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Humanitarians Should Want Hamas' Human-Sacrifice Strategy to Fail
(Commentary) Douglas J. Feith and Lewis Libby - Though Hamas battalions remain entrenched near Gaza's border with Egypt, the Biden administration is pressing Israel to stop fighting. Yet the president does not say Hamas has been sufficiently dismantled. A prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas' bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable. Hamas' ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Koranic vision of killing all Jews. In its Oct. 7 war plan, Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. To this ends, Hamas worked for a decade and a half to put military assets in and near schools, hospitals, mosques, and residences - and to build a dense network of tunnels underneath Gaza's cities. Someone who uses human shields is usually hoping to deter enemy attack, not to kill the shields. Hamas is employing a human-sacrifice strategy, intentionally increasing civilian casualties among its own people to fuel international demands for Israel to halt its offensive prematurely. Hamas' hiding among civilians is a war crime against the people of Gaza. Perpetrators of such immorality would under normal circumstances be widely condemned. In Gaza, however, people speaking in the name of humanitarianism are working to reward Hamas for this crime. Hamas has mastered the diplomatic alchemy that converts corpses of Gazan babies into worldwide support for the regime that arranged for the death of those babies. America, if provoked as horribly as Israel has been, would not stop its war against a terror group on its border until it completely destroyed the group. It is in the interests of America and the civilized world to reject Hamas' scheme of ensuring civilian suffering in Gaza and then taking advantage of that suffering. Allowing Hamas to remain in power would reward the gravest of war crimes. if Hamas wins, Iran wins. That would make losers of the U.S., Israel, and Iran's Arab enemies. The president should recommit the U.S. to Hamas' destruction. Douglas J. Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Lewis Libby, a Distinguished Scholar at the Hudson Institute, was formerly Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.