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Could the destruction of Gaza after October 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes – had Hamas so wished.
First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.
Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.
Nor do Israel’s enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the UN to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the “war criminals” of Hamas?
The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the UN persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli UN members silently approved of the murders.
Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible.
Second, Hamas didn’t just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of October 7 and the Israeli ground forces’ entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).
Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of October 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.
The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?
Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm’s way.
What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters – while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?
Most fundamentally of all, if Hamas and the people of Gaza had opted out of the “ring of fire” – the Iranian-sponsored plan to use Arab proxies to destroy the Jewish state by both aerial assault and ground invasion–there would be no Gaza moonscape today.
But that scenario, too, was impossible, because Hamas was a prime architect of the multinational, multi-cabal effort to launch a surprise attack.
Hamas’s ultimate plan was always for its invasion force of 4,000 terrorists and 2,000 civilians to kill thousands of Jews and drive much farther into Israel than the 17 miles the killers eventually reached. Hamas expected that Hezbollah would at the same time unleash its huge arsenal of missiles and drones along Israel’s northern border, while the Houthis launched swarms of drones and missiles at key Israeli civilian infrastructure.
Iran was the bank and brain behind the complex invasion of Israel. Had Iran simply cut off funding to these three Arab entities, they would not have had the wherewithal to conduct such a costly operation. Meanwhile, the Iranian maestros of death would (at least for a while) safely sit back 1,000 miles away, under their supposedly state-of-the-art Russian and Chinese air defenses, pulling the strings, always denying any culpability.
Hamas, however, like Iran’s other fully funded proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis, was foolish enough to be left openly holding the bag.