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Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, July 2024
Ohad Zwigenberg / Reuters The Case for Military Force
Ophir Falk
Hamas will end, but Audrey Kurth Cronin (“How Hamas Ends,” July/August 2024) is mistaken in asserting that the group will end if simply left to “defeat itself.” It will take more than that. After Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, Israel’s war cabinet directed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, free all hostages, and ensure that Gaza would no longer pose a threat to Israel. Limiting the goal to merely preventing another October 7 is not enough. No sovereign state would allow a genocidal terrorist organization to exist on its border.
Numerous studies, including my own, have shown that targeted killing is effective in mitigating Palestinian terrorism. Targeted killing against Hamas, however, is necessary but insufficient. Applying military pressure—or “military repression,” as Cronin refers to it—is also required. That is what Israel is doing, and it is doing so carefully and precisely. “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history,” John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, has observed, “setting a standard that will be both hard and potentially problematic to repeat.”
Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties. That is an integral part of its counterterrorism policy. Hamas seeks to maximize civilian casualties. That is an integral part of its propaganda strategy, and too many people are falling for it. The war in Gaza might have ended long ago had Israel applied indiscriminate force, akin to the force the Allies applied in Dresden during World War II or the force Russia applied in Chechnya in the first decade of this century. And of course, this war could end immediately if Hamas laid down its arms, agreed to an unconditional surrender, and released the hostages.
As of this writing, in July, the IDF has dismantled about 22 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, including their stronghold and crucial infrastructure in Rafah. It has killed over 17,000 Hamas terrorists, incapacitated a similar number, and captured about 5,000. The unfortunate deaths of civilians, used by Hamas as human shields, are Hamas’s responsibility. Israel has enabled over 30,000 trucks carrying humanitarian aid, including 500,000 tons of food and medicine, to enter Gaza. That is far more than the “trickle” Cronin suggests.
In light of the unique challenges of this war—including Hamas’s extensive tunnel network, the number of hostages held by Hamas in civilian settings, and the refusal of Egypt to provide temporary refuge for Palestinian civilians—these achievements are phenomenal. More is needed, but Israel’s objectives are within reach.
Hamas will not end on its own, but it will end. Israel will prevail.
OPHIR FALK is Foreign Policy Adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Cronin replies
My article laid out a strategic pathway to ending Hamas by turning its weaknesses against it. That is a much more ambitious aim than merely preventing another attack akin to the one the group carried out on October 7.
If Israel’s targeted killings had been strategically effective in mitigating Hamas’s terrorism, the October 7 attack would not have happened. Instead, since the 1990s, targeted killings have often boosted the group’s recruitment efforts, deepened its networks, and replaced weaker leaders with more extreme ones.
Hamas showed callous disdain for the welfare of Palestinians by launching the October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis. When Israel responded with military force, Hamas protected its leaders and fighters underground as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians suffered and starved on the surface—and tens of thousands died. But Hamas’s conduct does not absolve Israel of its responsibility to safeguard Palestinian civilians during military operations, including by ensuring they have enough to eat. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar has called the deaths of Palestinian civilians “necessary sacrifices.” If the horrific plight of Palestinian civilians is indeed an integral part of Hamas’s propaganda strategy, as Ophir Falk argues, then apparently the Israeli government is playing right into the group’s hands.
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