Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s initiative to bring back the hostages and end the war in Gaza, and in light of the support of key Islamic and Arab states for saving the Palestinian cause, Hamas finds itself at a critical juncture. For the first time since the start of the war, the terror organization is with its back against the wall, losing its advantages one after another: its total control over the population in the Strip, the rapid loss of territory due to total military pressure against its leaders and operatives worldwide, and the entrapment of its most significant allies—Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar—who have been forced to support an agreement that leads to its eradication.
Overall, it appears that the sophisticated diplomatic move led by Israel and the United States has cleverly and wisely drawn the regional players into the very trap that was laid for them. Since 1996, Qatar has led an international campaign to tarnish Israel’s image through jihad bil-kalam—the “media jihad”—via Al Jazeera, the most venomous propaganda network since the days of Goebbels and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “The medium is the message,” said communication theorist John McLuhan, and Qatar indeed utilized that medium to its fullest extent, applying relentless media pressure until it achieved a significant international image crisis for Israel. Through its financial power, Qatar spread its ideology among progressive-liberal supporters and used Islamic migrants who had infiltrated every corner of the Western world. The university campuses funded by Qatar became a battleground for blackening Israel’s image and portraying it as an oppressive, humiliating state that robs the rights of an “indigenous people” and exploits them to establish a so-called “Israeli empire” in the Arab world (Israel al-Kubra—Greater Israel).
Qatar skillfully exploited Western naivety to promote the false “starvation in Gaza” campaign and push it to the top of the global agenda. Israel and the U.S. found themselves dragged into an endless and partial hostage deal that restored Hamas’s status in the Strip and brought the Palestinian statehood issue back to center stage.
But every trick has its limit. While the attack on Hamas officials in Qatar sparked a wave of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used it for strategic purposes. When Netanyahu apologized in a three-way call to the Qatari prime minister for the injury of a local security officer in Doha, he made it clear that Israel’s target was Hamas, not Qatar—meaning that merely hosting Hamas leaders was unacceptable. Netanyahu used the conversation to clarify to the Qatari leader that support for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Hamas branch is a terror arm, was intolerable to Israel, stating, “Just as Qatar has complaints against Israel, we have complaints against you.”
He protested Qatar’s media jihad that demonized Israel through Al Jazeera and echoed Trump’s own opposition to anti-Israel sentiment on U.S. and international college campuses—a phenomenon the American president has vowed to combat fiercely. Netanyahu welcomed the idea of creating a trilateral working group to handle mutual complaints between Qatar and Israel and deftly handed the arbitration role over to “mediator Trump.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—the military backbone of the Muslim Brotherhood movement—was also called to order and urged by President Trump to restrain his venomous rhetoric. Thus, with Egypt (“the revolving door”), Qatar (“the sponsor and mouthpiece”), and Turkey (“the movement’s bully”) neutralized from influence, and Hamas required to accept Gaza’s demilitarization, renounce its governing claims, release its prisoners, and promote education for tolerance and coexistence—one can indeed say that the sting has been removed from the Islamist wasp. All this unfolds as Israel continues to crush the remnants of Hamas’s rule, infrastructure, and strongholds, steadily shrinking its territory of survival.
“Liberating Palestine” aspirations: not only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
True — the release of 250 prisoners and 1,700 despicable terrorists is a hefty price that Israel is required to pay as part of the deal. Still, such a move also strips Hamas of the bargaining chip in the horrific negotiation it has waged against Israeli society for two years. This negotiation continues to tear our society apart every day and accords with the Koranic statement in the Sūra al-Ḥashr regarding the people of Israel: “They only appear to you as strong and united, but among themselves they live in division and discord.”
All this is added to the fact that Israel will not be forced to halt fire during the negotiations, but will continue to determine the fate of the remnants of terror, and will retain the veto on whether Hamas has been defeated or not. The Palestinian state dreamed of by the assemblage of refugees and migrants called Palestinians will have to wait for an era in which a wolf lives with a lamb — insha’Allah. Although the wolf Abu Mazen dons a lamb’s skin, his dreams of founding a state from the sea to the river are today clear for all to see. After the campaign min nahra ila al-bahra was marketed on every platform over the past two years, today everyone understands that “liberating Palestine” means total liberation, not merely of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Therefore attention must be paid to the words of the advisor to the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud al-Albash, who clarified that the most outstanding achievement of the Trump deal lies in the fact that even after the events of October 7 and the two-year war that ended in Israel’s military victory, the Gaza Strip remains under the responsibility of the State of Palestine and is considered part of it. Thus, the position of the Palestinian Authority and that of the Arab states is clear: the only legitimate body suitable to be present in the Gaza Strip is the state that will be established, and the Palestinian government with its various institutions.
To uproot every idea of annihilation
In light of all this, Israel must not allow the world to create a physical connection between the Gaza Strip and the territories of Dar al-Islam and the Arab states. Israel should strive to annex de facto the contiguous areas surrounding the Gaza Strip, with emphasis on the Philadelphi corridor, and any change in their status should constitute a casus belli for Israel. The government must insist that the Gaza Strip will not constitute a single sovereign territorial unit, but that its inhabitants will be under the responsibility of municipal entities only. In addition, the Strip should be segmented along latitudinal axes over which Israel will exercise control. It appears that in the foreseeable future — some estimate at least within the coming decade, or until the Islamo-Nazi idea is eradicated — Israel should exercise military control over Gaza’s territory.
And what about the residents who will remain in a defined settlement area to which they will be relocated from the northern parts of the Strip? Well, as long as their education system and religious institutions teach tolerance and coexistence with Israel, and their clergy are not among those educated in the Muslim Brotherhood’s doctrinal school, they may continue to reside in the Strip — with emphasis on the al-Mawasi area only. Any element that does not accept these conditions will be required to leave the Strip, or its life will not be a life.
The new reality must be one in which every idea seeking to annihilate the Jewish entity must be extinguished, just as the Allies extinguished Nazism as a governing form at the end of World War II, and likewise the imperialist ideology of Imperial Japan. Arms smuggling from Egypt must be dealt with harshly by the Egyptians; if not, why are their enormous military forces concentrated in Sinai? This, too, is an issue that should be handled by the “arbiter,” President Trump.
Israel must replicate this pattern of action in the areas under Palestinian Authority control. Conditioning the establishment of a state for the Palestinians on their abandonment of education for terror is indeed necessary. Still, Israel must also act actively against the Authority’s anti-Semitic activity and eradicate it. As long as the Authority educates for terror, it has no place, and we must move to the idea of municipal-only control even in the West Bank.
The Last Opportunity for Hamas
And what about the application of sovereignty in the West Bank and Jewish settlements across Gaza? First, President Trump announced that the disengagement was a mistake in his view, and Israel should seize and act on that declaration — alongside the geographic dissection of the Strip — with active measures of control in key areas across its breadth. Israel should utilize empty lands and establish military governance points there, alongside creating companies that will develop leisure, resort, and advanced industrial zones, such as hydroponic agriculture, high-tech firms, and desalination facilities. It would be appropriate to name the contiguous areas Gaza Nova (the New Gaza), where Israeli settlement outposts like individual farms could be established. The same applies to the open areas throughout the Strip, which can be converted into agricultural farms similar to those in the West Bank, and in some parts, into nature reserves. Military outposts should be established on Gaza’s seaside to weaken the Strip from the west.
All these steps will respond to al-Albash’s statement and make clear to the Arab world that we have not renounced our right to this tract of land, that the Palestinians chose the path of war and are paying the price, and that the disengagement is a coup in Gaza and also in the West Bank. In addition, Palestinian residence in a defined area of the Strip is one thing, but rebuilding the ruined cities is another, and those cities must not be rebuilt in locations that threaten Israeli settlements.
Regarding the application of sovereignty in the West Bank, Israel should deepen Jewish settlement in the available expanses of these territories, expand the areas of existing communities, and aim for the presence of one million Jews or more there. Alongside this, illegal Arab construction in Area C must be addressed, and the European Union must not be allowed to establish the Palestinian state by emptying the Oslo Accords of their content and implementing the PIJAD plan.
In light of all this, Hamas faces a profound dilemma — whether to act as Arab honor demands and continue to refuse offers to end the war by surrender, or whether to adopt the Islamic cunning of a hudna in accordance with the Treaty of Hudaybiyya that the Prophet of Islam signed with the unbelievers, and to achieve its goals step by step. Yasser Arafat devised this staged plan in 1974, when he adopted the phased program, which he subsequently began to implement through the Oslo Accords. The Fatah movement he led did indeed manage to gain a foothold in the territories of Dar al-Kharb (combat zones) and return settlements to Islam and the Arabs.
Either way, the mere fact that residents remain in the Strip after the events of October 7 and the restoration of the Palestinian issue to the center of the world stage is, in Hamas’s view, a victory. Precisely for that reason, if the murderous terror organization chooses to refuse or to torpedo the Trump deal cunningly, Israel’s response must be to open the gates of hell in a way that brings about total nakba.
At the same time, one must be prepared that even after Israel expels remaining Hamas leaders from the Strip to countries such as Indonesia or other Arab states, the Islamist idea will continue to grow among those populations. The putrid sea of the Islamo-Nazi doctrine must be dried up at its source — starting with the Qatari state that funds it, through all assisting parties such as Erdoğan’s Turkey, Shiite Iran, and the al-Qaeda and ISIS movements that base themselves in the new Syria and the region, and ending with the Houthis in Yemen.
I will conclude with the words of a famous Gazan: whoever dislikes these words — be my guest to drink from Gaza’s waters and leave it with due honor. The beginning of success in confronting the issue is to analyze it from an Islamic perspective, rather than a Western one.
