To the Journal editor:

After 15 months of fighting and many failed international attempts to broker a truce, Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal that will pause fighting in Gaza and lead to a phased release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and our TV screens have been genuinely focused on the historic value of all the pains both Palestinians and Israelis have been facing for the longest period of an exhausting war.

After more than a year of fighting in Gaza, at great cost in blood, through enormous security, diplomatic and societal efforts, we seem to have created a moment of opportunity and we must seize it.

President Trump vowed repeatedly since early December there would be ‘hell to pay’ for Hamas if it doesn’t release the hostages before he takes office which has probably helped move the pieces on the checkerboard.

However, it would be grossly unfair if we neglect all what former president, Biden, Egypt, Qatar, and believe it or not, Saudi Arabia had done to help. However, Trump’s threats and his special envoy to the Middle East played a major role in helping Biden’s officials/team reach the finish line.

David Ignatius who is an undisputed authority on Middle East issues in a recent article titled “Year of carnage” started it with this sentence “Peace is a universal human aspiration. We pray for it in every faith and language. But we need to look in the mirror and admit that in 2024, the world failed miserably in containing the scourge of war.” It is profoundly sad that for whatever reason we, and the world with us are only focused on the carnage in the Middle East as if there is none in several other places on our planet.

Clearly it is a most valid and vital question to ask, how Hamas ends. Audrey Kurth Cronin back in July of 2024 wrote an article for Foreign Affairs Detailed several scenarios to end what had settled into a mind-numbing pattern of violence, bloodshed, and death. And everyone is losing–except Hamas.

When Israel invaded the territory last fall, its stated military objective was to destroy the terrorist group so that it could never again commit acts of barbarity like the ones it carried out during its Oct. 7 attack. But although the war has culled Hamas’s ranks, it has also vastly increased support for the group–among Palestinians, throughout the Middle East, and even globally.

But the Israeli government’s highly lethal response to the October 7 attack and seeming indifference to the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians has played into Hamas’s hands.

Somehow among the audiences that the group most wants to reach, including Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Arab populations throughout the region, and young people in the West, the heinous deeds of Oct. 7 have receded from view, replaced by images that support the Hamas narrative, in which Israel is the criminal aggressor and Hamas is the defender of innocent Palestinians.

But Israel should pay close attention to one route in particular: groups such as Hamas end not through military defeat, but through strategic failure. Since October 7, Israel has been trying to crush or repress Hamas out of existence, to little avail. A smarter strategy would be to figure out how to chip away at the group’s support and hasten its collapse.

Clearly, Hamas is not a good candidate for a decapitation strategy. It is a highly networked organization that is almost 40 years old. If killing Hamas leaders could end the group, it would have happened long ago.

Sad, frustrating and deadly is how evident it has become that negotiations may not seem a likely way for Hamas to end.