February 20th Sealed Gaza’s Fate

Some dates that change the trajectory of the world are definitive. June 28th, the day Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and WWI followed soon after. December 7th, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, and WWII began.

Sometimes a day changes the course of history yet passes below the threshold of a definitive, quantifiable one. That day for Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza was February 20th, 2025. The day the Bibas children and their mother were exchanged by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. The Bibas family—Shiri, 32; Ariel, 4; and Kfir, 9 months—were corpses. They died in Hamas captivity after being kidnapped from their Nir Oz kibbutz adjacent to Gaza. Naturally, Hamas claimed they were killed by Israeli air strikes, but the truth is unknown. The exchange featured a subterfuge in that the body of Shiri was that of a Palestinian woman; it was later rectified, and the real corpse handed over.

The “exchange” facilitated by the Red Cross also featured a macabre giant painting of Netanyahu depicted as a vampire presiding over the bodies of several hostages. Using antisemitic tropes of long noses and vampire evil eyes, Hamas thought the handover a good time to mock the Israeli prime minister. Propaganda stickers were placed on the coffins, visible for all to see.

Far more chilling for those watching live video was the presence of scores of Hamas soldiers fully attired in their masked face cloths, green bandanas, and automatic weapons. They did not appear beaten or bedraggled; they seemed proud and unified. In the background, as cameras panned the grounds, were thousands of Gazans who also seemed robust, certainly not suffering from hunger or wounds. Green flags of Hamas fluttered in the wind. Celebratory music could be heard as a soundtrack. Parents watched with their children.

Six days later, on February 26th, the family was buried in one casket in Southern Israel. I was among the thousands that lined the funeral route to say goodbye as they were driven to their final resting place in a cemetery.

What I and others I spoke to think snapped the Israeli consciousness that day and changed the course of the war was the realization that the promised “total victory” was not true. Hamas was not defeated and was perfectly capable of organizing a battalion of men, armed to the teeth. It also dawned on Israelis that the people of Gaza viewed this as a victory. Hamas not only survived but could bring far more suffering and misery to Israelis. The hostages, alive or dead, were a powerful tool of war, and the strategy of taking them proved a smart move on Hamas’s part. The cheering crowds mirrored those at the start of the war who celebrated seeing the bloodied bodies of Israeli girls as they were dragged into captivity.
Right or wrong, that day hardened the hearts of many in Israel, resulting in a justification for the horrors that war brings to an enemy land. In those moments, everyone understood that to the Palestinian, and perhaps the Arab mind as well, the mere survival, the very existence of a Hamas green flag, of a dozen masked armed men, would be celebrated as a victory for their cause. As their own late chief Sinwar is quoted as saying, “Even a hundred thousand dead children would be worth it.” As chillingly stated by dozens of Islamic resistance leaders over the years, “sacrifice” is an essential element in warfare, and none is too great to achieve their goal of eliminating the Zionist state of its Jews.

With these hardened hearts by Israelis and with Netanyahu out on a policy limb of promising “total victory,” the results are what we are now witnessing: a relentless all-out assault on Hamas and its allies in Gaza, i.e., the endless bombings, the reclaiming of Khan Yunis, and forcing the civilian population into smaller and smaller enclaves, areas that can be cleansed of armed men. You can also see the hardened hearts in the defiance of global pleas for restraint. Friends and foes alike are shut out of the Israeli consciousness. It seems that Israel is committed to destroying Hamas once and for all, even at the cost of destroying its relations with the world.

Historically, this is not unusual. Nothing stopped the Allies from totally destroying Germany and Japan. No humanitarian aid was offered. No one dropped food parcels on a firebombed Tokyo. No medical teams entered Dresden after the bombings sucked the oxygen out of the air, killing tens of thousands. Both countries could have surrendered years before their utter destruction, but they did not. It took an atomic bomb to convince the Japanese that resistance was futile. It took the death, rape, and a physical wasteland of their homeland before millions of Germans relented. They did so, however, only after Hitler self-eliminated. When fanatics are setting the war’s goals and determining its outcome, the results are always horrifying.

It will be up to historians to argue forever whether the war against Hamas devolved into war crimes, as the very definition has a time-based cultural shift, one that changes with different battling parties. Even attention is political; just ask any South Sudanese how much of the world’s attention is focused on them.
The horror of this Hamas-Israeli war will take a long time to heal. It is likely that the Bibas family murders will be minimized or forgotten in time. While this is inevitable, it is also true that February 2025 may have been the die that cast millions into the prolonged conflict.