The Jerusalem Post June 1, 2025 In parallel, Israel has established a new humanitarian mechanism — the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — to deliver food, water, and medicine directly to civilians without going through Hamas.
This is critical. For years, Hamas maintained power not only through fear and force but also by monopolizing aid distribution and punishing dissent. That monopoly is now being broken.
For the first time in nearly two decades, signs of civilian defiance are emerging: Gazans 1. protesting Hamas’s theft, 2. rejecting their authority, 3. and calling them out publicly.
But let no one be mistaken — this is still a war, not a counter-insurgency. Hamas remains the de facto ruling power of Gaza. It still 1. commands fighters, 2. holds hostages, 3. and exerts control over large swaths of the population.
No one who has studied war — real war — should have expected that a terror regime that spent decades militarizing every inch of Gaza and radicalizing generations of civilians could be dismantled easily or quickly.
Those calling for an immediate ceasefire 1. either do not understand war, 2. or do not want Hamas to lose.
This war must end not with a ceasefire, but with a clear and irreversible outcome: the defeat of Hamas as a military and governing power.
If the international community truly wants peace, it should focus not on saving Hamas, but on how it is first removed from power, disarmed, and dismantled — so that the long process of deradicalization and reconciliation can begin.
This was the path taken after World War II, when defeating the regimes that started the war was recognized as the necessary precondition for lasting peace.
