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Hamas left Israel no alternative but to resume the war

The resumption of Israel’s war in Gaza has produced a predictable reaction in a world that remains determined to malign the Jewish state.

Western media declared that Israel had ended the ceasefire. In fact, the ceasefire had ended more than two weeks earlier. Although Israel had agreed to a further US-brokered deal, Hamas rejected it and refused to release any more hostages.

Hamas left Israel with no option but to resume the war, which it did with an aerial bombardment of Gaza.

The terror group instantly stated that the bombardment had killed 400 Gazan civilians. This was absurd because Hamas couldn’t have known the number of casualties so fast and, as usual, it omitted any Hamas operatives in the total. Yet in typically reflexive fashion, the western media parroted this incredible figure without questioning it.

No less predictable have been the Israeli protests that by resuming the war Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages —of whom 24 are said still to be alive.

The most bitter and agonising reproach has been voiced by some of the former hostages, who have accused Netanyahu of ignoring everything they’ve been telling the world about the horrific conditions in which the captives are being held.

There can hardly be a single person in Israel who doesn’t desperately want the hostages back home. And there’s no denying the genuine anguish at the failure to get them all back. Their plight is beyond horrific, and the profound emotionalism of the public response is entirely understandable.

Unfortunately, such emotion is a barrier to clear and unavoidably brutal thinking. The only way Hamas will return all the hostages is if Israel surrenders and leaves it in power. The reason it took the hostages in the first place was to ensure that Israel could never win against it.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/19/israel-has-every-right-to-eliminate-hamas/

Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, specialising in defence and the Middle East.

The ceasefire in Gaza collapsed this week. IDF airstrikes have now resumed, targeting infrastructure and taking out senior Hamas officials. Israel has also issued an evacuation order for the entire Gaza border area, likely signalling a renewed ground invasion. When I was speaking with Israeli insiders in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, it was suggested to me that five entire divisions may be deployed. A deployment of this scale would likely mean the seizure of all of Gaza by the IDF.

The breakdown of the ceasefire in Gaza was predictable, inevitable and solely the responsibility of Hamas. Rather than acting as a genuine partner in peace, it has become evident that Hamas used the ceasefire as a tactical pause to regroup, rearm and prepare for the next wave of violence. Israel – confronted with Hamas’s failure to negotiate in good faith for the release of hostages and phase two of the ceasefire – is entirely justified in resuming efforts to dismantle Hamas as a military threat once and for all.

US president Donald Trump’s insistence on a ceasefire in Gaza posed significant challenges for Israel. When it was agreed in January, the job was only half complete. Hamas continued to hold power and hostages remained trapped in Gaza. However, after weeks of negotiations, one positive outcome of this enforced pause has been the reuniting of many hostages with their families.

The ceasefire has also exposed the truly monstrous nature of Hamas. The dire condition of the returned hostages – as well as the grotesque spectacle of hostage releases, in which the coffins of innocents were paraded before crowds and cameras – served as a stark reminder of Hamas’s barbarism. Meanwhile, seeing Israel return well-fed Gazans has dispelled notions of genocide or deliberate starvation for any sane observer.

Since then, phase two of the ceasefire talks has failed (despite the White House negotiating directly with Hamas, over Israel’s head). Hamas cocked a snook at both the Israelis and the White House, having been warned by Trump what would happen if it continued to stall on releasing the remaining hostages. Now, Trump has given the Israelis the green light to resume targeting senior Hamas members.

Trump’s ceasefire was never likely to be more than a temporary reprieve for Hamas. After all, the group remains fundamentally committed to the destruction of Israel – an aim baked into its founding charter. Any agreement with an organisation whose raison d’être is conflict can only ever be short-lived. Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched its unprecedented massacre against civilians in southern Israel, the terror group has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not recognise peace. Rather, it uses pauses in fighting to regain strength.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/20/a-savage-rupturing-of-our-civilisation/

They reduced Jews to ashes. In 2023, a fascist army burnt Jews to death. The Jews’ names were Ram Itamari, 56, a transportation manager, and his wife, Lili Itamari, 63, a schoolteacher. They were in their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 when the unit of anti-Semites showed up. The gunmen saw the Jews through a window so they set fire to the house. It burned at such a scorching temperature that when the Israeli authorities finally went in, they found not one trace of the couple’s bodies. It took archaeologists three weeks of sifting through the soot to discover a sliver of bone. It was DNA-tested. It was them.

It is the 21st century and we are searching among ash for the remains of Jews. Following decades of the cry, ‘Never Again’, humanity once more found itself foraging in the blackened remains of a building for the incinerated remnants of the Jews who lived there. This detail from the new UK parliamentary report on the barbarism of 7 October should chill the blood of everyone who reads it. For it is 7 October’s clearest echo, among thousands of clear echoes, of the Nazi atrocities of the last century. This report leaves no doubt: 7 October was more than terrorism, more than a war crime – it was a savage rupturing of human civilisation itself.

The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report, overseen by historian Lord Roberts, is a horrifying and essential document. It bears witness, in grim, meticulous detail, to the carnival of anti-Semitic violence carried out by Hamas and its allies on 7 October. It is a forensic account, over 300 pages, of every crime committed by those armies of anti-Semities on that darkest day. And it names and pays tributes to the Jews and others who were slaughtered. ‘We have done this so that future generations will not be misled about the true extent and the horror of the massacre’, says Roberts. This report is a ship of truth in the West’s frothing waters of denialism and apologism.

It lays out all the brutal facts. It tells us that 1,182 people were murdered and more than 4,000 were wounded. Of the dead, 863, or 73 per cent, were civilians. Two-hundred-and-fifty-one people were taken hostage, 210 of them alive, 41 of them dead.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21484/palestinians-dying-because-hamas

Hamas leaders have also repeatedly made it clear that their terror group has no intention of laying down its weapons.

Hamas leaders — based in luxury hotels and villas in Qatar, Lebanon and Egypt — appear in no rush to end the war. Many of them had fled the Gaza Strip together with their families during the past few years in search of a better life in Arab and Islamic countries. From their safe homes and offices, the Hamas leaders continue to issue fiery statements about their group’s refusal to make concessions to end the conflict.

“They are not the ones searching for food in the rubble. They are not the ones watching their children die. They sit in safety while others pay the price…. the suffering of Gaza has never been their concern, only their weapon.” — Hamza Howidy, Palestinian human rights and peace activist, X, March 18, 2025.

“Enough martyrs and death. Damn those who voted for you [in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election].” — Ranem El Ali, Palestinian journalist and author, X, March 18, 2025.

If the Palestinians living there want to end the war, they must revolt against Hamas and provide Israel with information about the whereabouts of the hostages. Sadly, most Palestinians seem unwilling to do so, either out of fear of Hamas or because they simply identify with the terror group and its goal of destroying Israel.

Palestinians are again paying a heavy price as a result of Hamas’s refusal to release the remaining 59 Israeli hostages (almost half of whom are believed to be dead) held in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. On that day, thousands of Hamas terrorists and ordinary Palestinians invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 Israelis and wounding thousands others. Another 251 Israelis – alive and dead – were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.

Since then, Hamas could have avoided much of the death and destruction it brought on the Palestinians by simply releasing all the hostages, laying down its weapons and relinquishing control of the Gaza Strip.

http://Striking when the iron’s cold

“Operation Strength and Sword,” the airstrikes in the Gaza Strip launched at 2:15 a.m. on Tuesday, didn’t only come as a shock to Hamas. Israelis, too, were taken aback, since they went to bed on Monday night preparing for a very different battle in the morning. The internecine kind.

Yes, the protest movement declared that it would be escalating its activities. Not that it ever ceased staging rallies against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for, well, just about everything.

For months, its focus has been his failure—for ostensibly personal and political reasons—to “bring all the hostages home now.” And Tuesday marked the 11th day of a more specific demonstration, this one titled the “Kirya Envelope.”

The name is a play on the term for the Gaza-border communities. It refers to the surrounding of Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, where the security cabinet usually meets.

But the hostage crisis wasn’t the impetus for some 100 protest leaders to jump to attention. No, their latest excuse was Netanyahu’s decision to fire Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Ronen Bar.

Never mind that he was the key figure responsible for not predicting and preventing the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Forget that he even admitted as much shortly after the deadly Hamas invasion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21481/arabs-help-rebuild-gaza

The truth, however, is that most of the Arab countries have always refused to receive Palestinians. Most Arabs view the Palestinians as ungrateful.

Qatar has funded every Islamist extremist group from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Taliban to Al Qaeda, both with donations and through its broadcasting empire Al Jazeera. Qatar was the only Arab country that provided direct financial aid to the Hamas-rulers of the Gaza Strip over the past two decades. The Qataris did not do so out of love for the Palestinians, but to ensure that Hamas remains in power, in order to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic state. October 7, 2023 was the result. Now Qatar is negotiating to preserve its client, Hamas.

The Arab plan, notably, also does not call on Hamas to lay down its weapons. Do the Arab leaders really believe that Western donors would rush to invest tens of billions of dollars in the Gaza Strip while terrorists belonging to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups continue to roam the streets?

The latest Arab plan does not even include a commitment from the Arab regimes to contribute to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Instead, it states that the sources of funding would come from the United Nations, international financial institutions, and donor countries, as well as foreign direct investments and private sector contributions.

For Hamas, holding onto its weapons is far more important than rebuilding the Gaza Strip.

For the Arab countries, the new plan just another attempt to avoid responsibility towards their Palestinian brothers and shift the blame onto Israel.

“The reality is that the Arab emergency summit was also about demonizing Israel and throwing the Gaza hot potato into its court. A closer look at the summit’s final statement reveals its true purpose: attacking Israel rather than addressing Gaza’s future… Until Hamas is removed, every so-called ‘peace plan’ will be nothing more than another chapter in an endless cycle of destruction.” — Dalia Ziada, Egyptian political analyst, March 12, 2025.

The Arab countries have finally come up with a plan for the Gaza Strip that aims to address the humanitarian crisis, restore essential services and rebuild. The $53 billion plan, announced in early March after an extraordinary meeting of the Arab League in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, did not come out of a genuine desire to help the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but as a counterproposal to US President Donald Trump’s vision of relocating the residents of Gaza and turning it into the Rivera of the Middle East.