Imagine what would have happened if Japan hadn’t agreed to surrender in 1945. Or if Germany had remained undefeated after World War II. Even after their regimes had dragged their countries into catastrophic wars—wars they started—what if the world had simply stopped fighting and walked away?
That is exactly the scenario we are confronting with Hamas today.
After October 7,the single deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Hamas is not suing for peace. It is not seeking a ceasefire in good faith. It is actively planning the next October 7. In fact, its leaders have said as much, publicly and proudly.
The goal for Hamas has never been a two-state solution or co-existence. Its charter, still unchanged, calls for the annihilation of Israel. This war, which began with Hamas’s genocidal rampage into Israeli communities, was never about land or borders. It was about survival—Hamas’s survival as a terrorist regime and political force. The moment Hamas executed on October 7, it accepted a war it could not militarily win. Yet now, it is fighting not to win militarily but to survive politically. For Hamas, mere survival is victory.
And if the guns fall silent now, if the war ends before Hamas is clearly and decisively defeated—or unless Hamas unilaterally surrenders, returns all the hostages, and agrees to fully disarm, then it will be a Hamas victory.
Calls for a ceasefire may sound moral. They are not. A ceasefire without victory rewards war crimes such as mass hostage-taking, torture, mutilation, rape, the deliberate use of human shields, and the slaughter of civilians. These are not tactics of desperation; they are strategies of coercion. If such methods are seen to succeed, they will become a template for every terror group, militia, or hostile regime in the world.
Ceasefire could mark dangerous change in evolution of modern warfare
It would also validate and entrench a dangerous evolution in modern warfare: the systematic abuse of the laws of war as a weapon. Hamas has built its entire doctrine around this, deliberately violating every principle of international humanitarian law while relying on those same laws to constrain its adversary.
This is not just hypocrisy. It is a form of calculated warfare sometimes called lawfare: turning schools, hospitals, mosques, and civilian neighborhoods into military facilities, embedding command centers and weapons under protected sites, and then using civilian casualties as a political weapon. When those civilians inevitably suffer, Hamas leverages the images and statistics to win global sympathy and condemn the very nation trying to dismantle their terrorist infrastructure.
A Hamas victory would establish a new, horrific standard: that if you violate every rule of war with enough strategic cruelty—using your own population as shields, storing rockets in clinics, placing snipers in minarets, and ensuring the maximum number of civilians are exposed to danger—then international outrage will fall not on you, but on the state trying to stop you. It would teach regimes and terror groups everywhere that protected sites are no longer protected—they are exploitable. That civilian deaths are not just tragic but useful, even essential, to political victory. The consequences of rewarding that strategy would echo far beyond Gaza: it would put every civilian population under the control of evil dictators or armed non-state actors at even greater risk.
We’ve seen this before. In every prior round of fighting—Operation Cast Lead (Dec 27, 2008 – Jan 18, 2009), Operation Pillar of Defense (Nov 14–21, 2012), Operation Protective Edge (July 8 – Aug 26, 2014), and Operation Guardian of the Walls (May 10–21, 2021)—Hamas used international pressure for ceasefires not to lay down arms, but to regroup, rearm, and dig deeper into Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Each ceasefire became a strategic pause, not a step toward peace. October 7 was the result.
Now, with the war approaching a decisive phase and the IDF dismantling the core of Hamas’s operational capacity, the terror group is betting once again that international pressure will save it. That hostages and humanitarian suffering—deliberately prolonged and manipulated by Hamas—will force Israel to back down. This is not a miscalculation on Hamas’s part. It is their only hope.
Even if Hamas returned every hostage tomorrow but remained the de facto armed leadership in Gaza, it would not change the strategic calculus. In fact, it would mark a Hamas victory. The group would have proven that taking civilians—children, elderly, women, and foreign nationals—can yield tangible political results—that the international community will pressure a democratic state to halt a war of self-defense in exchange for hostages who should never have been taken. That leverage can be gained not through negotiation, but through atrocity. No nation can allow hostage-taking to become an accepted currency of warfare. To do so would invite it everywhere.
The idea that a genocidal terror group can survive a war it started by choice, from a position of unprovoked aggression, is a dangerous precedent. Hamas’s survival will be celebrated by its backers—from Tehran to Beirut to Doha—as a modern miracle: a militant group that faced the full force of a nation-state and lived. This is the symbolic power Hamas craves. It would send a clear signal to Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iranian proxies across the region, and radical groups worldwide: terrorism works. Most dangerously, it would affirm to the Islamic regime in Iran that its decades-long strategy of proxy warfare against Israel—its so-called “ring of fire”—is working—that all it needs to do is keep going.
Hamas will prepare for the next war
If Hamas survives, it will not rebuild Gaza. It will rebuild tunnels. It will not return hostages. It will capture more. And it will not seek peace. It will prepare for the next war. This is not speculation. This is what they say. This is what they’ve always done.
War is always tragic. But some wars are necessary. The just purpose of war is not vengeance—it is justice, deterrence, and the restoration of peace. But peace is not possible with an armed, fanatical regime in Gaza that seeks your destruction and views the murder of civilians as a divine duty. Wars of self-defense must end with unmistakable clarity.
Germany in 1918 was defeated militarily, but the war ended with ambiguity. The Allies allowed the German army to retreat intact. The result was the “stab-in-the-back” myth that fueled Nazism and led to an even more catastrophic war. In 1945, the Allies made no such mistake. Nazi Germany was not just defeated—it was destroyed as a governing entity. So was Imperial Japan. And just as importantly, the German and Japanese populations came to see and accept that their regimes had been defeated. Both societies underwent years of disarmament, reconciliation, and comprehensive deradicalization. Only then could Europe and the Pacific begin to rebuild in peace.
Israel faces the same choice today. Ending this war without defeating Hamas means condemning Israelis—and Palestinians—to unending conflict. It means October 7 becomes not a cautionary tale, but a case study in successful terrorism, lawfare, hostage taking, and wars of aggression.
Israel is currently achieving real, measurable success in its military campaign. Operation Gideon’s Chariot has transitioned from massed maneuvers to coordinated clear-and-hold operations across Gaza. The IDF has successfully seized and is now holding terrain in areas once dominated by Hamas battalions. Elite Israeli units continue to dismantle Hamas’s underground networks, rocket infrastructure, weapons production sites, and command centers—undermining the group’s ability to wage war.
In parallel, Israel has established a new humanitarian mechanism—the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—to deliver food, water, and medicine directly to civilians without going through Hamas. This is critical. For years, Hamas maintained power not only through fear and force but also by monopolizing aid distribution and punishing dissent. That monopoly is now being broken. For the first time in nearly two decades, signs of civilian defiance are emerging: Gazans protesting Hamas’s theft, rejecting their authority, and calling them out publicly.
But let no one be mistaken—this is still a war, not a counterinsurgency. Hamas remains the de facto ruling power of Gaza. It still commands fighters, holds hostages, and exerts control over large swaths of the population. No one who has studied war—real war—should have expected that a terror regime that spent decades militarizing every inch of Gaza and radicalizing generations of civilians could be dismantled easily or quickly. Those calling for an immediate ceasefire either do not understand war, or do not want Hamas to lose.
This war must end not with a ceasefire, but with a clear and irreversible outcome: the defeat of Hamas as a military and governing power.
If the international community truly wants peace, it should focus not on saving Hamas, but on how it is first removed from power, disarmed, and dismantled—so that the long process of deradicalization and reconciliation can begin. This was the path taken after World War II, when defeating the regimes that started the war was recognized as the necessary precondition for lasting peace.
Israel cannot be the only party planning for what comes after Hamas. The international community must stop pretending Hamas can be part of the solution. It must become part of the solution itself: by supporting measures that accelerate Hamas’s defeat, such as the movement of civilians out of Hamas’s grasp, not refusing to participate in a humanitarian plan that delivers aid directly to the people Hamas has long exploited.
The hypocrisy must stop. The reality must be accepted: peace will never come while Hamas remains intact. There is no future in which Gaza flourishes while Hamas remains in power. There is no future in which Israelis or Palestinians are safe if October 7, hostage taking, lawfare, and human shielding are seen as a path to political leverage.
We would live in a very different world if the Allies had not pursued victory in 1945. We will live in a dark and dangerous world if Hamas is allowed to claim one now.
Let it be clear—to Hamas and to the world—that they lost this war. Anything less guarantees a future of endless violence.
The author is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.