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The Gaza War Led Russia to Embrace Hamas, and Use It as Leverage Against the West
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 7, 2023. Photo: Sputnik/Sergei Bobylev/Pool via REUTERS
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in October 2023, Russia had been involved in its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine for a year and a half. Given the challenges Russia has faced during the war, Putin has sought allies in the so-called “Global South,” and has sought to portray Russia’s war against Ukraine as a war against NATO and what Moscow described as Western neo-colonialism. This overall policy perspective has shifted Russia from its once close bilateral relationship with Israel, which it sees as part of the Western camp, to an increasingly pro-Hamas position.
Interestingly enough however, despite Russia’s rising anti-Israeli (and antisemitic) rhetoric, Israel’s two main goals in its dealing with Russia — the freedom of action for the Israeli air force in Syrian airspace and the continued emigration of Russian Jews to Israel — continued to be achieved. Indeed, Israel expanded its activity in Syria, flying missions all over the country and even bombing the annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, an action that was to lead to a serious confrontation between Israel and Iran.
Putin was initially silent during the first few days of the Israel-Hamas war, as the Russian leader was probably assessing its costs and benefits for Russia. On the benefit side, the war diverted US and Western attention from the war in Ukraine, and Putin may have hoped that it would divert US weapons that would have gone to Ukraine to Israel, although Republican Congressional opposition in the US to aid to Ukraine was to serve the same purpose.
In addition, since the Palestinian issue was popular in the Global South, with the exception of the Modi regime in India which remained pro-Israeli — and since US President Joe Biden immediately came out in support of Israel and transferred weapons to the Jewish State — Putin may have hoped that the war would weaken the US position in the Global South.
On the other hand, however, since Iran was an ally of Hamas, there was a danger of a conflict between Israel and Iran, especially when Hezbollah started firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Hamas. In any case, when Putin did publicly respond to the war a few days after the war started, he did not blame Hamas but called the war “a clear example of the failure of US policy in the Middle East which has never defended the interest of the Palestinians in peace talks.”
While Putin did acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defense, saying it had suffered an “unprecedented attack,” he then compared the Israeli invasion of Gaza to the Nazi siege of Leningrad. After Putin’s statement, Russia introduced a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for a cease-fire and the release of hostages (some of whom were Russian citizens). The US, however, vetoed the Russian UNSC resolution because it did not mention the Hamas attack. Several months later, it was Russia that vetoed a similar US UNSC resolution because it did mention the Hamas attack. Russia also provided humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
In another effort to demonstrate that Russia had a role to play in the conflict, Putin offered to host a meeting of foreign ministers to bring an end to the war, stating that “we have very stable and trade relations with Israel and we have (had) friendly relations with the Palestinians for decades.” The Russian leader, however, got no support for his planned meeting. Putin then had a belated condolence call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in mid-October, but followed it with a formal invitation to a Hamas delegation to visit Moscow — less than two weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel — thereby appearing to legitimize both the organization and the attack. Needless to say, the Israeli leadership was furious with the visit.
It is possible that the pro-Hamas tilt in Russian foreign policy together with the rising tide of antisemitism in the official Russian press, which was often directed against President Zelensky of Ukraine, who is Jewish, may have encouraged near-pogroms in the North Caucasus soon after the visit of the Hamas delegation. Rioters stormed the airport at Makhachkala, Dagestan, as a flight from Israel was arriving; a Jewish community center was set afire; and a hotel was put under siege as rioters sought to discover if there were any Jews among the guests. While Putin blamed the mob’s actions on Ukraine, the actions of the rioters had to be problematic for him as they served to undermine his description of the Russian Federation as a place of inter-faith and inter-ethnic harmony.
Meanwhile, Russia’s anti-Israeli rhetoric was growing, as the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, stated on November 2 that Israel, being an “occupying state” did not have the right to self-defense, under international law. There appeared to be a slight improvement in Russian-Israeli relations in December, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the Doha forum, stated that Hamas had carried out a “terrorist attack” — but followed up this statement by commenting “at the same time it is unacceptable to use this event for the collective punishment of millions of Palestinian people with indiscriminate shelling.”
In looking at the reasons for the change in Moscow’s tone about Hamas, it is possible that Lavrov was appealing to the leadership of the Arab States in attendance who viewed Hamas negatively. This was especially the case of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Putin also made another telephone call to Netanyahu, this time according to Russian sources, to discuss the crisis caused by the Hamas attack. According to the Israeli version of the call, Netanyahu criticized Russia’s UN representatives for their “anti-Israeli positions,” and the Israeli leader also voiced “robust disapproval” of Russia’s “dangerous cooperation” with Iran. According to the Russian version of the call, Putin highlighted “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.”
In January 2024, Russian-Israeli relations took another turn for the worse, as during a meeting on Syria at Astana, Kazakhstan, the Russian special representative for Syria, Alexander Lavrentyev, stated, in reference to South Africa’s lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, that Israel’s actions in Gaza represent a “real crime” which “can even be interpreted as genocide.” In addition, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized Germany for defending Israel at the International Court of Justice, given Germany’s actions in World War Two, and she went on to compare Germany’s defense of Israel with its support for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia was stepping up its efforts to woo the Global South. Taking a page from the old Soviet playbook, when the USSR was wooing the Third World with the Soviet Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Association, Putin created, through his United Russia Party, an organization called “The Forum of Supporters for the Fight Against Neocolonialism and the Freedom of Nations.” Meeting in Moscow in mid-February, the organization expressed solidarity with the Palestinians.
Putin also sought to exploit the growing crisis in Gaza to once again urge Palestinian unity between Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. To do this, he convened a Palestinian unity conference in Moscow at the end of February. Even though it did not appear that Hamas and Fatah were ready to agree to unify — so deep were their differences — neither group felt able to resist Moscow’s invitation. For Hamas, which was getting battered by Israeli attacks, Russia offered important diplomatic cover, especially in the UN, while the Palestinian Authority, which had been sidelined by the ongoing conflict in Gaza, may have seen the Moscow meeting as a means of improving its diplomatic position. In any case, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas did not want to alienate Russia by refusing to participate in the meeting.
Despite the failure of many such “unity” conferences in the past, Putin may have hoped that the rapidly deteriorating situation in Gaza would propel the two major Palestinian groups toward unity. Indeed at the start of the conference, Lavrov offered to the Palestinian groups the services of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and special envoy to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, as well as the head of the Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vitaly Naumkin, to provide “advisory services” to help mediate the discussions. Unfortunately for Moscow, however, the meeting turned out to be a failure despite the final communique calling for unity. Еven the pretense of unity was shattered two weeks after the conference when Hamas attacked Abbas’ choice for the Palestinian Authority’s new Prime Minister, Mohamed Mustafa, a close confidant of Abbas, asserting that the choice was made without consulting it, despite the meeting in Moscow. For its part, the Palestinian Authority attacked Hamas for not consulting it, “when it made the decision to undertake the October 7 adventure which brought down upon the Palestinian people a disaster even more horrible than that of 1948.” Moscow sought to put the best possible light on the continuing Hamas-Fatah conflict by praising the appointment of Mustafa, while also hoping that he would “enjoy the support of the entire Palestinian population.”
As Moscow was trying to forge Palestinian unity, its relations with Israel continued to deteriorate. The Russian deputy UN ambassador, Maria Zabolotskaya, cast doubt on the report by Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary General’s special representative for sexual violence in conflict, about rapes by Hamas fighters during their attack on Israel on October 7. Zabolotskaya, who had questioned Patten’s report on rapes by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, attacked the report on Hamas, calling it a “half-truth which in no way gives a universal picture of what is happening.”
In April, Russia faced its most serious crisis of the war. Up until this time, Moscow had been protecting Hamas at the UN, denouncing Israeli activities in Gaza, and blaming the US for the war in Gaza, all the time trying to improve its position in the Global South at the expense of the United States. In April, however, Iran and Israel directly attacked each other, raising the possibility of a wider war that could have pulled in the United States and caused a US-Iranian war, which would pose very difficult problems of choice for Moscow, given its close tie to Iran on which it continued to depend for drones and missiles. Consequently, Russia sought to play down the conflict (as did the US) and seemed satisfied by April 19 that it did not escalate into the wider Middle East war, which it may well have feared.
In looking at Moscow’s response to the escalation between Israel and Iran there are several things to note. First, as might be expected, Russia criticized Israel for its attack on the embassy annex while blaming the US as well. Then, when Iran retaliated with its major attack on Israel, Moscow urged Israel to stay calm. The Russian warnings did not succeed in preventing the Israeli retaliatory attack on Iran which destroyed a SAM-300 complex that was guarding an Iranian nuclear installation at Natanz. However, Moscow must have been relieved that the Iranian leadership played down the Israeli attack and saw no need to escalate further. Still, the relative ease with which Israel had destroyed the Russian-built SAM-300 complex had to be of concern to both Russia and Iran because it underlined Iran’s vulnerability. Nonetheless, following the Israeli attack, tension eased, and it appeared — at least in the short run — that a more general Middle East war had been avoided, a situation that Moscow welcomed.
Despite the easing of tension, Russian-Israeli relations continued to deteriorate in April. In early April, Russia supported the Palestinian Authority’s request to obtain full membership in the UN — much to the displeasure of Israel — and even when the US vetoed the Palestinian request, Moscow promised to continue the effort to obtain full UN membership for the Palestinians. A new low in the Russia-Israel relationship was reached on April 19 when Russia urged the UN to sanction Israel for its failure to comply with a UNSC resolution (on which the US had abstained) that called on Israel for a cease-fire during Ramadan. As might be expected, given Russian policy since the war broke out, Russia also condemned the US for its aid to Israel. The Russian call for sanctions against Israel is a useful point of departure to draw some preliminary conclusions about Russian policy toward the Israel-Hamas war.
First, the deterioration of relations between Israel and Russia during the war has been significant. Not only did Moscow legitimize the Hamas attack on Israel by inviting a Hamas delegation to Moscow only two weeks after the Hamas attack, but it also protected Hamas by introducing UN Security Council Resolutions to end the war that made no mention of the Hamas attack while vetoing a US UNSC resolution that mentioned Hamas. It also supported the South African effort to bring genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, downplayed Israeli claims that Hamas had sexually assaulted Israeli women during its October 7th attack, and called on the UN Security Council to sanction Israel for its actions in Gaza. Still, while Russian invective against Israel, sprinkled with a large dose of antisemitism increased, Russia continued to allow Israeli war planes to fly through Syrian air space to attack Iranian and Hezbollah positions in that country, and it also continued to permit Russian Jewish emigration to Israel. In trying to explain Russian behavior, one can point to Moscow’s desire to maintain high-tech trade relations with Israel, and also its possible concern that with Assad’s still shaky control over Syria, Israel might move to help Assad’s enemies.
Second, at least by default, Russia has benefited in the Global South from the continued flow of US arms to Israel during the war, a policy that was unpopular in the Global South (except in India where the Modi regime is closely allied to Israel) where the Palestinian issue has resonated. By supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza and backing the Palestinian positions at the UN, Moscow could claim an improved position in the Global South, even as it sought to conflate its war in Ukraine with the Palestinian struggle against Israel. Still, the Russian position was not without its problems. Hamas is unpopular with the leaderships of a number of Arab states which Moscow has been courting, such as Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and the clash between Israel and Iran in April 2024 had the potential of escalating into a full-scale war that would have threatened Russia’s ally Iran, especially if the US got directly involved in the conflict.
A third preliminary conclusion that could be drawn from this study is that Russia has had little influence over the events that transpired after the Hamas attack of October 7th. Thus its call for an international conference to settle the war proved unsuccessful; the key diplomatic efforts to achieve a cease-fire were undertaken by the US, Egypt, and Qatar, not Russia; despite a major diplomatic effort, Moscow was unable to forge a reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and Russian was even unable to extract all the Russian citizens who were held hostage by Hamas despite all that Russia had done diplomatically for the Palestinian organization. Finally, despite Moscow’s warnings, Israel attacked Iran directly, an event that also showed the vulnerability of Russia’s SAM-300 system.
In sum, in the first six months of the war, it can be said that while Russia may have gained politically from the war — because of the close US-Israeli relationship — its influence in the conflict was quite limited and the deterioration of Russian-Israeli relations may yet change the Israeli position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Prof. Robert Freedman is one of the leading U.S. authorities on Israel, the Middle East, and American foreign policy. He is a former President, the Hebrew University in Baltimore, and currently is a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University. His has advised policymakers in State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and has been a commentator on major American news outlets. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here
A drone view shows Palestinians and terrorists gathering around Red Cross vehicles on the day Hamas hands over the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, seized during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
JNS.org – The moment we had all been dreading came to pass on Feb. 20, as four coffins draped with Israeli flags traveled from the Gaza Strip to Israel in a convoy led by the Israel Defense Forces. Two of the caskets were markedly smaller, in a heartbreaking confirmation that Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the two little boys abducted to Gaza with their mother, Shiri Bibas, during the Hamas-led pogrom on Oct. 7, 2013, did not survive their ordeal.
As I was writing these words, I received a video from my youngest son, who is studying in Israel, of two rainbows etched high in the sky above Tel Aviv’s Florentin district. As I choked back tears, I wanted to believe that this spectacle—God’s tribute to these two complete innocents—was a sign of hope for the rest of us.
But then I remembered that once again, Jews are on the defensive even as we grieve for these children, whose smiling faces became emblematic of the plight of the Israeli and foreign hostages seized on that terrible day. For it is impossible to grieve peacefully without remembering the sight of posters bearing the photos of Ariel and Kfir, as well as Shiri and their father, Yarden Bibas, being violently ripped from walls and lampposts by the antisemitic Hamas cheerleaders who have poisoned our lives. It is impossible to grieve peacefully without recalling the cruel barbs about the “weaponization” of the hostages issued by insidious pundits like Mehdi Hasan, the British-born Islamist antisemite who, shockingly and inexplicably, was granted US citizenship in 2020.
Most of all, it is impossible to grieve peacefully with the memory of the grotesque ceremony staged by Hamas before the coffins carrying the four bodies set off still fresh in our minds. Jaunty Arabic music blared through loudspeakers, and children posed with the guns carried by Hamas terrorists as their parents grinned and leered for the cameras.
Many hours later, an even more shocking development was reported. Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike, as falsely claimed by Hamas, but were brutally murdered in November 2023, as was the fourth hostage, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, according to the autopsies on the bodies undertaken in Israel. Forensic analysis also revealed that Hamas lied about Shiri being returned since the body in the coffin was not hers. The agony persists, and we continue to cry out, “Where is Shiri Bibas?”
The giant screen at the ceremony mocked Shiri and her children even in death—their images dwarfed by a vile, crude caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire, his fangs dripping with blood. Don’t be fooled by the apologists who will tell you that this representation of Netanyahu is merely trenchant criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza—a war that only erupted because of the monstrous atrocities of Oct. 7. It is better understood as a symbol of the sickness enveloping Palestinian society, which regards Jews as subhuman, and which liberally borrows from 2,000 years of anti-Jewish iconography to make that point.
The depiction of Netanyahu as a vampire is no accident, just as images of him dressed in a Nazi uniform are no accident. The Palestinians and their admirers are expert at selecting images that recycle the worst canards about Jews: that they have eagerly adopted the methods and ideology of their worst persecutors and that their collective goal is to suck out the lifeblood of non-Jews without mercy—to the point of sacrificing their own people should that turn out to be necessary, with the Bibas family on display as Exhibit “A.”
The association of Jews with blood dates back at least to the Roman era, spawning anti-Jewish “Blood Libel” riots from Norwich in England (one of the earliest examples) to Damascus in Syria (one of the more recent.) It has been embraced by both Christian and Islamic theologians, as well as by the more secular antisemites who asserted their hatred of Jews in the language of science rather than religion. In the literature and journals of the 19th and 20th centuries, the fictitious figure of the vampire emerged with unmistakable Jewish associations.
“It’s impossible to have this discussion without bringing up the blood libel, the unsubstantiated claim that Jews murdered gentile children to use their blood in rituals,” wrote Isabella Reish in a recent essay on the 1922 film Nosferatu. “Thus, European vampires of old are intrinsically linked to Jewishness.” In my view, that linkage is as true of Hamas now as it is of a Berlin salon in the dark years that ushered in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
We cannot live with this hatred, which has seeped from the Palestinians into the wider world, especially among Muslim communities in North America, Europe and Australia—nor should we be expected to. Combating it effectively means that we must be honest about the sources of the problem.
The main source is the Palestinians themselves. All the current discussions about the reconstruction of Gaza and the possible relocation of its civilian population miss the bigger issue. If Palestinians are to live successful, productive lives, then their society must be thoroughly deradicalized, foremost by challenging the antisemitic hatred that has consumed them. The United States, in particular, must prioritize the complete transformation of the Palestinian school system, installing and supervising a curriculum that will educate Palestinian children about Jewish history and religion, about the abiding, uninterrupted Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, and about the cynical manner their own plight has been exploited by Arab leaders happy to project internal unrest onto an external, “colonialist” enemy.
The second source is harder to pin down and cannot be dealt with in a school environment. I’m talking about the fans of the Scottish soccer club Glasgow Celtic, who waved banners urging “Show Zionism the Red Card” at a match in, of all places, the German city of Munich; about the Muslim and far-left vigilantes who last week descended on one of America’s most Jewish neighborhood, Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were gratifyingly confronted by local resistance; about the cowardly arsonists burning down synagogues and Jewish day-care centers in Canada and Australia. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to do more than just respond to each outrage. What’s required is a comprehensive global strategy aimed at rooting out these organizations, their communications networks and their propaganda outlets. No measures, including deportation and loss of naturalized citizenship, should be off the table, and no country—looking at you two, Qatar and Iran—should escape scrutiny for fueling these fires.
For decades, our elected leaders have cynically used Holocaust commemoration and education as evidence of their commitment to fighting post-Hitler antisemitism. That hasn’t worked very well, and as the black-and-white images of the Holocaust fade into history’s depths, replaced by decontextualized social-media video bursts of Gazans fleeing Israeli bombing, it’ll work even less so. If the soul-crushing pictures of the coffins bearing the Bibas children don’t result in a fundamental strategic pivot, then perhaps nothing will.
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Is Religion Rational?
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – When it comes to religion, how much is belief, and how much is rational? Is Judaism a rational religion? Does being religious require a leap of faith?
Perhaps other faiths do. I mean, I respect everyone’s right to choose the religion they subscribe to and want to practice, but some religions do require extraordinary leaps of faith from their followers.
Judaism, on the other hand, is based not on any incredulous leaps of faith, but on the shared firsthand experience of an entire nation.
With other faiths, the starting point is a supposed revelation reported to have been experienced by the founder of that faith. You either believe it or you don’t believe it. Your choice.
But Judaism was founded at Mount Sinai where millions of Israelites, fresh out of Egypt, experienced the Revelation at Sinai. Each and every Israelite, personally, heard the Ten Commandments from the voice of God, not Moses! And it wasn’t virtual, it was personal. They were all there, and it was an in-body experience.
That’s not faith. That is fact. Not only Moses and his disciples but the entire nation of men, women and children—a few million in all—were eyewitnesses to that revelation. And this was handed down by father to son, mother to daughter, throughout the generations wherever Jews lived. European Jews and Yemenite Jews have the very same tradition, the very same Torah. Yes, there are differences in custom and variations on a theme, but the basic traditions are identical.
How? Because they all came from the very same source—Almighty God at Mount Sinai!
This week, we read Mishpatim, a Torah portion that deals with civil and social laws that are very logical. Everyone understands and accepts that society needs a code of law and justice to be able to function.
So, if your ox gores your friend’s ox, you will be liable for damages. If you’re making a barbecue and your negligence causes the fire to spread to your neighbor’s property and it burns down his house, you will be liable. And if you’re going on vacation and deposit your pet poodle at the Lords & Ladies Poodle Parlor for safe keeping and when you come back, they tell you they lost your poodle, then they will be responsible for paying you for your poodle. And so on.
But even the logical mitzvot have much more to them than meets the eye. There are layers and layers of depth, meaning, symbolism and profound spirituality behind every single mitzvah, rational or not.
There are only a handful of chukim, statutory decrees that we were not given an explanation of and for which we must take on faith, like kashrut or shatnez, the law of not mixing wool and linen garments together.
But the truth is that every mitzvah needs faith.
Why? Because without faith, we do something only humans are capable of. Do you know what that is? Rationalization.
Everyone understands that you’re not supposed to steal. And yet, studies have shown that no less than 59% of hotel guests steal from their hotel rooms. Now, I don’t think the hotel really minds if you take the shampoo. I imagine if you asked them, they would say it’s fine.
But no hotel will let you take the towels or the robes. And no hotel will let you take the TV. I was shocked to read that some guests even took home a mattress! (Apparently, in the middle of the night, they snuck it into the elevator, went down to the basement garage and stuffed it into the trunk of their car.)
If you ask these people, they will likely give you all kinds of reasons why their actions are justified. The hotel overcharged me. It calculates shrinkage into their price, so I actually paid for it. If I wear the hotel’s towel on the beach, I am advertising for them, so they should pay me.
This is classic rationalization.
So we do need faith after all, even for logical commandments like not stealing. Otherwise, we fail. Badly.
Interestingly, the very same Torah reading of Mishpatim, with its logical, civil laws also has the famous phrase, Na’aseh V’Nishma. These were the words of the Jewish people when asked if they would accept God’s Torah. They replied Na’aseh, “we will do” and only thereafter Nishmah, “we will listen” and understand. It is the core of simple, pure, absolute faith, beyond any logic or understanding.
And this explains why the Ten Commandments, which we read last week, begin with Anochi, “I am God,” the lofty, abstract mitzvah to believe in God. To have faith.
And then the other commandments go on to tell us the most basic laws that every low life knows he should keep. Not to murder, commit adultery, steal, lie or be jealous.
How did we get from the highest, metaphysical commandment of belief to the grossest of the gross in a few short sentences?
Because without faith, a human being is capable of justifying anything.
The accursed Nazis justified the Holocaust. REAL genocide, not make-believe South African genocide. How did they justify it? By saying Jews are scum, sub-human. We are doing the world a service by eliminating them. The world will be a better place for it. Rationalization.
Without the first commandment of faith in God, there can be no adherence to any of the other commandments.
Logic gets you pretty far but not far enough. As logical as Judaism may be, we still need the foundation of faith to do what we must do and avoid that which is tempting but wrong.
May we all embrace Judaism with knowledge and reason and by understanding its philosophy, without losing that pure and simple faith that every one of us possesses.
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Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity
Orthodox Jewish men stand near a tank, ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
JNS.org – Thursday was a national day of mourning, as the bodies of hostage Shiri Bibas’s children Ariel and Kfir, along with that of Oded Lipshitz, returned to Israel. Hamas also handed over a fourth coffin, falsely saying it held Shiri Bibas‘s remains, but it was subsequently determined that it contained the corpse of an unidentified non-Israeli woman.
Their dire fate, along with that of some 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, stand as an unbearable reminder of the consequences of allowing a genocidal, jihadist army to entrench itself on Israel’s border.
The sorrow that grips all Israelis, reinforced by months of war, adds up to a clear national imperative: Israel can never again allow Gaza to be a staging ground for an Iranian-backed terrorist army. Once Israel has exhausted all efforts to secure the release of its hostages, Hamas must be eliminated from the face of the Earth as a terror army. No one on Israel’s borders can be allowed to build an ability to send death squads and invasion brigades over the border in an organized manner.
Ensuring Israeli security control over Gaza is the only way to achieve this. This work cannot be outsourced to anyone; the idea that a foreign force or paid mercenaries would have the ability to deal with Hamas is absurd. Israeli security control of Gaza is not just a military necessity to prevent future Hamas barbarity, it is an existential imperative.
The ongoing professional inquiries by the IDF into the events of Oct. 7 aim to provide answers to the public, the bereaved families and affected communities about the multiple system failures of that darkest of days.
But these investigations are not just about accountability—they are about learning from history in real time. As one IDF official put it this week, Israel must “carry out the lessons learned during the war, not afterward, and prepare for future conflicts.”
The scope of the IDF’s inquiries is broad, covering four main areas: Israel’s long-term strategy regarding Gaza, intelligence failures leading up to the war, the decision-making process between Oct. 6 and 7, and the first 72 hours of defensive operations.
But even before their conclusions are published, likely in the coming days, it is possible to draw some key conclusions.
Not deterred, not a rational actor, not seeking prosperity
Before the attack, every day that Israel did not act to prevent Hamas from building its capabilities, and every day that Israel gave up on the idea of achieving security control over Gaza, was an opportunity for Hamas to develop further its murderous plans and prepare for the massacre.
The Western-oriented idea that Israel could afford to refrain from continuous security operations in Gaza, and that the IDF could stay back behind the border, was fueled by deluded concepts of Hamas being deterred, that it was a rational actor, and that it sought economic prosperity.
These delusions stem from a catastrophic inability to grasp the jihadist mindset of a fundamentalist Islamic death cult, and from the tendency that was rampant in the defense establishment and the political echelon before Oct. 7 to project Western thinking onto our enemies. This allowed Hamas the space and the time to prepare its attack. Those who wish to indefinitely delay Israeli operations to prevent Hamas from rebuilding these capabilities have returned to the pre-Oct. 7 misconceptions. The “day after” is today.
During the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas behaved like an army intent on genocide. It seized land, executing civilians in the most brutal manner imaginable, and taking hostages to act as insurance policies for the survival of its leadership. It was only able to do these things because it controlled its own territory, giving it the ability to develop an arms industry, smuggle in weapons and develop its intentions with minimal interference.
Meanwhile, the chief of the IDF General Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who is due to step down on March 6, has spent recent days in the United States discussing strategic and operational issues with top American military officials.
Halevi visited the Pentagon to meet with Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with staff officers, and with Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the commander of CENTCOM (responsible for the Middle East), to discuss Lebanon and Iran, and ways to strengthen U.S.-Israeli cooperation.
But Gaza trumped the other arenas. Halevi expedited his return to Israel due to the agreement to return the bodies of the hostages.
No international diplomacy or security guarantees can obviate the necessity of full Israeli freedom of operation in Gaza for the foreseeable future. Failure to recognize this would invite, once again, catastrophe, and Israel cannot afford to repeat its mistakes.
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