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The plan, in its admirable clarity, insists that Hamas must disarm if the Strip is ever to be rebuilt and its people given even the slimmest chance of a future unburdened by perpetual war. Hamas, being Hamas, has no intention of complying unless the pressure becomes quite literally unbearable. And so, with the foresight of a criminal syndicate that has survived longer than anyone predicted, it has already begun spiriting away its arsenal to safer climes.
As the Jerusalem Post reported on November 16, citing Israeli public broadcaster KAN: "Hamas has started stockpiling weapons in African countries, Yemen, and other nations sympathetic to the terrorist organization… The report follows the implementation of the US-broked ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which stipulates the disarmament of the latter. According to Kan, the weapons are being stockpiled so that they can later be smuggled to locations, including the Gaza Strip, where Hamas can access them."
In plain English: Hamas has agreed to disarm in the same spirit that a snake agrees to become a vegetarian while quietly relocating the contents of the henhouse to a neighboring county. The destinations, one hardly needs reminding, are the usual suspects: Somalia, the lawless east of Libya under the Tripoli-based regime, the Houthi-ruled wastes of Yemen, and, let us not pretend otherwise, the indulgent salons of Qatar, the accommodating ports of Turkey, and, at the end of the supply chain, the arsenals of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A geography of fanaticism and failure, united by a single animating hatred.
Mossad, one presumes, is already mapping these ratlines across half the globe, though the task is rather like trying to count grains of sand in the Negev while the wind keeps blowing.
Mossad, one presumes, is already mapping these ratlines across half the globe, though the task is rather like trying to count grains of sand in the Negev while the wind keeps blowing.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council prepares to vote on yet another resolution, this one authorizing a multinational force to "demilitarize" Gaza, destroy its military infrastructure, and secure its borders, as if the paper on which such resolutions are written has ever restrained a single jihadist.
Hamas, for its part, has refused even to pretend it will surrender its weapons. And why should it? Since October 2023 it is believed to have recruited another twenty thousand young men eager to die for the cause. The organization is bloodied, certainly, but far from broken. Like some malevolent organism that regenerates faster than it can be cut, it has already ensured that whatever is confiscated in Gaza today can be replaced tomorrow from caches scattered across continents that have never met a terrorist they didn’t wish to support.
This is the reality of negotiating with millennial apocalypticism dressed up as "resistance." One does not disarm such people; one defeats them, or one waits for the next massacre. Everything else, the ceasefires, the resolutions, the earnest twenty-point plans, is merely the interval between atrocities.
Hamas understands this perfectly. It is long past time the rest of us did too and it's also time to end Hamas' existence.
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