After October 7, 2023

Could the destruction of Gaza after October 7 have been avoided? The answer is yes — had Hamas so wished.

First, if the Hamas leadership had simply complied with Israeli demands to (a) return the 251 hostages and (b) surrender the architects and perpetrators of the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, the Israelis would not have had to fight Hamas in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.

Note how critics of Israel consistently fail to offer any viable alternative to the Israeli ground effort to destroy the Hamas mass murderers.

Nor do Israel's enemies ever bother to explain why Hamas did not return its hostages and give up the perpetrators of October 7. Why did nobody expect the International Criminal Court or the U.N. to have the slightest effect when they ineffectually interceded to demand the return of the hostages and issued arrest warrants for the "war criminals" of Hamas?

The answer, of course, is that there was no more likelihood of them getting Hamas to cooperate than there was of the defunct League of Nations convincing Hitler to stop the killing of Jews or the U.N. persuading Pol Pot to stop murdering Cambodians. And it is likely that many anti-Israeli U.N. members silently approved of the murders.

Moreover, there is no evidence that most Gazans objected to the terrorism. Indeed, large numbers joined in when possible. More than 2,000 civilians tagged along in hopes of killing, raping, torturing, and looting with impunity. And when corpses and hostages appeared in the trucks of the returning Hamas murderers, the killers had to protect their prizes from their own even more bloodthirsty people back home, who sought to beat and spit on already dead and wounded Jews. Imagine: the killers had to protect their hostages from an even more bloodthirsty "civilian" mob.

Second, Hamas didn't just refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable terrorists to the Israelis. Far from seeking peace, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the slaughter of October 7 and the Israeli ground forces' entry into Gaza launching thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel (barrages that would exceed, within a year, 25,000 launches).

Third, the death toll in Gaza would have been far lower had the killers of October 7 helped their own civilians keep clear of combat zones. Far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately situated its tunnel exits and entrances beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.

The IDF gave warnings to civilians and even texted thousands of Gazans with instructions to evacuate northern Gaza and keep clear of the Hamas terrorists who were using their own citizens as human shields. And why did Hamas do this, if not in the correct belief that the Israelis would avoid those human shields in a way that Hamas itself would never have avoided Israeli human shields had the situation been reversed?

Worse, Hamas had even less respect for its own citizens than did the supposedly genocidal Israeli enemy. It used noncombatants, hospitals, and mosques as shields because it was certain that Israel would show them more deference by not bombing them than Hamas itself showed by putting them in harm's way.

What would have happened had Hamas (after jubilantly returning home with hostages, trophy corpses, and loot) immediately insisted that Gazan citizens descend into its 310 miles of subterranean sanctuaries to use them as air-raid shelters — while Hamas fighters battled the enemy above ground?

Could anyone imagine British soldiers during the Blitz sneaking into subway tunnels and hiding, Hamas-style, while British civilians fought above and braved the bombing?

Most fundamentally of all, if........

© Townhall