A military approach alone cannot solve Gaza crisis

Deradicalization and disarmament of Hamas feature high on the agenda of the Board of Peace, whose leaders’ summit meeting at the White House on 19 February 2026 attracts global attention. But one crucial question looms large: Is a military approach the right way to end radicalism?

The sure answer is “No”. Since 1948, the military approach has failed to end the hatred and deeply-rooted enmity against Israel; it has only emboldened the resistance groups to retaliate and willingly die for the cause. So much so that rebellion dubbed a “holy war” has become a culture and even way of life for a people that have their own definition of the possession of the so-called Islamic Waqf Land — Israel’s Promised Land.

In the current post-truth era, where opinion engineering that manufactures perceptions forms people’s convictions, even historical facts can be challenged with pseudo-truth to erroneously reshape the international community’s behavior. Amid such a situation, fighting an ideology with weapons is a vanity.

This doesn’t compel you to confront armed rebels with sermons or speeches. Countering terrorism, you need a do-or-die response, even to kill or be killed. But eliminating terrorists without rectifying the ideological breeding ground is the best way to give birth to even more terrorists.

A systematic educational and humanistic approach toward the public is needed to reshape the bedrock of radicalism that produces terrorism. For this, the real need is not building military might, or launching military strikes, because the actual enemy hides in the tunnels of the post-truth world.

If educational and humanistic approaches can outpace a military approach, there could be hope that more terrorists would regain their senses to grab the merits of peaceful coexistence. Such is a cultural approach that cannot be imposed from outside by war-minded avengers. The Palestinians themselves, along with clean-hearted and farsighted neighbors, must do it.

The Gaza Board of Executives needs to formulate some kind of balanced and inclusive deradicalization program to trim those people’s decades of anti-Israel indoctrination. This requires persuasive education for a change of mindset that cannot happen overnight.

But the change of mindset needs to happen on both sides. Palestinians need to realize the merits of peaceful coexistence for a better future, and Israel needs to put more effort on humanistic approach toward stability rather than holding on to its military approach, which has not been able to guarantee its security since 1948.

Understandably, military generals don’t like this idea, because they were trained to kill rather than to heal. But killing your enemies without healing their families’ outrage only enlarges their distrust of all the peace efforts, culminating in worse perpetual conflicts.

The mission of President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to disarm Hamas has its own rationale, but decommissioning of weapons is no bed of roses. Because the resistance fighters are mingling with local residents and it is not easy to identify them. More so now that they have lost effective leadership and they think that the only way to remain alive is to keep their weapons.

To disarm Hamas, the International Stabilization Force (ISF) needs to conduct high-risk sweeping operations across Gaza, because none of them would willingly surrender their weapons. Only Muslim countries can tame the situation.

As the world’s largest Muslim-populated country, Indonesia has committed to deploying up to 20,000 peacekeepers, 8,000 of them will be sent in the first batch, apparently not for combat, but for engineering and construction works as well as for medical facilitation.

Unfortunately, the plan has been rejected by Hamas leaders who mistakenly think that Indonesian troops will annihilate them. Indonesia is a non-aligned nation — a staunch defender of the two-state solution idea — and its troops are not in a position to crush what most people in Indonesia support as the “brave freedom fighters” of Palestine. They don’t like Hamas being called terrorists.

In fact, the presence of Indonesian troops cooperating together with the IDF and Egyptian forces in Gaza could create a balanced environment whereby decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons could be carried out without prejudice and without further bloodshed.

Indonesia’s top public figures have actually met Israeli and Hamas leaders on a number of occasions, acting as a bridge toward a two-state solution. That is a clear indication of Indonesia’s goodwill for solving the crisis, culminating eventually in normalization of relations with Israel. And a two-state solution is Indonesia’s primary prerequisite for opening diplomatic relations with Israel.

It is therefore a big lamentable mistake if Hamas’ provisional leadership council continues to reject the presence of Indonesian peacekeepers in Gaza. Their rejection of Indonesia’s pacifying role equals missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach a better-balanced solution to the crisis.

But whether or not Hamas would change its mind does not really matter. Indonesian peacekeepers will be deployed in Gaza, somehow, as part of the International Stabilization Force (ISF) which will disarm Hamas, even doing it the hard way, as it is one of the prerequisites for peace and reconstruction of Gaza.

In the event Hamas leaders lost their minds and ordered strikes against the ISF, they would have no one else to blame for their swift extinction, because the response would be unimaginably devastating.

The remaining problem would be to remove the breeding ground of radicalism — from under-aged children to adults, from schools to worship places, from households to places of work, and the entire Palestinian society. Likewise, sources of radicalism in Israel, the Arab and Muslim world, as well as in Western countries and elsewhere, need to be abolished also.

For the Board of Peace to succeed, those heads of State and heads of Government need to be wise with their choice of words and diplomatic expressions in a way acceptable to the conflicting Palestinian factions and the warring parties.

If indeed peace is the goal, then one must not use verbal or written expressions that could hurt the warring parties even more. The art of diplomacy lies not in enforcing an idea to hurt your opponents; instead, it lies in wisely directing them to follow your path.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” And here’s what Mahatma Gandhi said: “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.”

Actually, I am not sure if President Trump — the lifetime chairman of the Board of Peace — likes to hear those nice quotes. And I don’t know if he is also a fan of Frank Sinatra’s song, “I Did It My Way”.

But Mr. Trump is arguably a great leader who has the charisma and capacity, even against all odds, to mobilize so many world leaders to attend the first BOP summit at the White House on 19 February 2026.

There’s now as much guarded optimism, even doubt in some quarters, about its final outcome as Mr. Trump’s conviction for successful implementation of the peace plan, because as the old adage says, the devil is in the details.