Situational Update

The pace of the news has been rapid to say the least, so I will not try to capture the current status of the hostage agreement as it appears to be changing by the hour. For now, we continue to pray for the immediate return of all of the hostages held in captivity in Gaza.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said today:

I have just finished an in-depth, four-hour Security Cabinet meeting. We all expressed outrage over the shocking state of our three hostages who were released last Saturday. We all welcomed President Trump’s demand to release our hostages by Saturday noon as well, and we all welcomed the President’s revolutionary vision for the future of Gaza.

In light of Hamas’s announcement regarding its decision to violate the agreement and not release our hostages, last night I instructed the IDF to amass forces inside – and surrounding – the Gaza Strip. This action is being carried out at this hour and will be completed very soon.

The unanimous decision that I passed in the Cabinet is as follows: If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon, the ceasefire will end, and the IDF will resume intense fighting until the final defeat of Hamas.

Hostage Update

• The Times of Israel reported today: Shlomo Mantzur, the oldest hostage still in Gaza, was declared dead by Israeli authorities on Tuesday, who said that he had actually been killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught and his body taken captive.
• The Jerusalem Post reports: The family of twin hostages Gali and Ziv Berman announced on Tuesday morning that they had received signs of life from them after 494 days in captivity. They are not included in the first phase of the current hostage deal.
• There are now currently 73 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 76 hostages remaining in total)
• 21 hostages have been released so far in the first phase of the agreement
• 17 are now remaining on the list for release during the first stage of the ceasefire.
  • 9 of the 17 remaining hostages still to be freed are alive and 8 are dead
    • 3 are members of the Bibas family (Shiri Silberman Bibas and her two children, Ariel, who was 4 years old when taken captive, and Kfir, who was 9 months when taken captive)
  • 6 hostages are Americans: Meet the Seven American Hostages Still Held By Hamas
• 24 hostages will remain in captivity after Phase I and have not been declared dead.
  • 4 are soldiers
  • 7 are residents of the Gaza border communities
  • 11 were abducted from the Nova music festival
  • 2 are foreign workers, one from Thailand and one Nepal
• Link: These are the hostages to be released (and left behind) in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal’s first phase – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

• On October 7^th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
• During the ceasefire deal in November of 2023, 112 hostages were released.
• 179 hostages in total have been released or rescued
  • The bodies of 40 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
• 8 hostages have been rescued by troops alive
• Of the 76 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
  • 35 hostages have been confirmed dead and are currently being held in Gaza
  • Thus, at most, 41 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
  • Hamas is also holding 2 Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015 (civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who have been held in Gaza for a decade), as well as the body of 1 IDF soldiers who was killed in 2014 (Lt. Hadar Goldin’s body remains held in the Gaza Strip)

Casualties (no change)

1,850 Israelis have been killed including 846 IDF soldiers since October 7th (no change since Sunday)

• The South: 407 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed (no change since Sunday)
• The North: 131 Israelis (84 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (no change since Sunday)
• The West Bank: 63 Israelis (27 IDF and Israeli security forces)
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,580 (no change since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 497 (no change since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
  • 5,709 (+4 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 848 (no change since Sunday) who have been severely injured.

• The Gaza Casualty Count:
  • According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 47,583 (no new reported numbers since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 111,633 (no new reported numbers since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
  • [MUST READ] Report: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza by Andrew Fox with The Henry Jackson Society
  • On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
  • Read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
  • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”
• The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Listen

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: Could Trump’s Vision for Gaza Be Real? – with Amit Segal & Nadav Eyal

• In this episode, we break down how the Israeli public is reacting to Trump’s proposal, what it means for Netanyahu’s political standing, and the implications for the ceasefire and the hostage deal negotiations.

Humanitarian Aid

In accordance with the terms of the deal for the return of Israeli hostages from Hamas captivity, an extra surge of humanitarian aid entry has been taking place, as detailed below.

Visit Israel Humanitarian efforts – Swords of Iron for a detailed breakdown of all humanitarian aid that has been provided to Gaza by Israel since the beginning of the war.

Antisemitism

The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism wrote this week:

• The phrase “Jews control ____” reflects one of the oldest conspiracy theories, used online in moderate amounts for over a decade—until 2022. Since then, its usage has surged, growing from around 10,000 mentions per month to 45,000 this past month, the highest in five years.
• The alarming increase indicated conspiracy theories about Jewish control are becoming more common in mainstream conversation. For example, the use of the phrase “Jews control the world” increased by 60% in 2023, and then more than doubled in 2024.

 

Israel/Middle East Related Articles

The Historical Case for Trump’s Riviera by Andrew Roberts with The Washington Free Beacon

• Much of the international condemnation of Donald Trump’s ‘Riviera’ plan for Gaza rests on the assumption that the Palestinians retain sovereignty over the territory, despite all the events that have taken place since their incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, and that they also continue to have the right to choose their own government.
• In fact, historical precedent suggests that Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel that day, and its condign punishment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), have severe implications for whether the Gazans still have the right to decide their own destiny, and who governs them.
• For again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated—as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric—lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both. It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend.
• Saddam Hussein’s surprise attack on Kuwait was a similar example of when a country invades its neighbor suddenly and without provocation, and after defeat in war loses both its government—Saddam was hanged—and its sovereignty while the U.S.-led coalition attempted to rebuild the country. Such surprise attacks as Saddam’s, or indeed of Hamas’s on Israel on October 7, 2023, which was not intended to seize territory like Saddam but instead to kill and kidnap the largest possible number of Jews, are thus huge rollings of ‘the iron dice of war,’ an all-or-nothing endeavor in which Saddam and Hamas cannot complain if they end in disaster.
• The witness of history is therefore fairly uniform: If a government undertakes a vicious and unprovoked attack on a neighboring country, and subsequently loses on the battlefield, it cannot then expect to continue to exercise sovereignty and avoid population transfers. In a similar vein, Arab governments cannot in the same breath argue that Gaza is ‘a concentration camp,’ but also that its citizens should not be allowed to leave such a beloved homeland. They can choose one propaganda line or the other, but not simultaneously both.
• If each of the 22 Arab states undertook to receive 100,000 Gazans, the Strip could be the home to the remaining 100,000, living and working on Trump’s “Riviera.”
• As the international community yelps with indignation at Donald Trump’s remarks and their implications regarding Gazans’ sovereignty and Hamas’s right to govern there, history is on the president’s side.
• Link: The Historical Case for Trump’s Riviera

A Paradigm Shift for the Middle East by Elliott Abrams with Foreign Affairs

• A year and a half ago, Iran’s foreign policy could possibly have been considered enormously successful. The country’s nuclear weapons program was steadily producing enriched uranium; by 2024, it had enough for several bombs. Washington was largely not enforcing its sanctions on Iran. China was purchasing about 90 percent of Iran’s oil, greatly improving the regime’s finances. Political and military relations with China and Russia were growing closer; Iran had secured their protection against action in the UN Security Council and had earned money and gratitude from weapons shipments to Moscow. And the ‘ring of fire’ of Iranian proxies and allies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen—seemed to be a problem Israel could not solve.
• Trump has always favored a negotiated solution to the U.S.-Iranian standoff and still does; the objective of his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign in 2019–20 was not regime change but a new and comprehensive deal to replace the flawed one that President Barack Obama made in 2015. Earlier this week, Trump wrote on his Truth Social account that instead of a U.S.-Israeli attack to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he would ‘much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper.’
• Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of the ‘ring of fire’ strategy, mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear weapons program grows in the shadows.
• The prize the Saudis truly seek for normalizing relations with Israel, however, has nothing to do with the Palestinians: what Riyadh wants more than anything are defense agreements with the United States that would genuinely enhance Saudi security. Because an Israeli-Saudi accommodation would change not only the Middle East but Israel’s relations with the entire Muslim world, the Trump administration should see how far it can get.
• The main obstacle to the emergence of a better Middle East is Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon. Trump has now stated flatly that the United States will not permit Iran to succeed. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is now 85. As he contemplates the next four years, he will be tempted (and advised) to rush forward to a bomb as the only way to ensure his regime’s survival after he is gone. Trump has made it clear that such a move is precisely what would threaten the regime most gravely, because it would elicit not only more isolation but also, if necessary, a U.S. military attack. To make this threat more credible than it has been recently, Washington should begin visibly planning, preparing for, and practicing for such an attack, in coordination with Israel.
• But Trump should go beyond announcing full support of Israel and opposition to an Iranian nuclear weapon. For decades, conventional wisdom held that Arab-Israeli rapprochement was impossible until the Palestinian issue was resolved, but Trump’s Abraham Accords proved that wrong. Today, he should seek not the false stability of an endless deadlock with Iran but a transformation of the region—reinforcing the changes that Israel has already achieved by weakening Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, demonstrating Iran’s military vulnerability, and setting the stage for the overthrow of the Assad regime.
• Trump has correctly restored severe U.S. economic sanctions that will deprive Iran of resources. He must also push the International Atomic Energy Agency to demand tough inspections of Iran’s facilities. Trump should insist that Iran take immediate and concrete steps to show that it has abandoned its nuclear goal: for example, by beginning to export uranium enriched to 60 percent (or ‘downblending’ it into lower enrichment levels) and by agreeing to allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency at military sites that Iran has so far refused to open to the agency. If Tehran refuses to take those steps by this summer, Trump should urge France and the United Kingdom to invoke the UN Security Council ‘snapback’ mechanism that reimposes all the UN sanctions Iran faced before it entered the 2015 nuclear deal—a mechanism created by that agreement, to which the British and French are still parties.
• The United States now has a chance to keep Iran and its allies off balance. Because the only true solution to the problem of the Islamic Republic is its demise, the United States and allies should mount a pressure campaign on behalf of the Iranian people—who wish for the regime’s end more fervently than any foreigner. These efforts should include exposing the regime’s repression and human rights abuses and carrying out political warfare on the regime: constant criticism of its economic failings and brutality, support for Iran’s neighbors if Iran threatens them, and aid (overt and covert) for efforts by Iranians to protest a regime most of them clearly loathe.
• In four years, Trump could leave behind a Middle East where Washington’s friends are far stronger and its enemies far weaker than ever before.
• Link: A Paradigm Shift for the Middle East

Trump and What it Would Take to Rebuild Gaza by John Spencer and Liam Collins post on X

• His remarks, while controversial, touch on a critical issue: who will take responsibility for stabilizing and rebuilding Gaza once the war ends?
• Yet, in Gaza, Hamas has actively opposed the evacuation of civilians,

  instructing residents to remain in their homes despite Israeli military directives to move south for safety. Reports indicate that Hamas has also

  physically prevented evacuations by setting up roadblocks and using civilians as human shields to obstruct their movement.

• The question must be asked: why would Hamas insist on civilians returning to a war zone? The answer likely lies in Hamas’s military strategy—using civilians as human shields to complicate Israel’s ability to resume operations against them. Thus, it is not out of the question that Hamas could turn a reconstruction effort into a counterinsurgency.
• If Hamas is not removed from power and does not surrender its militant ambitions, any reconstruction effort will be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible.
• Comparisons to past reconstruction efforts, such as single-city battles like Mosul or Aleppo, fail to capture the size and scale of destruction in Gaza. The Gaza Strip is not a single city—it is a high-density urban region consisting of five governorates, 25 municipalities, 299 distinct neighborhoods, including four major cities with populations exceeding 100,000: Gaza City (600,000 people); Khan Yunis (173,000 people); Jabalya (168,000 people); Rafah (126,000).
• Unlike in Mosul or Raqqa, where insurgents fought from above ground, Hamas built an underground battlefield beneath the civilians of Gaza.
  • Between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels run beneath homes, schools, hospitals, and government buildings.
  • Many tunnels contain blast doors, weapons depots, command centers, and ambush positions.
• No reconstruction effort can begin without a full-scale clearance operation to remove unprecedented military hazards:
  • Unexploded Ordnance: Thousands of unexploded air-dropped munitions, artillery shells, rockets, and IEDs litter the terrain.
  • Booby-trapped buildings
  • Underground weapon stockpiles
• For Gaza, with most urban centers damaged or destroyed, the cost will likely exceed $100 billion and require decades of work. The problem isn’t just rebuilding homes—it’s also reconstructing water desalination plants, sewage systems, and food supply chains, which were already in severe decline before the war due to Hamas’s mismanagement. It is especially challenging because it isn’t rebuilding what was previously a functioning city, it is building an extended urban area that was barely functioning throughout its history.
• Before any rebuilding can begin, a complete military occupation and stabilization effort will be required. This means:
  • Hamas must acknowledge its defeat
  • Clearing and securing the terrain— killing or capturing Hamas, removing munitions, collapsing tunnels, and ensuring Hamas does not resurface (and expand its subsurface).
  • Mobilizing international funding and expertise—coordinating a reconstruction effort at a scale never attempted in modern times.
• Without an answer to who will secure and rebuild Gaza, the destruction and suffering will persist for years—if not decades—to come.

With Trump, many Arab Americans are getting what they deserve by Fred Maroun with Times of Israel

• Arab Americans are almost universally horrified by some of the things that President Donald Trump has said in his first two and a half weeks in office. Even the chairman of ‘Arab Americans for Trump’, Bishara Bahbah, is suddenly alarmed. And yet, there are reasons to believe that Arab Americans played a crucial role in electing Trump.
• As reported in CBS News, Ali Alfarajalla, a Baghdad-born realtor in Dearborn, Michigan who normally votes for the Democrats, switched his vote because, he said, ‘If 50,000 Palestinians dead under the rubble isn’t enough to sway me from Democratic Party, I don’t know what is.
• They don’t blame the Gaza war on Hamas, which started the war with a massacre and the kidnapping of men, women, and children, including some Muslims and some Americans.
• They don’t blame their own failure to denounce Hamas. They don’t blame the longstanding failure of the Palestinians to accept the existence of Israel and to agree to a two-state solution.
• Instead, they blame the Biden/Harris administration for doing what any decent US administration would have done, support Israel’s right to defend itself.
• As if to prove this point, Trump is now pushing the idea of the United States ‘taking over’ and ‘owning’ the Gaza Strip, therefore taking it away from the Palestinians. Condemnation of Trump’s idea has been widespread, including from Germany, an ally of Israel. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said, ‘The civilian population of Gaza must not be expelled, and Gaza must not be permanently occupied or repopulated.
• Most Arab Americans evidently placed their hatred of Israel ahead of the interests of the Palestinians. That is perhaps not surprising since the Palestinians themselves have made that choice repeatedly at every opportunity given to them to have a state, including the 1947 UN partition plan, the missed opportunity between 1948 and 1967 to declare the West Bank and Gaza a Palestinian state, and the rejection of the peace plan offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, among other opportunities.
• Former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban famously said: ‘The Arabs [Palestinians] never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ Apparently, Arab Americans suffer from the same syndrome. Now they must live with the consequences, just as the Palestinians live with the consequences of having refused every opportunity given to them.
• Link: With Trump, many Arab Americans are getting what they deserve

Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to the Middle East Status Quo by Clarity with Michael Oren

• To review his breathtaking remarks: the President of the United States said that his country ‘will take over the Gaza Strip,’ clear rubble and unexploded ordnance, and ‘develop it’ into an Eastern Mediterranean Riviera.
• Meanwhile, Gaza’s Palestinians could move to a ‘good, fresh, beautiful piece of land,’ possibly in an Arab country, such as Jordan or Egypt. He announced that Saudi Arabia would make peace with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state, essentially as the United Arab Emirates and three others did under the Abraham Accords of Trump’s first term. And, for good measure, he pledged to reimpose sanctions on Iran, and reduce its oil exports to zero.
• But just as Trump’s retreat from the brink with Canada and Mexico did not signal an abandonment of tariffs as an economic and political weapon, he is sticking with what was most transformational about his initial statement—which he said was not improvised but resulted from ‘a lot of months’ of study: Neither Gaza nor the West Bank will become a Palestinian state on his watch, and that, indeed, a Palestinian state is not necessary to a resolution of the regional conflict.
• For Trump today, the core problem in the Middle East is not the absence of a fantasized state for the Palestinians, but the presence of a Palestinian population condemned to pursue conflict, both by their socioeconomic circumstances and by their addiction to a victimhood narrative.
• Even if Trump’s radical vision could be realized, however, the overall threat of Iran would remain. On this point, Trump makes a total departure from long-standing U.S. policy. Unlike Biden and Obama, who believed Iran could be incentivized to behave less malignantly, Trump knows that the ayatollahs cannot be bought but only coerced.
• Though he appears to prefer to negotiate with Iran rather than bomb it, the president vowed to reimpose the punishing sanctions which, during his previous term, dried up Tehran’s terror-supporting cash reserves. ‘Hamas was not being funded,’ he recalled during the press conference. ‘Hezbollah was not being funded. Nobody was being funded.’
• Link: Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to the Middle East Status Quo

Hamas’s Torture Tactics Are Finally in the Spotlight by Seth Mandel in Commentary

• This week the attention is on Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami, and Eli Sharabi because their abuse was evident before they even said a word. But more information has come trickling out: they were, reportedly, burned with hot objects, hung upside down, kept in chains, at times gagged to the point of suffocation, starved and dehydrated.
• Amit Soussana was chained up in a child’s bedroom. After her captor let her bathe, he stripped her of her towel and sexually assaulted her, Soussana told the New York Times in March. Later, she was suspended in the space between two couches and beaten. According to recently released hostages, Soussana’s captors beat her at gunpoint viciously until another captive convinced the Hamasniks that they had mistaken her for an IDF officer.
• Yarden Bibas and Ofer Calderon were beaten and kept in cages. Bibas was also subject to the psychological abuse Hamas takes special pleasure in doling out.
• Gadi Mozes, an 80-year-old farmer released last month, was at one point kept in a hot pickup truck for 12 hours underneath a Red Cross building in Gaza. He hoped he was being processed for release, but it turned out he was just being moved to a new location.
• Another form of torture practiced by Hamas was to let serious injuries go untreated and force the captives to watch them deteriorate.
• Romi Gonen was taken into Gaza with a bullet wound. She was permitted to clean the wound with no painkillers and her captors reportedly laughed at her as she did so.
• Daniella Gilboa was taken into Gaza with a bullet in her leg and returned sixteen months later with the bullet still in her leg.
• …the strong possibility exists that the emaciated survivors released on Saturday were the healthiest captives Hamas had left. What we already know of the torture and torment amounts to unspeakable crimes, but they may be just the tip of the iceberg.
• Link: Hamas’s Torture Tactics Are Finally in the Spotlight

Trump Gives a Green Light to Resume Fighting in Gaza—But Does Netanyahu Want to Do It Now? by David Makovsky with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

• After a cabinet meeting earlier today, Netanyahu warned that Israel could return to war on February 15 if hostages are not released. Three are slated for release that day. Yet by not mentioning a specific number in his warning, the prime minister seemingly skirted Trump’s ultimatum and stopped short of jettisoning the phased approach or demanding that all hostages be freed by Saturday.
• The prime minister has seemed more focused on getting Trump’s general backing for a return to fighting than entangling himself in the president’s specific pronouncements, whether this week’s ultimatum or last week’s “Gaza Riviera” proposal. Netanyahu likely wants to be solicitous of Trump without being fully bound by the president’s ideas, at least some of which are likely impracticable.
• The prime minister sees phase one of the ceasefire as advantageous to Israel because of the many hostages being gradually released. Yet he seems to view phase two as a trap that will require Israel to fully withdraw from Gaza, thereby curtailing its ability to continue security operations against Hamas.
• Although Netanyahu’s tactics could reflect a deep personal conviction about defeating Hamas, they cannot be divorced from domestic political calculations. The fear that his coalition might collapse is likely peaking right now amid maneuvers by two far-right members of the cabinet—National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his faction left the coalition after the ceasefire deal was reached, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to bring down the government if it goes through with phase two.
• …a February 10 poll revealed that 67% of Israeli respondents favor proceeding with phase two (including 49% of voters from the prime minister’s Likud Party), apparently believing this is the way to free all the hostages.
• It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Netanyahu believes he now has a U.S. green light to resume the fighting, whether at the end of phase one or even sooner if the next tranche of hostages are not released. But if Israel does in fact return to war, would this doom the remaining hostages?
• More important, how long can they put off formulating a “day after” approach to Gaza? Destroying Hamas appears to be Netanyahu’s guiding objective, with all else secondary.
• Link: Trump Gives a Green Light to Resume Fighting in Gaza—But Does Netanyahu Want to Do It Now?

The Imperative Remains: End Hamas’s Control of Gaza by Bret Stephens with the NYT

• The president’s threats are long overdue. Anyone who thinks that Hamas can be allowed to continue to torture Israelis, tyrannize Palestinians and remain the ruling power in Gaza, free to someday set fire to the region again, needs to be disabused of the idea. That goes especially for Arab states like Qatar and Egypt that depend on U.S. protection and largess even as they have harbored Hamas leaders or failed to stop the group from arming itself to the teeth before Oct. 7.
• The administration should give the region a choice between two possible options.
  • One is that Gazan civilians leave the territory, principally to neighboring Egypt, so that Hamas and its labyrinth of tunnels can more thoroughly be destroyed by a renewed Israeli offensive without risk to innocent life. Israel should not reoccupy the Strip, and the return of those civilians to Gaza must never be closed off. But it should also depend on those civilians forswearing allegiance to Hamas, along with a de-Hamasification program for Gaza that bars former Hamas members from any positions of power and that publicly exposes their apparatus of repression against ordinary Gazans.
  • The second option is that Hamas’s chieftains be pressured by their patrons into exile, so that Gazans might rebuild their lives under better leadership. This is what happened in 1982 when the Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and his minions were forced out of Lebanon to exile in Tunis. Exile is much better than Hamas’s cruel rulers deserve, but it’s an option that spares a lot of bloodshed.
• Governments that are firmly opposed to the first option on practical or ethical grounds should work that much harder to achieve the second. What they can’t do is accept a status quo in which Gaza remains indefinitely under Hamas’s thumb and Israel remains perpetually at risk.
• If the tragedy of Gaza is ever resolved, it will probably happen through the same combination of potent threats, loud bluster and diplomatic indirection — but much faster. Little Qatar, which hosts a vast American air base and depends on the United States for its security, can exert pressure on Hamas by imprisoning the group’s leaders, who currently live in splendor in the sheikhdom, and cutting off their funds. Egypt, whose external debts have ballooned in recent years, can pressure Hamas by letting Gazans in and otherwise cutting Gaza off. Both countries may balk, but they are vulnerable to suasion by the administration.
• Then there is Iran, Hamas’s principal patron, which suddenly seems interested in diplomacy with the United States thanks to its proxies’ military losses in Lebanon and Syria and the near-collapse of its economy. It, too, can be pushed to pressure Hamas to release the hostages and leave the territory — provided the U.S. pressure is credible, acute and immediate.
• But what hasn’t worked, and what can’t, is expecting Hamas to behave as anything other than the barbaric terror group that it is.
• Link: The Imperative Remains: End Hamas’s Control of Gaza

Regular sources include JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, Tablet Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, The Free Press, and the Times of Israel