Gaza: Terror-Free Zone?

"Gaza will be a deradicalized  terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours."

"[Hamas members  who commit to] peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons [will be given amnesty]."

"[In time] conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood."

U.S. President Trump's peace plan

 

"[The] pride heroism, and honour [of the Palestinian people had] thwarted the Israeli occupation's plan for subjugation and displacement."

"[Hamas] will not abandon our people's national rights: to achieve freedom, independence, and self-determination."

Hamas' reaction to ceasefire plan

 

"With the approval of the first phase of the plan, all our hostages will be brought home."

"This is a diplomatic success and a national and moral victory for the State of Israel."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Thousands gather at Hostages Square to celebrate the return of the hostages, October 13, 2025.

 

If the nature of Hamas as a dedicated death-cult led to a preordained barbaric assault against Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023 for which Israel was unprepared, and the targets of the murderous rampage might never have imagined that such savagery would be launched against them, since those that lived in the kibbutzim and farming communities regularly employed their Gaza neighbours as farm labourers and were in total sympathy with their plight under Hamas, it follows that the government of Israel was preordained to respond with a full, all-out invasion and corresponding assaults on the Hamas terrorists.

 

The leaders of Hamas had long planned the details of the impending incursion into southern Israel. On the surface it appeared that their cult mission to destroy the Jewish state had abated with the weight of government in Gaza shifting to civic infrastructure, when the extent of the underground maze of tunnels under the Strip had not yet been fully realized by Israeli intelligence and its military. Only to discover their numbers and sophistication with the understanding that Israeli children, women and men were incarcerated there as hostages, abducted from their homes on October 7.

 

Hamas command posts and weapons depots established in Gaza hospitals, rocket launchers placed in the midst of crowded civilian enclaves, and Hamas operatives along with those of Islamic Jihad doffing uniforms to meld into the civilian population, leaving little option for the Israel Defense Forces but to bomb identified terrorist posts, buildings used as headquarters, communications, and planning centers with associated and unpreventable civilian Palestinian harms.

 

People wrapped in US and Israeli flags stand around a portrait of US President Donald Trump as they wait for the release of hostages from Gaza at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv early on October 13, 2025.

 

All of which fell as planned by Hamas; documenting the rising death toll among Palestinians as fodder for their public relations machinery geared to Western news media, gullible populations and governments, while destabilizing the Middle East and preventing Sunni Muslim governments from the momentum gained by Bahrain, the UAE and Morocco, continuing to swell the ranks of those making peace with Israel through the Abraham Accords. Hamas called upon its sister terror groups in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon as well as their mentor-state Iran to swell their own Israel-demolishing ranks.

 

So, now, the world celebrates a ceasefire, hoping for a lasting peace between Israel and its Middle East neighbours and for the immediate moment, a cessation of military hostilities  between Israel and Gaza. Despite the serious losses sustained by Hamas in the two years since the  horrors of October 7's mass murder of innocent lives in Israel, the terrorists continued their rocket fire, joined by Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthis. Hamas glories in its supposed fighting prowess, lusts after Jewish blood, takes pride in its death mission.

 

Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard on the day of the handover of hostages held in Gaza since the deadly October 7 2023 attack, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 22, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/

 

There will never be peace in the Middle East while Hamas persists. And while Israel and Jews everywhere are joyful and relieved at the return of the still-living hostages, awaiting the full return of those who died in captivity along with the dead taken from Israel to Gaza, expectations that the ceasefire plan's points of Hamas surrendering its weapons, and leaving Gaza are not remotely credible. Much less the ease with which deradicalization of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank under the PA can be accomplished.

 

Palestinian culture is based on clan loyalties, and while Hamas still reigns in Gaza however temporarily, an orgy of revenge-killings is on overdrive. Prominent Palestinian clans that ordinarily prey on each other and on the wider Palestinian populations who rival Hamas in its dominant role, are engaged in wholesale armed conflict with Hamas, even as Hamas hunts down those Palestinians it claims to be disloyal to their cause. Bloodshed is the order of the day. Public executions of Palestinians by Hamas as traitors become events enjoyed by other Palestinians assembled to witness the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens.

 

How likely is it that this culture is prepared to become entirely civilized and accepting finally of a Jewish state, one they have violently opposed for 70 years and more? In a realm where Israel's population is accepting of over a million Palestinians as citizens, and where, should an Israeli Jew venture into Palestinian territory, it would mean instant death. How possible is it to wean millions of people taught from the cradle to infancy, teen years to adulthood to despise Jews and consider martyrdom in the act of murdering Jews to represent the highest point to which anyone could aspire?