I write this with a heavy heart, still struggling to process the horror unfolding before our eyes as I watch the TV in the comforts of my condo in Florida. We are all grieving for the Bibas family—innocent Jewish lives lost in the most brutal fashion imaginable. A mother, father, and their two young children, taken hostage by Hamas, were held in captivity for months, their fate uncertain. Yarden, the father, was released in January 2025 but now we know what happened to his family. Black coffins filled with Jewish babies and their mother — innocent mother and children who were alive when Hamas kidnapped them, now returned in death—paraded through the streets of Gaza as trophies as Palestinian Arabs look on with smiles and cheers. The sheer cruelty of this moment is unfathomable. There are no words strong enough to describe the depravity, the inhumanity, the unmitigated evil of Hamas and the people who celebrate their atrocities. The illusion of a two-state solution is shattered. The world can no longer hide behind the comfortable fiction that this is a conflict between two sides seeking peace. This is not a territorial dispute. This is not about negotiations. This is about a death cult that thrives on Jewish suffering and destruction. This is about an ideology so perverse that it revels in the murder of infants. The international community such as the United Nations and European Commission has spent decades pressuring Israel to make concessions, to take risks for peace, to give up land, to recognize Palestinian Arab claims. And Israel has tried. In 2005, Israel officially withdrew from Gaza, uprooting its own citizens in a desperate attempt to create space for peace. What did it get in return? Rockets, terror tunnels, and now, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas, the Palestinian Arabs that elected them and its enablers in Tehran have proven, again and again, that they do not want peace. They do not want coexistence. They do not want a state alongside Israel; they want a state instead of Israel. And the Palestinian Arab population that cheers for them, that raises their children to become suicide bombers, that hands out sweets when Jews are slaughtered—these are not innocent bystanders. These are active combatants in the perpetuation of hatred and bloodshed. The world needs to understand: there will never be two states. There will only be one, and it is called Israel. The notion of a "Palestinian state" is dead, buried under the weight of its own unrelenting jihadist violence and the thousands of Jews they murdered on October 7, 2023. Hamas, and all who support them, must be eradicated. They should be given no quarter. They forfeited any claim to moral legitimacy the moment they danced on the corpses of murdered civilians. The land Israel ceded in good faith must be reclaimed. There can be no safe haven for terrorists. No illusion of peace with those who glorify genocide. The tragedy of October 7th should have been a wake-up call, yet even now, too many in the West refuse to see the truth. The same international organizations that wring their hands over Israel’s right to self-defense are the ones who remain silent in the face of Hamas’s atrocities. Where is the outcry for the Bibas family? Where is the global condemnation for the murder of innocent babies? When Jewish lives are lost, the world looks away or worse, rationalizes the violence as part of a "cycle of conflict." But this is not a conflict; this is a one-sided war waged by terrorists against a sovereign nation, a war against Jewish existence itself. The evidence of Hamas's genocidal intent is undeniable. Their own charter calls for the extermination of Jews. Their actions on October 7th were not about resistance; they were about bloodlust. They slaughtered women, children, the elderly—anyone they could get their hands on. They filmed their crimes, taking pride in their barbarism. And still, the so-called "human rights" organizations hesitate to label Hamas as what they truly are: monsters. The response from Israel must be absolute. No more half-measures. No more ceasefires that allow Hamas to regroup. No more concessions that are met with rockets and kidnappings. The IDF must dismantle Hamas completely, root and branch. Every tunnel must be destroyed, every weapons cache seized, every terrorist eliminated. The people of Gaza had a chance to build a future, but they chose jihad. They chose Hamas. Now they must live with the consequences. And the world must finally wake up. We are past the point of diplomatic hand-wringing, of empty calls for "de-escalation." Israel is fighting not just for its survival, but for the very concept of civilization itself. If we fail to recognize this, if we allow ourselves to be lulled into another cycle of appeasement and delusion, then we are complicit in the next massacre. There is no middle ground. There is no room for compromise. Evil must be destroyed. Full stop. Israel - and the Jewish people - will endure, not because of international goodwill, but because it has no choice. And this time, the world must stand with it—not with useless resolutions or hollow sympathy, but with unwavering resolve. The two-state lie is over. Let it be buried alongside the victims of Hamas’s barbarity, and may their deaths not be in vain. May the memories of the Bibas family, and the thousands of Jews murdered by Hamas be a memory forever. We will never forget them. We will never stop fighting in their memory. Am Yisrael Chai, always. Bryan E. Leib is the Managing Director of Henry Public Relations and the Senior Fellow of the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest, Hungary.
