Ophir Falk & Audrey Kurth Cronin
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.
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