Since October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas militants and Gazan civilians invaded Israeli communities — murdering entire families (and intentionally burning them alive), raping women, and abducting hostages — the global media and major NGOs have de facto erased Hamas’ central role in everything that followed.

The conflict’s root cause — and Hamas’ underlying responsibility for everything that has happened since — is routinely ignored. This is not an oversight. It’s a willful distortion.

Hamas’ Ideology of Rejection — From 1920 to Today

Hamas emerged from a tradition of Islamist Arab leadership in British Mandatory Palestine that has consistently rejected any compromise with Jewish sovereignty in any part of historic Israel.

From the 1920 and 1929 Arab pogroms and massacres of Jewish communities throughout British Mandatory Palestine, through the rejection of the 1937 Peel Commission and the 1947 UN partition plan, Palestinian Arab leaders have refused to share any land in historical Israel with a Jewish state.

Hamas’ founding charter in 1988 formalized its commitment to this rejectionism: declaring jihad as the only solution, rejecting Israel’s legitimacy, and committing to the “full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.”

This ideology isn’t fringe. It defines the group’s  worldview. Hamas has rejected every peace offer — Madrid, Oslo, the Camp David frameworks, the 2000 and 2008 peace offers — intentionally undermining efforts at diplomacy, while reinforcing violence as the only acceptable strategy.

The UK Ultimatum: Morality Twisted into Complicity

Likely in response to the morally bankrupt “news” coverage of Gaza over the past 21 months and the realities of its own electorate, Britain’s Labour government has issued a one-sided ultimatum: Israel must meet demands — halt all hostilities in Gaza, abandon Jewish sovereignty in Judea & Samaria — or the UK will prematurely recognize a Palestinian state (with borders, governance, currency, etc. of this supposed new state all undefined).

There is no reciprocal demand on Hamas. The genocidal terror group is under zero pressure to disarm, release hostages, or relinquish power. This UK policy explicitly externalizes all responsibility onto Israel, absolving Hamas. It’s like refusing to blame the Nazis for the deaths that occurred in World War II, which was launched by Adolph Hitler’s aggression and invasion.

At a bare minimum here, morality demands reciprocity: any peace pathway must begin with the removal of Hamas and the rejectionist and deeply antisemitic ideology it exemplifies. Yet the UK’s policy ignores this completely. The consequence is moral inversion: terrorists rewarded, and their target for elimination is loaded with demands and obligations.

Media Starvation Campaign: Propaganda Dressed as Humanity

No doubt, given the timing of the UK’s one-sided ultimatum, the Hamas-started and Western media fueled narrative, which blames only Israel and largely ignores Hamas’s own role in Gaza’s food crisis — helped to incentivize UK Prime Minister Starmer’s announcement. The reality is that Hamas not only started this war, and thereby caused the suffering caused by it — but the terror group has also diverted or hoarded food-aid, hijacked its distribution, used the aid it confiscated to stay in power and fund its war efforts, and used Gazan civilians as bargaining chips.

Yet most of the “reporting” often falsely depicts Gazans as starving only because of Israel.

Setting aside how this mendacious media campaign and hyperfocus on Israel leads to Western ignorance or indifference to far worse situations and starvation occurring in places like Yemen and the Sudan (where at least 500,000 people have died from starvation in the last two years alone), when the media and NGOs shield Hamas from scrutiny and spotlight only Israel’s military actions, they distort moral agency.

When governments like the UK demand change only from Israel, they validate Hamas’s strategy: no disarmament, no surrender, no recognition of Israel — and indefinite war. Hamas is incentivized to keep fighting because the world is telling Hamas that its survival and mandate for perpetual war until Israel is destroyed are acceptable.

If Western democracies truly care about Palestinian lives, they must stop de facto sanctioning the ideology and the groups responsible for their suffering. Hamas’ rejectionist, genocidal platform — antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic — stands at the root of every death in this war. Its refusal to compromise is tangled with a history of more than a century of Palestinian Arab leadership rejection of Jewish peoplehood and right to self-determination that must dramatically change for peace to have a chance.

There is no path to peace without clarity: Hamas’ ideology and actions are the cause of the October 7th war and the suffering that has occurred in this war. Any attempt to “recognize Palestine” or negotiate peace without removing Hamas and ending the ideology behind it is simply handing power and legitimacy to both the rejectionist ideologies and the entities that have repeatedly ignited and perpetuated the violence in this region for over a century.

The moral path demands naming and addressing that reality — not trying to ignore or erase it.

Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.