What’s Next for Israel and Hamas?

The Hamas handover of four locked coffins on February 20, 2025 once again revealed a dehumanized Hamas that incensed every civilized person on the planet. Hamas tortured all of humanity once again with their lie that Shiri Bibas’s body was in one of those coffins on the murderers’ stage. Sending the body of a dead Gazan to Israel in exchange for live terrorists illustrated Hamas’s Nazi-like depravity. Hamas’s barbaric mutilations and bare hands executions of Shiri and her sons confirmed Hamas’s cruelty. Is it really true that Hamas, the PLO/PA, and their Iranian and Muslim Brotherhood fellow Jihadis, have supporters who endorse the torture, strangulation, rape, and murder of Israelis and wiping Israel off the map? Yes, because “when it comes to Jews or the Jewish State, all norms and rules are thrown out of the window.”

The Gaza War is a religious war on Israelis and Jews to the death, ours or theirs, and not just a war for land. Jihadis, like their Nazi role model, call Jews “subhuman.” Responsive name calling might allow us to feel better but will not solve this latest genocidal, ethnic and religious war. A ceasefire is no solution if it allows Islamo-Nazis to remain in close proximity to Israel with the ability to terrorize their avowed targets. Jonathan Tobin is correct in telling us to “stop pretending that there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with the Palestinians, which must also be taken into account when discussing how to solve the conflict with them.”

Allowing genocidal Jew-hating rapists and murderers and their enablers to reside in a small parcel of land adjacent to Israel is not tolerable. They cannot be allowed to remain in Gaza after befriending Jews in nearby communities to surveille them in order to invade, rape, kill and take hostages. The solution is for Hamas to return all hostages, dead and alive, immediately, and to exit Gaza to a faraway place. Many Hamas members and their families have reportedly already left Gaza through Egypt for Turkey, Malaysia and elsewhere.

How much longer must Israel wait for Hamas to release all hostages and to exit Gaza? The Hamas murderers and rapists have sealed their death warrants to be exercised by Israel now or later. Hamas’s Jew-hating ideology will not die with a Hamas exit from Gaza. The Hamas bigwigs, invaders and torturers who escape Gaza must always look over their shoulders, mindful of Haniyeh in Tehran, Nasrallah in Beirut, and Eichmann in his Argentine safe haven.

What Hamas chooses to do will depend on how many Hamas leaders will have left Gaza with their families by the time the last living hostages are released, if ever. Hamas leaders will leave their Gazan enablers and supporters behind as cannon fodder. Israel will respond quite forcefully if those Gazans take up arms against the IDF. If they surrender and release any remaining hostages, dead or alive, the question will be how to make sure all of them leave Gaza or in some cases be allowed to remain in small Israeli-controlled enclaves of disarmed Gazan clans. Israel, not Jihadis, will be in charge of Gaza’s education and security systems.

Standing in the way of solving any problem involving Israel and Palestinians are Jew-haters who invert truth to characterize as “genocide” Israel’s defense of its life against those who want Jews and Israel to join the dustbin of history. Jew-haters routinely accuse Israel-supporters of being “complicit” in that reimagined “genocide” against “innocent” Palestinians. That nonsensical propaganda has been propounded by sickos since 1948. Today’s Left embraces Jihadi calls to kill the Jewish State and all Jews when they wrongly accuse Israel of being a Nazi, colonialist or imperialist state.

Thinking Hamas or the PLO/PA can be reasoned with, or do not mean what they say or write, is no different from the globe’s appeasement of Hitler. Nazi Germany was not defined as an enemy of freedom and civilization itself, and was to be “contained.” Similarly, Biden’s rules of engagement constrained the IDF and appeased the terrorists. Biden can tell us from now until eternity how much of a “Zionist” he is; the facts say the opposite. Antisemitism flourished under Biden who did nothing about it. Obama-Biden do not see Iran, Hamas or the PLO/PA as enemies. Appeasing Hitler resulted in the Holocaust. Appeasing Hamas, Iran and the PLO/PA will result in Israel’s extinction and more global antisemitism, if that’s even possible.

The world still has not come to terms with the reality that in 1948, for the first time in modern history, Jews had sovereignty in their own country. The Middle Eastern societies who had just seen Jews in Concentration Camp striped uniforms or crematoria, now had to deal with Jews in charge of their own sliver of a Jewish State in the middle of their world. After the Partition Plan, Israel wanted to attract Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab countries, and to be left alone to fulfill its destiny to build the Israeli State and its institutions. Since 1948, Israel’s neighbors have sought to destroy Israel and to steal Eretz Yisroel for themselves. The US tied Israel’s hands so that an Arab-Israeli power “balance” would persist. Obama and Biden saw the non-Israeli side of that balance being led by Shiites, and other Presidents saw that balance being headed by Sunnis.

Hamas bridges that Shiite/Sunni dichotomy and, like Israel, has not yet won or lost. Israel must win, survive and thrive. From birth, Palestinians are taught to hate and kill Israelis, Jews and other Infidels. Those Jew-haters must be removed from inside Israel and from any territory adjacent to Israel. As Lebanon is learning, an adjacent country cannot be allowed to harbor terrorists or to allow terrorists to run that country, even with a “buffer zone” between that state and Israel. Is it any wonder that no Arab country wants to take in Palestinians, even Jordan, which some say is or should be “Palestine”?

Friends tell me: “We are not them” and “Two wrongs don’t make a right” to warn Israel about taking revenge. Are they the same people who attacked the propriety of Eichmann’s death sentence? Killing Eichmann was the right thing to do. In a small way, hanging Eichmann righted the incalculable Nazi wrongs. Killing Nasrallah, Haniyeh and Sinwar were also the right things to do. “Enough . . . with the insufferable ululations about Jewish morality and its arc which somehow always bends towards having mercy on the monsters who devour our children.”

It took eight months for France to reveal the Bataclan terrorists’ horrific mutilation of “Infidels” by which time Bataclan was off the front pages. The magnitude of what Hamas did will be revealed in time, and what Hamas did will be no less horrific. Israel must decide how best to rid itself of the terrorists in its midst and in adjacent lands. Being a democracy does not require Israel to commit suicide. Biden, Blinken and their ilk were behind the Israeli anti-judicial reform movement, the protests against Netanyahu, appeasement of terrorists, and prolonging the Gaza War. Those days are over. With President Trump in office, Israel is done appeasing Hamas and the PLO/PA. Israel has a great friend and ally in the White House. Israel must decide for itself what to do, and must not wait too long to risk that friendship changing.