishal explains, “When rockets are fired out of Gaza, they are fired on military targets. The accuracy of such rockets is limited. So, they sometimes miss their targets. That’s why, when we acquire the smart, accurate rockets, striking of military targets will be more accurate.”

Israel’s troops, meanwhile, have moved north. On *Vanity Fair’*s recent visit, some of the same soldiers who had swept into Gaza are now manning a forward operating base in the Golan Heights—a contested mountainous area between Israel and Syria. The Israelis watch as the Syrian Army (unsuccessfully) battles rebels from the Nusra Front (the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda). These insurgents, after kidnapping and later expelling U.N. peacekeepers in September, have reignited a border that had remained peaceful for four decades. Recently, Israel shot down a Syrian aircraft that strayed into its territory. And to make matters worse, ISIS elements are entrenched farther north, attempting to establish a caliphate, using war-torn Syria and Iraq as their base.

Tensions have also escalated on Israel’s other northern border—with Lebanon. In the past week a member of the Syrian opposition was quoted as telling CNN that Hezbollah appears determined to flex its military muscle on the Israeli border. I.D.F. troops have fortified their positions there. And Israel has other worries as well. Sources in these northern neighborhoods tell Vanity Fair that the I.D.F. is planning to send an engineering team to one of the Israeli towns whose residents have been awakened by the subterranean clamor. Although some officials are publicly skeptical (possibly to avoid alarming residents and parry criticism that they have ignored another threat), privately they say they have serious concerns about what Hezbollah might have in the works. A recent account in the Arab newsmagazine Al Watan al Arabi quotes a Hezbollah member as asserting: “Quality-wise, [our tunnels] are on par with the metro tunnels in the major European cities.”

“We say in the I.D.F. that ‘procedures are written in blood,’” says one senior intelligence officer. Harkening back to previous aboveground attacks by Hezbollah, he continues, “I can see them doing it again and going underground to do it.”

And the goal of at least one of these Israeli platoons scheduled to arrive on the border with Lebanon? To plow deep into the ground to find and, hopefully, silence the source of those noises in the night.