The West’s shameful betrayal of Israel gives Hamas the chance to kill again.
Wars are not won through ceasefires, and Jerusalem should be allowed to finish off the terrorists in Rafah
ANDREW ROBERTS
HISTORIAN
27 March 2024 • ‘Father, I killed 10 Jews! I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands. Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!”
Have we forgotten? Have we really forgotten so quickly the monstrous events of October 7 last year that we genuinely want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza before Hamas has been utterly destroyed as a military force and potential government there?
As we watched the British ambassador to the UN raise her hand at the Security Council meeting this week to vote for a ceasefire, alongside the Chinese and Russians, leaving our ally the US in the cold as the only member abstaining, do we not feel embarrassed, even ashamed? I know I do.
How proud I would have felt if we had actually had the guts to veto a resolution that is designed to prevent Israel from genuinely exercising her right to self-defence, which Britain and America were so quick to declare they believed in back in October – however, hypocritically, as it turns out. For Israel’s “right to self-defence” is utterly worthless if its forces are stopped from entering Rafah and annihilating the Hamas leadership there.
Hamas has already stated – and in this, at least, one can’t fault the group for its honesty – that it is committed to repeating October 7-style massacres as soon as it gets another chance.
As its spokesman Abu Obeida has stated, Hamas intends to make Israel “taste new ways of death”. The international community has clearly shown that it is happy to let Hamas have the opportunity, because the immediate ceasefire in the UN resolution is intended to be followed by “a lasting sustainable ceasefire”, in which Hamas would surely survive.
It will be hard even for Hamas to think up new ways of making Jews taste death considering what the terrorists did on October 7. Having dehumanised Jews after decades of officially-organised anti-Semitic propaganda to children as young as four, it visited death upon them in more vile, sadistic and depraved ways than can possibly be imagined. “Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered,” wrote Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, “in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not.”
Yet a mere five months later, we have shifted our position enough to give Hamas a lifeline, and have joined China and Russia in calling for a ceasefire before the terrorists are destroyed. In military doctrine, the word destruction means: “To render the enemy incapable of accomplishing his mission without reconstitution.”
Hamas’s stated mission is to destroy both Israel and Jews. Preventing any such reconstitution means forcing it into a Berlin 1945 moment in Rafah. As Benny Gantz, former Israeli deputy prime minister and Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief of the general staff, has pointed out: “You don’t send the fire brigade to put out 80 per cent of the fire.”
There would be two major beneficiaries from Hamas’s destruction, and one major loser. The loser would be Iran – whose ally Hamas is, along with the almost equally vicious Houthis and Hezbollah – and it would be a significant blow for Tehran in the tinderbox region they are so keen to ignite. A beneficiary would, of course, be Israel, but the other would be the Palestinians of Gaza themselves.
Since Hamas ejected Fatah from Gaza in a bloody coup in June 2007, it has run a theological dictatorship that has spent up to $1 billion on constructing military tunnels rather than schools and hospitals. It has viciously crushed the hopes of ordinary Gazans for a better life, and brought on the present war for fanatical ideological reasons utterly opposed to the best interests of the people it tyrannises. Just as ordinary Germans ultimately benefited from the death of Adolf Hitler in the ruins of Berlin, so would ordinary Gazans benefit from the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his lieutenants in the ruins of Rafah.
As long as the war continues, Gazans will continue to die in large numbers, though thankfully in nothing like those claimed by Hamas’s propaganda arms, its government media office and equally mendacious health ministry. Welcoming the ceasefire resolution, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, stated that more than 100,000 Palestinians had been killed and maimed, which was another outright lie intended to blacken Israel’s name.
Not only are Hamas’s statistics fabricated, but they are not even reconcilable with figures given earlier in the war by the same organisations. Invaluable and objective work undertaken by the Washington Institute and data scientists at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that Hamas’s official civilian death toll has been exaggerated hugely and systematically since the start of the conflict, and swallowed by almost all media outlets – including the BBC.
War is hell, and every civilian death is a tragedy, but it is important not to accept inflated figures from an organisation like Hamas that has taken its fellow-fascist Joseph Goebbels’ dictum to heart, that the “big lie” is easier to sell than smaller ones.
According to Hamas, the death toll grew with perfect linearity and almost no daily variation. On several days, nearly no men were apparently killed at all, but only women. A good day for Hamas, according to its data, was October 29, when no fewer than 26 men came back to life.
The truth is that the IDF’s ratio of civilian deaths to Hamas terrorists killed is likely to be astonishingly low for modern close-combat urban warfare in which the enemy routinely uses the population as human shields. The time and trouble Israel has taken in minimising casualties compares extremely well with the urban fighting seen in Grozny in Chechnya, Aleppo in Syria, Mosul and Fallujah in Iraq, and in Bakhmut and Mariupol in Ukraine.
Israel has already dismantled 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, and destroyed or rendered inoperable around 100 of its terror tunnels, but that is not enough to prevent Hamas’s “reconstitution”. For that, the IDF need to be given time to finish the job in Rafah, clearing every building, room, cellar and tunnel.
“Wars are not won by evacuations,” said Winston Churchill after Dunkirk. They are not won by ceasefires, either, so the British Government should stop calling for one until victory is won.
Andrew Roberts is a historian, Conservative peer and author, with General David Petraeus, of ‘Conflict: A Military History of the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine’
