As Israel’s war on Hamas grinds into its 20th month, comparisons with Sri Lanka’s 2009 military defeat of the Tamil Tigers have grown louder. For some, Sri Lanka represents a rare example of a state achieving total military victory over a powerful insurgent group.
Among those advancing this approach is Israeli security expert Moshe Elad, who told The Jerusalem Post last month that Sri Lanka demonstrated how “terror groups can…be completely defeated through military means”.
“Sri Lanka did it without a Supreme Court or B’Tselem,” Elad remarked, referring to the absence of legal considerations or scrutiny by human rights groups.
Other security experts have also drawn parallels between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Hamas.
The subtext is clear: Israel should consider following the Sri Lankan model, mounting a campaign of overwhelming force to annihilate Hamas.
This argument misses the fact that Sri Lanka’s victory came at the cost of immense civilian suffering, long-term instability and international legitimacy. If Israel borrows this script, it may not just replicate Sri Lanka’s battlefield gains, it may also inherit its political and moral collapse.
The Sri Lankan government’s war against the LTTE was among the most brutal counterinsurgency campaigns of the past century. Between 2006 and 2009, the Sri Lankan military launched coordinated offensives across several fronts and methodically dismantled the LTTE’s war-making capacity.
But this military strategy also relied on a scorched-earth approach that devastated the civilian population.
As the fighting intensified, over 300,000 Tamil civilians were cornered in shrinking pockets of territory. Areas designated as “no fire zones” were bombed; hospitals and schools were destroyed. International observers, journalists, and aid agencies were expelled or obstructed. In the final phase of the war, estimates suggest between 40,000 and 70,000 civilians were killed.
The government denied any wrongdoing. With geopolitical momentum on its side, Sri Lanka largely avoided any real accountability.
To frame this as a success story is to treat mass atrocity as a price worth paying. The danger lies not only in the ethical cost of such logic but also in its strategic consequences.
Sri Lanka’s post-war years did not deliver national unity or sustainable peace. While the LTTE was wiped out as a fighting force, the deep-rooted ethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils remained unresolved. The Rajapaksa government diverted enormous resources to militarise the island’s north east, suppress dissent, and reconstruct the region in ways that alienated the Tamil population even further.
At the same time, the war effort saddled Sri Lanka with massive debt, much of it used to fund military expansion and prestige infrastructure projects. Combined with corruption and cronyism, this laid the groundwork for Sri Lanka’s economic collapse.
By 2022, the country defaulted on its debt, faced crippling inflation, and experienced widespread protests that forced the Rajapaksa family from power. The political establishment that had claimed glory in war could not survive peace.
If Israel adopts the Sri Lankan strategy, it risks repeating not only its military triumph but its unraveling. A military win that generates long-term instability is not a victory – it is a delayed crisis.
Even as a matter of tactics, the analogy fails to hold. Hamas is embedded in a radically different geopolitical context. It has strong state backers, including Iran and Qatar, and its leadership has adapted to operate in decentralised, transnational ways.
The LTTE, by contrast, was increasingly isolated diplomatically by the end of its war. Its support networks were disrupted and its leadership physically cornered in a fixed geographic zone.
One of the most dangerous elements of the Sri Lanka comparison lies in the way that the LTTE was completely dehumanised. The World Trade Center attack in the US in 2001 resulted in a conclusive shift in global counterterrorism discourse. Groups labeled as “terrorists” were increasingly framed not as political or military actors with goals and constituencies, but as existential threats requiring elimination.
This allowed states to ignore civilian protections, blur the lines between combatants and noncombatants and justify extreme violence.
In Sri Lanka, this meant Tamil civilians were often treated as extensions of the LTTE, collateral in a war that no longer differentiated between targets. In Gaza, similar dynamics are playing out. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened. Civilian infrastructure is treated as inherently suspicious. Humanitarian corridors are shelled. Over 55,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began in October 2023, many of them women and children.
As in Sri Lanka, the dominant narrative paints the population as indistinguishable from the militants.
This kind of discourse is not just ethically corrosive. It is strategically shortsighted. It fuels grievance, radicalisation and long-term resistance. When civilians are treated as complicit, the political space for any future reconciliation disappears.
Sri Lanka’s “success” was in part made possible by international fatigue. The West, entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan, had little appetite to challenge a state that framed its campaign as part of the global war on terror. Sri Lanka exploited this context to conduct its final war with near-total impunity.
But the effects of that impunity linger. The country remains diplomatically almost isolated on human rights issues, its war crimes unresolved and its path to reconciliation blocked by unresolved trauma. The silence of the international community did not make the consequences disappear – it only deferred them.
Israel faces a different international landscape. The International Court of Justice has already found plausible grounds to investigate Israel’s actions in Gaza under the Genocide Convention. Civil society mobilisation has been far more rapid and global. The legal, political and reputational costs are mounting.
To adopt a strategy modeled on Sri Lanka in this context is not just a moral risk. It is a gamble against the weight of international law and memory.
Even if Israel were to militarily defeat Hamas, the aftermath would not be straightforward. Gaza would remain devastated, politically ungovernable and socially fractured.
The destruction of whatever is left of Hamas’s current leadership would not erase the ideas that fuel its support. Nor would it build a foundation for coexistence. Without a parallel political strategy aimed at restoring Palestinian agency, justice and rights, another iteration of Hamas – or something worse – will emerge.
Sri Lanka shows that annihilation can end a war, but not the conflict that produced it. It also shows that the consequences of how a war ends last far longer than the military campaign itself.
Elad is right that Sri Lanka fought its war without a Supreme Court or a B’Tselem. That is exactly why it should not be the model.
Ashok Swain is a professor of peace & conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden.
