Can Israel's Bombing Campaign End Hamas?

          For over a hundred days after Hamas militants crossed Israel’s border on October 7, killing 1,139 people and taking around 250 hostages, Israel has bombed Gaza into a wasteland, which UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths recently described as “uninhabitable.”

          According to Oxfam, an international collective of non-governmental organizations, Israel’s bombing campaign has led to a death toll exceeding any other major conflict in recent history, currently leading to around 250 deaths a day with a current death toll of over 24,000, around 70 percent of which are estimated to be civilian casualties. Israel dropped more tonnage of explosives in the last few months in Gaza than the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, displacing 1.9 million people—around 85 percent of Gaza’s population—and heavily restricting access to fuel, electricity, and clean water in the region. According to the United Nations, “more than 90 percent of Palestinians in the territory say they have regularly gone without food for a whole day” and more than half are at risk of starvation.

          In the eyes of the Israeli government, all of these actions are worth it to achieve its end goal: eliminate Hamas and take back the hostages. They are certainly trying, having killed or captured between eight and nine thousand Hamas militants out of a total of around 30,000 and returning 100 hostages. Online, however, heated arguments question whether Israel has the right to slaughter so many civilians if it can achieve its goals by doing so.

          Israel’s goal of  permanently ending Hamas has become increasingly difficult and grows less achievable with every bomb that goes off, for reasons that go far beyond Hamas itself. After October 7, polling indicated that support for the US-designated terrorist group skyrocketed, more than tripling from 12 to 44 percent in the West Bank and increasing from 38 to 42 percent in Gaza. This wave of support is not because Palestinians support the slaughter of civilians; in fact, according to Fadi Quran, a West Bank activist, many Palestinians refuse to believe stories about civilian murder. He says that most Palestinians instead see Hamas’ efforts as a challenge to the military occupation, defending against their occupiers.

          The Palestinian Authority (PA), which currently holds control over the West Bank, came to power with the belief that diplomacy could achieve the wishes of the Palestinian people, meaning the terrorist actions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization at the time and Hamas today were unnecessary. Yet diplomatic attempts have not only been unsuccessful but have continued to worsen over time. As ​​Ghaith al-Omari notes in his article in The Atlantic, the stalling and eventual failure of the Oslo Accords, the last significant attempt to give Palestinians an independent state, “undermined the PA’s central message” and the success of diplomacy. Today, 60 percent of land in the West Bank remains under full Israeli civil and military control, and Palestinians face constant threats from settler violence as well as severe limitations to where they can go and what they can do. According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and independent UN human rights experts, these practices are so severely harmful that they constitute apartheid against the Palestinian people. Coupled with the Palestinian Authority’s history of rampant corruption, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness, this failure of the PA proves to Palestinians that diplomacy will not bring them anything, giving them nowhere to turn but to radical and often violent groups like Hamas. 

          Even though Hamas’s actions on October 7 directly led to and partially excused Israel’s brutal response in the eyes of the international community, polling shows that Palestinians do not see Hamas as the enemy: they see Israel, the country actively bombing them, as the enemy.

          On October 7, Netanyahu vowed “mighty vengeance” against Hamas for the death of around 1100 people. What vengeance might Gazans seek after Israel has killed over 20,000 people in a country where the median age is 19, and made their homeland “uninhabitable?” Israel’s response, and any further actions it takes, will only continue to strengthen the message of Hamas or, if it is destroyed, the next organization created to continue in its memory. Bombs and guns may kill off Hamas, but they will not destroy the ideology behind it. But if bombs cannot kill off Hamas, what can?

          Although Israel does not have any easy or immediate solutions to this issue, the only thing that can kill radicalization is stability, something that Israel cannot produce without Palestinian cooperation but can certainly move Palestine towards. First, and most importantly, Israel should listen to the international communities’ calls for a ceasefire, ending the devastation it has inflicted upon Gaza and allowing it to heal.

          Second, Israel should end its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, giving Palestinians the state they so desperately desire. According to the United Nations, Israel has illegally occupied East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza since 1967, after a six-day war between Israel and neighboring Arab states. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and most of the international community support a deal creating a Palestinian state with these three regions. However, Israel has continuously refused the deal for various reasons, the most significant of which has been their claim to the entirety of Jerusalem. Furthermore, creating this state would require Israel to dismantle its own illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, something it is unlikely to do anytime soon.

          Third, Israel must allow Palestine to return to its former self, ending its physical blockade of economic activity in Gaza and allowing trade to flow in and out of the city. Gaza needs to rebuild, reconstructing the 50 percent of its infrastructure that Israel destroyed as well as building a new airport and seaport, both of which Israel destroyed more than twenty years ago during or shortly after they were constructed.

          Outside of committing to a ceasefire, none of these steps will be easy nor likely to occur, as Israel openly states that it opposes the existence of a Palestinian state. The last prime minister who tried to create such a state was assassinated by a far-right law student with views that, according to Doron Weber of Haaretz, are not all that different from modern Israeli politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. Israel has not meaningfully attempted to create a Palestinian state since. But without change, Hamas will only continue to grow in popularity, and violence may soon supersede diplomacy as Palestine’s strategy to resist Israel.