Obliterating Hamas is vital to a lasting peace in Gaza

Israel’s renewed strike on Gaza was inevitable as well as essential. Hamas could have released hostages to extend the ceasefire but instead refused to do so and chose war, as White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes says. The terrorists never embraced the letter or the spirit of the truce that was agreed on January 19.

While fighting paused during the past two uneasy months, Hamas had begun reasserting its authority and had been recruiting new fighters, The Wall Street Journal reported in late February. Despite Israeli and US demands that they disarm and leave the Gaza Strip, the terrorists were never intent on laying down their weapons or stepping back for the greater good of two million Gazans.

Terror – the more cruel and macabre the better – is Hamas’s stock-in-trade. The resumption of war also was inevitable because, in the absence of credible alternative leadership in Gaza, Hamas retains an iron grip over the Strip, contrary to the objective of the ceasefire. This is also contrary to the interests of peace and the needs of Palestinians long misused by Hamas as human shields. As former Israeli hostage Tal Shoham revealed after his return to Israel on February 22, Hamas has extended its tunnel network of at least 600km beneath Gaza with an eye to future warfare.

A fortnight ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz warned that if the terror group did not free the remaining Israeli hostages, “the gates of Gaza will be locked and the gates of hell will open”. “We will return to fighting, and they will face the (army) with forces and methods they have never encountered – until a decisive victory,” Mr Katz pledged. Of 251 captives kidnapped during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, 58 remain in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military has confirmed are dead.

After releasing about 1800 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, Israel had extended the truce until mid-April. But in refusing to reason and negotiate sensibly and decently, Hamas preferred to see hell inflicted on ordinary Palestinians, more than 300 of whom died when the Israel Defence Forces resumed airstrikes on Gaza on Tuesday AEDT.

In advance of the strikes Israel informed the Trump administration, which approved. Painful as the resumption of strikes is for remaining Israeli hostages still alive, their loved ones and ordinary Palestinians, Hamas left Israel no choice. Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq claimed that in relaunching military operations in Gaza, Israel had opted to “sacrifice” its hostages.

The resumption of warfare comes just as Donald Trump has upped the stakes in the Middle East, announcing on Monday that he would hold Iran responsible for any future attacks by the Houthis in Yemen, threatening unspecified consequences against the Islamic Republic after large-scale strikes in recent days against the militant rebels.

Mr Trump ordered attacks against the Houthis last weekend shortly after the terror group said it would resume attacks on ships transiting the Red Sea near the Yemen coastline unless Israel allowed humanitarian aid back into Gaza. “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran, and Iran will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” Mr Trump posted on social media.

Mr Trump drawing Iran directly into the conflict makes strategic sense. The ayatollahs’ fanatical theocracy is the immoral force behind terror in the region. For that reason, Hamas is unlikely to relinquish its grip on Gaza while it enjoys Iranian backing. And while Hamas, driven by diabolic loathing of Israelis and the Jewish faith, continues its iron grip on Gaza, progress towards sustainable peace, let alone a viable two-state solution, remains impossible.

That is an important lesson that politicians in all countries, including Australia, should grasp. And local authorities and police need to be on the alert against fresh outbreaks of anti-Semitism that have marred our society since Saturday, October 7, 2023.

Rather than blaming Israel for violating the ceasefire, anti-Semitic apologists for Hamas need to look more deeply at the situation. The need to obliterate the Hamas terror group and bring its sanctimonious Iranian masters to heel is as compelling now as it was when the terrorists slaughtered 1200 people in Israel and captured 251 others who subsequently endured untold suffering.

The attack on Jews, in their own homeland, was the worst since 1945. The slaughtered citizens ranged from Holocaust survivors in their 90s to a newborn baby boy who died 14 hours after his mother was shot in the womb.

Nobody denies that Palestinian mothers, babies and children also have suffered mightily and died in large numbers. That is all the more reason Hamas must be defeated and driven out. For now, the question of what happens next is open and intractable.

While voicing its openness to an extension of the ceasefire, Hamas remains rigid in its determination not to cede influence in Gaza as it recruits new commanders to wage guerrilla warfare against Israel.