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Israel Should Press the Advantage to Defeat Hamas in Gaza

(Telegraph-UK) Col. Richard Kemp - The final moments of Yahya Sinwar's malevolent life are an allegory for the current balance of military power in Gaza. The once mighty terrorist leader was filmed skulking into a building in Rafah like the fugitive he was. Where were his layers of security, the bodyguards to whisk him away when danger loomed? All gone, shattered by Israel's assaults, with even Hamas's most senior terrorist forced above ground by the IDF's progressive destruction of his protective tunnels. Hamas's organized structure has been decimated and its military campaign reduced to small-scale guerrilla operations with the priority on survival rather than offensive action. Many of the senior terrorist commanders have been killed. In latter days Sinwar could no longer exercise meaningful control over his troops. He was the embodiment of Hamas's "resistance" against Israel, the architect of the greatest achievement the organization has ever had or is now likely to have. For the Hamas terrorists who have survived until now he has been an inspiration and an example. His death, therefore, will be a major psychological blow which in some will undermine the will to continue the fight. Plenty of terrorists, however, will remain defiant, galvanized to fight on. The end of Sinwar is not the end of Hamas. He will be replaced like other terrorist leaders, but with its terror army badly weakened. U.S. demands that Israel stop fighting rather than calling for Hamas's surrender give hope and strength to the terrorists, and to their Iranian masters, and help prolong the bloodshed. Instead, with Hamas reeling, now is the time to intensify the fight and drive home the advantage. Netanyahu's policy of attrition against the terror armies while eliminating their leadership, whether in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran, is certainly working. What would not work in any of these places is the Western obsession with ceasefires, peace deals and de-escalation. Against jihadist enemies, all such appeasement of those dedicated to your annihilation can at best only store up the same threat for another day, or an even greater one. Optimism is not a strategy. The writer, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, was chairman of the UK's national crisis management committee, COBRA.
2024-10-22 00:00:00
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