It is time for Israel to start annexing Gaza
Israel should annex Gaza, piece by piece, until every last hostage is released and Hamas surrenders.
The time has come for Israel to stop pussyfooting around and annex Gaza. Israel has routed Hamas and controls 75 percent of the strip, yet Hamas remains emboldened enough to have sunk the most recent peace talks with outlandish demands that it knew Israel could not accept.
Given Hamas’ recalcitrance, Israel must expand its military operations to the quarter of Gaza not yet under its control and where the remaining 50-odd Israeli hostages, of which 20 are still alive, are being held.
If Hamas does not surrender, then Israel must destroy them. If Hamas does not release the hostages, then Israel must free them. Israel could lay siege to Gaza until the terror group relents, but what it should do is start annexing Gaza.
Looking at how Western leaders have jumped up and down at the UN-manufactured hunger crisis in Gaza, the international community will not accept a siege. A siege is also unlikely to be effective given Hamas desires great Palestinian suffering, and it would indeed cause great suffering.
Annexation, by contrast, would allow Israel to avoid inflicting a humanitarian disaster on Gaza, while attaching a clear long-term cost to Hamas. Israel should establish a timetable whereby the longer Hamas keeps the hostages, the more land Israel annexes. Every day a hostage remains in Gaza; another block should fly the Star of David.
Israel annexing land, rather than just occupying it, ups the stakes by making land losses permanent. Israel should pile on the pressure even more by committing to re-establishing Jewish settlements on any land it annexes. These settlements will impose a further cost on Hamas and make Israel safer. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 included forcibly removing 8,000 Jewish settlers. It is unlikely that the October 7 massacre could have happened if those settlements were still there.
Hamas can then choose to stop fighting and release the hostages, or watch Gaza become part of Israel again.
The international community will not like it, but Western leaders are so morally adrift, so grossly ill-informed, and increasingly so hostile to Israel, that Jerusalem need not concern itself with their objections, especially as their real anxiety is not peace, but Jewish power.
This would also strengthen Israel’s deterrence by sending a clear message to its neighbors - whose opinions count, unlike those of supine European leaders - that the costs of attacking Israel are territorial and permanent.
