Editorial: Hamas remains devoted to death and destruction

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Feb 20, 2025

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Even as Hamas releases hostages and temporarily lays down its weapons, leaders of the terror group continue to make clear their intentions: No matter what happens in the Middle East, they will continue to attack Israel and to indiscriminately kill Jews in their maniacal effort to eliminate the Jewish state.

It is with this reality as a backdrop that President Donald Trump caused a ruckus recently by suggesting that it might be time for the United States to build “the Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza and to relocate Palestinians who live there. It’s extremely unlikely that this will ever happen, of course. But Trump has a way of using exaggeration and hyperbole to shift diplomatic paradigms.

His suggestion “may force the sides to reconsider long-held positions, stir things up dramatically and lead to new openings,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, told The New York Times. Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington, told the newspaper that Trump, “in his brutal and clumsy way” raises a pertinent question: “What to do when 2 million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?”

But we must not forget how Gaza became a “field of ruins.” The answer lies in the extremist Hamas leadership, embodied by Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, who last week sat on a panel discussion at an Al-Jazeera forum in Qatar. His comments were instructive.

“Whoever comes to fill Israel’s place (in Gaza) will be treated like Israel,” he said, CNN reported. “Whoever wants to work as an agent for Israel will bear the consequences of being Israel’s agent.” Hamdan added that the group would never consider disarming and will seek “to expand” after the war, while calling the group’s brutal Oct. 7 massacre “a historic success.”

In other words, Hamas — which continues to be enabled by many forces in the region — remains eternally committed to death and destruction. Is it any wonder that no Arab nation will open its arms to Gaza refugees?

It’s important to remember that the Oct. 7 attack itself — which killed 1,400 Israelis and led to the abduction of 240 innocent civilians at the hands of the terrorists — was an intentional effort to provoke a wider war in the region in a futile attempt to create an Arab coalition that would rise up against Israel. “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” one Hamas media adviser told the Times in 2024.

Trump’s “Riviera” suggestion may be outlandish, but at least it properly identifies the cause of the problem: The fanatical death cult known as Hamas.