Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son and can be purchased on Amazon. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) The resumption of Israel’s war in Gaza has produced a predictable reaction in a world that remains determined to malign the Jewish state.
Western media declared that Israel had ended the ceasefire. In fact, the ceasefire had ended more than two weeks earlier. Although Israel had agreed to a further U.S.-brokered deal, Hamas rejected it and refused to release any more hostages.
Hamas left Israel with no option but to resume the war, which it did with an aerial bombardment of Gaza.
The terror group instantly stated that the bombardment had killed 400 Gazan civilians. This was absurd because Hamas couldn’t have known the number of casualties so fast and, as usual, it omitted any Hamas operatives in the total. Yet in typically reflexive fashion, the Western media parroted this incredible figure without questioning it.
No less predictable have been the Israeli protests that by resuming the war Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages—of whom 24 are said still to be alive.
The most bitter and agonizing reproach has been voiced by some of the former hostages who have accused Netanyahu of ignoring everything they’ve been telling the world about the horrific conditions in which the captives are being held.
There can hardly be a single person in Israel who doesn’t desperately want the hostages back home. And there’s no denying the genuine anguish at the failure to get them all back. Their plight is beyond horrific, and the profound emotionalism of the public response is entirely understandable.
Unfortunately, such emotion is a barrier to clear and unavoidably brutal thinking. The only way Hamas will return all the hostages is if Israel surrenders and leaves it in power. The reason it took the hostages in the first place was to ensure that Israel could never win against it.
If it gives up all the hostages, Hamas will be left with no means of holding off the Israelis. It will be finished. By keeping hold of its captives, Hamas doesn’t just have the upper hand; it holds all the cards because it knows that to Israel, every life is important and thus Israel feels under a sacred duty to retrieve them. While Hamas keeps them under its brutal imprisonment, it will continue to spin out negotiations over releasing them to paralyze Israel’s military options.
The Israel Defense Forces have known for some time where many, if not most of the hostages were being held, but it couldn’t reach them because if they did Hamas would murder them.
The released hostages say that a deal is the only way to bring the rest of them back. The terrible truth is that no deal will bring them all back. Only Israel’s total capitulation will do that.
That would mean Hamas would survive, more hostages would be taken, more Israelis would be murdered, and every malign force in the Middle East would be incentivized to redouble their attacks against Israel in the belief that Israel will no longer do what it takes to defeat them.
So, now, Israel is going all out to destroy Hamas as a military and governing force. This second stage of the war is different from the first because Israel no longer has to fight America, too.
Unlike the Biden administration, the Trump administration is backing Israel to win this war. U.S. President Donald Trump is not only providing Israel with the weapons to do so, but he is also supporting Israel’s ban on further humanitarian aid supplies going to Gaza, which was how Hamas was able to keep going.
Indeed, a key reason this war has lasted for 17 months, why so many IDF soldiers have fallen, why the hostages have been incarcerated for so long in such lethal conditions, and why so many Gazan civilians have been killed is because by insisting on aid supplies continuing throughout the war the Biden administration and Western governments provided Hamas with the means to continue to fight.
Israel says the only way to get the hostages back is through military pressure. According to Israeli Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, head of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, this pressure will be ramped up in stages.
The first stage was the aerial bombardment, which was stunningly successful in killing most of Hamas’s top commanders along with hundreds of its troops.
If Hamas still refuses to release the hostages, says Avivi, the next stage will be the ground war, which has now started. This, he states, will be a decisive attack of a type not seen before to force the release of all the hostages and “create a new reality” in Gaza.
But the great dread is that, if Hamas feels its back is to the wall, it will murder all the living hostages. It can’t be denied that this is a very real possibility. So, to some people, doing a deal to get all the hostages back seems a no-brainer. Despite the suicidal price of allowing Hamas to return to power.
In Israel, a majority of the public strongly favors this option. The redemption of captives is viewed as an absolute obligation of the state, rooted in Jewish principles.
However, those Jewish principles also hold that, while the redemption of hostages is a sacred duty, this must not be achieved if the price to be paid is the capture and killing of more innocents.
This is the terrible dilemma Israel has faced from the start of this war. How does a nation balance the imperative it feels to save some of its citizens from captivity, torture and death with the imperative not to sentence even more of its citizens to the same fate and, instead, ensure their security?
Taking Israeli hostages was a diabolically brilliant tactic through which Hamas is, even now, controlling the agenda, not least by whipping up overwhelming and uncontrollable emotion among Israel’s deeply traumatized population.
From the start of the war, however, Netanyahu has made a bad mistake in not being honest with the public. He has consistently declared that he will deliver the twin goals of destroying Hamas and returning the hostages.
He should have said that while no effort would be spared to return the hostages, it might not be possible to achieve both those goals; and that if a terrible choice had to be made, it would have to be to win the war and protect Israel’s population of 10 million people.
He didn’t say that. He still maintains that both goals can be achieved through military means. (Perhaps he cannot bring himself to say that, ed.)
What really sticks in the craw, however, is that one crucial card has not been played by either the United States or Israel. Qatar is the creator, funder and protector of Hamas; in effect, Qatar is Hamas.
If America had put significant pressure on Qatar’s rulers to release the hostages and surrender the Hamas leaders it was sheltering, the war would have ended. Instead, both the United States and Israel have used Qatar as "dispassionate honest brokers" in the grotesque Hamas negotiation circus.
The reason for America’s attitude is undoubtedly the vast investments Qatar has shrewdly made in the United States that have made the Gulf state an invaluable contributor to American prosperity. Indeed, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, reportedly has a significant financial relationship with Qatar.
There are also allegations that Qatar secretly funded Israeli officials and influencers, including some connected to the prime minister’s office. This may be propaganda. But Israel’s indulgence of the Islamists of Qatar is baffling.
Maybe, precisely because Hamas knows that if it kills the remaining hostages it will lose its only leverage, it won’t murder those who remain under its vicious thumb.
Maybe the IDF will get to them before Hamas can do so.
Maybe the increased military pressure will force them to release their captives.
With no realistic alternative to the war, we can only hope and pray.
