In July 2024, when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited presidential candidate Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Netanyahu was pictured presenting Trump with a baseball cap that said “Total Victory.”

It was a reference not to Trump’s electoral hopes but to Israel’s war aims following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. Israel demanded the return of all the kidnapped hostages. It also sought the elimination of the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza. And it wanted to extinguish the capability of Hamas, or of any other terrorist organization, to launch another Oct. 7-style surprise attack on Israel.

Nearly three years after Oct. 7, 2023, it’s easy to forget all the subsequent twists and turns. One great achievement of “In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman, is reminding readers of all the victories Israel has achieved since the day of the attack.

Even readers who have followed the war closely may find themselves cheered to recall that during a few days in December 2024, after Bashar Assad’s Iran-allied regime in Syria was toppled, “Israel destroyed the major assets of the Syrian military: Chemical weapons, air-defense batteries, combat aircraft, helicopters, drones, the naval fleet, weapons stockpiles, production facilities, and even tanks.”

In only two days, “Israel carried out 480 strikes, wiping out an estimated 70 percent of Syria’s strategic capabilities. A Syrian rebel commander told the Syria Direct news outlet that it would take decades to rebuild the Syrian army.”

In Gaza, Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It killed Yahya Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed Sinwar, who took over Hamas in Gaza after his brother died. It killed Hamas’s military chief, Mohammed Deif. It killed the Hamas political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, while Haniyeh was staying in a Tehran guesthouse that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps used for visiting dignitaries.

In Lebanon, Israel killed the military chief of the Hezbollah terrorist group, Fuad Shukr. It killed the overall leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut “alongside around twenty Hezbollah military commanders.” 

Israel killed “3,851 Hezbollah terrorists and wounded around 9,000 more,” the book reports, citing the Israel Defense Force and recounting the story of the exploding pagers. Also killed: “more than twenty-two thousand Hamas fighters.”

On the Iranian front, the US and Israel jointly significantly set back the nuclear program and killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “and nearly all of his top IRGC and military commanders.” Israel killed Iran’s top two military commanders, Hossein Salami and Mohammad Bagheri. Israel killed IRGC Air Force Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh. Israel killed the IRGC intelligence chief, Mohammad Kazemi, and his deputy.

And Israel brought back from Gaza 168 live hostages and 87 bodies of dead hostages, accounting for all those known to have been kidnapped.

Alongside the highlight reel of Israeli and American accomplishments, this book provides a kind of supercut of retrospectively ridiculous things that Israeli and American politicians have said along the way. The compilation, in one volume, of all these gems is another public service provided by Bob, who is The Jerusalem Post’s senior military analyst, and by Kaufman, who is an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal. 

Israeli politician Benny Gantz bragged to an interviewer in 2018 that as Israel Defense Force chief of staff he had “prioritized cyber and intelligence over infantry and armor,” because “unlike the threat of ground invasion, the threat of cyber is realistic.” 

John Kerry, as President Obama’s secretary of state, cited the Afghan army to the Israelis as a model for Palestinian security forces and “an example of how local forces could be trained successfully.” 

Kamala Harris, before Israel’s invasion of the southern Gazan city of Rafah: “I have studied the maps,” she said, incorrectly claiming there was nowhere for civilians to evacuate to.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who has since landed at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, had written a Foreign Affairs essay “that went to print just before the October 7 attack and arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes later in the month,” boasting that Biden’s policies made the Middle East “quieter than it has been for decades.” He claimed credit for having “de-escalated crises in Gaza” and having  “enhanced deterrence” to discourage Iranian aggression.

The book details differences among Netanyahu, his war cabinet members Gantz and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Israel Defense Force chief of staff Herzi Halevi. Those internal discussions — and the parallel dialogues with the Biden and Trump administrations — shaped the outcomes in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The personalities also reflected the span of public opinion in Israel’s diverse democracy.

The authors are less sure-footed when analyzing US and global sentiment. “Widespread destruction became a key driver of Israel’s diminished global standing,” the authors contend. “Videos of Gazan neighborhoods turned to rubble, with nothing left intact for as far as the eye could see, told a story of their own.” And, “a young generation’s first impression of the Jewish state has been formed by the destruction of Gaza.”

Somehow the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of Dresden, didn’t diminish America’s global standing for the young generation during or after World War II. Any erosion can be blamed not on the destruction of Gaza but on a sophisticated social-media and on-the-ground campaign by foreign actors to demonize Israel, coupled with social trends in America such as declining church attendance, a flood of Muslim immigration and biblical illiteracy.

The weakest part of the book is an author’s note from Yonah Jeremy Bob. Here, Bob claims Netanyahu “harmed Israel’s name with US Democrats and other parts of the fair-minded West (Germany is another notable example) by continuing the war for too long.”

He goes on: “Whether the war should have ended in late summer 2024, early 2025 or summer 2025 is hotly debated within the Israeli defense establishment. But close to zero of the Israeli defense establishment supported continuing the war beyond that point, and beyond that point is where Israel’s standing took the largest global walloping.”

This timeline does not cohere. It was only in October of 2025 that Hamas agreed to disarm and to return all the Israeli hostages, dead and alive. Count me as skeptical that Israel’s global standing would have been improved had the Jewish state ended the war prematurely, without getting the hostages back and without a plan to disarm and dislodge Hamas. And the sniping by the “Israeli defense establishment” against Netanyahu, an unfortunate feature of Israel’s domestic political landscape, is the rare Israeli export that America might indeed be better off boycotting.

So skip that section and appreciate the rest of the fast-paced narrative. Rerun the dramatic details of how Israel killed all those terrorists, and laugh along the way at Kerry, Sullivan and Harris. The victory may not be entirely total, but for Israel and America it’s already been quite an impressive win, especially considering how grimly this round began. And the war is not fully over quite yet.

Ira Stoll is a senior writer at the Washington Free Beacon.