Any outcome where Hamas was permitted to live after October 7th or to govern Gaza was never going to be acceptable, and Hamas was unlikely to ever concede this.
Anything less than the end of Hamas would have been a terrible outcome for all sides. They’d regroup, rearm, and in a few years’ time they’d attack again, more civilians would die, and people would start clutching their pearls and warning about ‘escalation’. And in the meantime, the Palestinians in Gaza would have had to endure their brutal rule.
Once Hamas has been sufficiently degraded, there’ll be some sort of regional coalition to rebuild Gaza with Saudi, Emirati and Kuwaiti involvement and US security guarantees, a deradicalisation process for the Palestinians there, and the construction of a civil bureaucracy. The international community will be pouring in financial assistance, except that this time it won’t be used to build hundreds of miles of terror dungeons.
The West Bank is a tougher nut to crack. But Israel will have to deal with the Hezbollah Jihadis first.
I mean how the occupation can end. It's not obvious how that can happen, even though it obviously should. Go on Google Images, then search 'topography of Israel and the West Bank'. If a nascent civilian government of Palestine falls to Hamas or similar forces then they'd be overlooking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They'd have a throughline to Iran via Syria-Lebanon. That's not a risk Israel can take.
This simply isn't correct. Hamas operates in much of the West Bank, as do allied groups like the Jenin Brigades and Lion's Den in Nablus. They're also enormously popular among West Bank Palestinians.
So democratic that the current President Abbas is currently serving the 19th year of his 4-year term.
This is misleading at best. They're not trying to hold new elections, because every single opinion poll for about 15 years now show that Fatah would lose badly and certainly Hamas would become the new government of the West Bank, which would finally shatter the possibility of there ever being a Palestinian state. That doesn't serve Fatah or Israel. Israel therefore keeps Fatah on life-support as the least-bad option.
Because it's been suppressed by Fatah in co-operation with Israeli security services who've been operating in the West Bank before and after October 7th.
By the way, right at this moment thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are out marching in support of Hamas and against the killing of Ismail Hainyeh: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/dismay-in-gaza-and-rare-open-support-for-hamas-in-west-bank-after-haniyeh-killing/