The Biden Administration is furiously working to secure a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza, desperate to end the current war as soon as possible so as to have a foreign policy “victory” Vice President Kamala Harris can run on in the November presidential election.
At the surface level, a ceasefire is a good thing. It would allow the return of some, if not all, of the hostages still alive held by Hamas nearly a year after they were brutally kidnapped. It would end the death and destruction on both sides and allow rebuilding of lives and infrastructure.
But the issue that is preventing Hamas from agreeing to the ceasefire it so desperately needs demonstrates the danger that an ill-conceived ceasefire will only lead to more war and death in the future.
Israel is insisting that the IDF remain stationed at the Philadelphi Corridor on the border between Gaza and Egypt, while Hamas is demanding a complete IDF withdrawal. At stake is the question of whether Hamas will be allowed to rearm and rebuild so that it can carry out its threats to commit more massacres like the one it committed on October 7, 2023.
Israel, naturally, does not want to recreate a situation where Hamas terrorists have the capability to fulfill their desire to murder hundreds of Israeli civilians as was the case on October 6. Hamas, just as naturally, wants to be free to kill Jews with impunity. That is the entire reason Hamas exists, after all, to kill every last Jew on the planet.
Hamas political bureau official Ghazi Hamad vowed to carry out more October 7s in the weeks following the massacre. In an interview with Russian media in October 2023, Hamad said, “We have to strike Israel with full force. Al-Aqsa Flood (the attack) was only the first time. There will also be a second time, a third, and a fourth. We have the strength, the decision, and the ability to fight and to pay the price."
He added, "We will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated."
Showing that the cost of the war has not caused him to reevaluate any of his priorities, in late June, Hamad continued to praise the worst and most barbaric massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, telling the NGO Masar Badil, “We say long live October 7, which has brought the Palestinian struggle to the top of the agenda of global politics.”
This is the same Ghazi Hamad who repeatedly states now that the only ceasefire Hamas will accept is one in which all Israeli forces are permanently removed from the Gaza Strip as they were for nearly all of the last two decades following the 2005 Disengagement. The reason he wants the IDF out is obvious.
For more than three-quarters of a century, ever since five Arab armies invaded Israel the day it declared independence in an attempt to annihilate the newborn Jewish State and its Jewish inhabitants, Western leaders have fallen into the same trap of forcing ceasefires at the expense of guaranteeing more wars in the not-too-distant future.
Rather than allowing Israel to win decisively so that the other side concludes it will never succeed in destroying the Jewish State and therefore might stop trying, they always swoop in to save the would-be genocide committers and set up the next war.
Rather than dealing with the underlying problem of antisemitism that is the root cause of the entire conflict, they always pressure Israel to make more and more concessions despite the fact that every single concession Israel makes results in the other side becoming more bloodthirsty and in hundreds if not thousands of deaths.
At stake right now is whether this ceasefire is like the ceasefire that ended the 1956 Suez War, which only served to set up the Six Day War less than a decade later. At stake right now is whether this ceasefire is like the ceasefire that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War, which resulted in Hezbollah growing exponentially more powerful and amassing an arsenal of 150,000 rockets and drones with which to threaten Israel, more than 7,000 of which have been fired at the Jewish State in the last 11 months.
Only a ceasefire in which Israel retains the capability to prevent Iran from re-arming its proxy Hamas via Egypt has a chance of being anything more than a pause until the next time Hamas attempts another massacre on the scale of October 7, sparking yet another war. Only an IDF presence at the Philadelphi Corridor can do that.
The US unfortunately gave up on the idea of victory and of removing Hamas from power early in 2024. Had Israel listened to the US in the Spring and never launched a military operation in Rafah, Hamas would have far more of its armed forces, its command structure, and its attack capabilities intact. It would have been in a far better position to dictate terms to Israel than it is now.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Israel demonstrated extraordinary intelligence capabilities on Sunday morning when the IAF launched a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah’s rocket launchers in Lebanon, preventing an imminent attack with thousands of rockets and drones. But it would have been better if Hezbollah had never been allowed to build its rocket arsenal in the first place, an arsenal that still contains more than 100,000 rockets and other dangerous projectile weapons.
Preventing Hamas from building its arsenal and its army again is just as important. There is no guarantee that the next time Hamas attacks, and there WILL be a next time if the IDF withdraws completely from the Philadelphi Corridor, Israel’s intelligence will respond as it did the morning of August 25 2024, and not as it did the morning of October 7, 2023.
The best-case scenario would be for Hamas to be forced to unconditionally surrender, for Yahya Sinwar to stand trial for his crimes against humanity, and for Gaza to be ruled by a government committed to life rather than death, the god Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and their Iranian masters worship.
If the war is to end in a ceasefire that leaves Hamas and Sinwar in power, then this ceasefire must leave Hamas permanently weakened and unable to ever regain the strength it had a year ago. It must leave Hamas unable to ever even consider attempting to fulfill its promises to repeat the horrors of October 7.
If the US forces Israel now to bow to Hamas’s demands, if it forces Israel to abandon any chance of stopping Hamas from smuggling unlimited supplies of rockets, guns, bombs, and every other weapon Iran sends, if it puts political expediency above doing what’s smart and right in the long-term, all it will have done is guarantee another massacre, another hostage crisis, and another war.
Gary Willigis a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.