Conrad Black: Hope on the Horizon for End of the War in Gaza

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he arrives at the White House in Washington on Sept. 29, 2025. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Commentary

It is now difficult to see how the Gaza war, as we have known it for the last two years, will not be ended soon. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has famously said, it will end “either the easy way or the hard way” but it will end.

This choice resides with the beleaguered and shell-shocked Hamas leadership, such of it as survives. The distinction is between escaping with their lives but militarily defeated, and in terms of political influence, torn out of Gaza root and branch, or being killed in hopeless combat in their tunnels in central Gaza city where they are constantly reminded of the presence of 60,000 battle-hardened Israeli counter-urban guerrilla soldiers overhead.

Despite the capacity of anti-Israel terrorists to find and deploy useful idiots prepared to detonate themselves in acts of terror or, most infamously, conduct suicide missions in skyjacked civilian aircraft, and despite the very heavy casualties Hamas has sustained in this war, there is no convincing evidence that they are really enthused about committing suicide. At this point, the only practical relevance of their choice is that if they choose to die, they will probably take with them the 20 Israeli hostages that have allegedly survived two years of their inhumane captivity.

The Hamas terrorist apparatus was initially elevated to government in Gaza, as Hezbollah was in Lebanon, when President George W. Bush in his enthusiasm for the elevation of democratically elected governments demanded elections in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. These were conducted with inadequate supervision to be confident of the results, but in 2006 elected Hamas and Hezbollah—previously outlawed groups that had had almost no access to official levers of power. President Bush and his chief advisers, with refreshing American optimism but contrary to ample evidence, assumed that any political movement that won a democratic election would itself be a democratic political force.

Of course, practically the exact opposite occurred, and in the intervening years those two terrorist movements profoundly entrenched themselves on Israel’s borders, thoroughly undermined and infiltrated the Lebanese government, and transformed Gaza into one almost constant launching pad for anti-Israeli terrorist activity, while building underground tunnels and redoubts approximately three times as extensive, if less sophisticated, than France’s interwar Maginot Line.

We have now arrived at the welcome junction of events where Hamas is practically finished, at least in Gaza, because of the confluence of two events that had not previously intersected. The Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the massacre of over a thousand Israelis and seizure of approximately 250 hostages, many of whom have been murdered in captivity, was intended to raise a general Arab uprising throughout Israel and the West Bank and to enable a flying column of highly trained Hamas terrorists to approach the walls of Jerusalem. It did not succeed in these objectives, but as it was the greatest single loss of Jewish lives since the completion of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945, there was a national consensus in Israel to treat the attack not as yet another border skirmish, but as an act of war creating a state of war and requiring the determination of Israel to destroy this mortal enemy which had so barbarously assaulted it.

The other simultaneous event was that the Islamic government of Iran, which had unleashed the Hamas attack and complementary Hezbollah aggressions on northern Israel, had not foreseen Israel’s comprehensive response. The regime had gambled on its ability to bring its military nuclear program to a point of maturity that would enable it to use it as leverage to stabilize Iran’s position as the principal power in the Middle East. The ayatollahs became complacently accustomed to the pusillanimity of the Western European governments and the Obama and Biden administrations, all of which had long since effectively conceded the right of Iran—although it is by far the world’s principal terrorism-sponsoring state—to enter the small number of countries with deliverable military nuclear strike capacity: the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, China, France, Israel, India, and Pakistan. None of these countries has been in the habit of making irresponsible references to the potential use of nuclear weapons, except Russian President Putin occasionally as his invasion of Ukraine has faltered and stalled.

Neither Israel nor President Trump’s America, as they had both frequently promised, was prepared to tolerate Iran’s taking up nuclear weapons in support of its terrorist policy. Subsequently, the Israelis overwhelmingly defeated Iran in a 12-day air war, destroying many of its senior officials and commanders and almost all of its missile launchers, while the United States, in a three-minute mission with no casualties to itself, completely destroyed Iran’s $1 trillion nuclear military program. It was the swiftest and most decisive military defeat of any reasonably serious power (unless Iraq is considered to have been in that category in 1990 or 2003), since Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s annihilation of the North Korean army in two weeks and with minimum casualties following the brilliant landing at Inchon in 1950.

President Trump’s achievement in rounding up the Arab powers, and even the principal non-Arab Muslim countries (Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia), against continued terrorism in the Middle East and implicitly in recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, is the greatest diplomatic achievement in the Middle East since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The hydra-headed Palestinian leadership failed to realize that the Arab powers never had any great affection for the Palestinians, although they followed the lead of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970) in using the alleged Jewish subjugation of Palestinians as a distraction of the Arab masses from the misgovernment most of their rulers were inflicting upon them. With the rise of the Islamic Republic in Iran and Turkey’s return to meddling in Arab affairs after their brusque rejection by the European Union, the Arab preoccupation with Palestine quickly gave way to recognition that Israel could be a valuable ally against the encroachments of the Arabs’ ancient Persian and Turkish foes.

Now, Hamas and Hezbollah and the Assad front regime in Syria that was propped up by Hezbollah have all been smashed, and Iran has been profoundly humiliated and defanged. In these circumstances, the prospect of peace in the Middle East and the sudden shameful demise of much of demonstrative international anti-Semitism is now imminent.

All civilized people should be relieved at these events. Apart from the first day of the State of Israel, the last such optimistic development in the Middle East was the defeat of the original Nazis at the Battle of El Alamein in October/November 1942.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.