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Notes -
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
So far you’ve been getting a lot of replies saying that the US can only pressure Israel, but not Hamas. This is false. Hamas is not a leaderless organization, it’s actually very well organized and its leadership is known to all.
The heads of Hamas, those that are parallel to its government rather than military leadership, are situated in Qatar. Their locations are known. They frequently fly out of Qatar, to any place they wish, such as Egypt just recently. They are, of course, war criminals. However, there is literally no effort or any calls to bring any of these men to justice, or any sanctions on Qatar. This is despite providing direct monetary aid to Hamas, as well as the aforementioned sheltering of Hamas leadership.
Qatar is a US ally in the region, the US even has bases there (unlike Israel), the US is one of (if not the) largest importer to Qatar. In other words, the US has a lot of leverage on Qatar, if only anyone wished to use it.
Keep all this in mind when reading all these other replies.
Oh surely. I think the interesting factor here is that Hamas doesn't have a monopoly on violence in Gaza. Possibly even by design, Islamic Jihad and other groups have the ability to independently throw a wrench in things. As I recall, those groups (broadly non-Hamas militants) had a decent fraction of the hostages taken.
So even if you did turn the screws on Hamas (via Qatar or otherwise) it doesn't solve Israel's problem. Everyone in the West dreams of some Palestinian leader that has a monopoly on force and hence can negotiate for an end to armed resistance in return for whatever is on offer. In reality, if they tried they might quickly lose their position or their limbs.
Yes, Jihad is the biggest and most well-known not-Hamas in Gaza. There’s also several hamullahs (extended family? Not sure how to translate) with their own militias, and some AQ aligned organization. Other than Jihad, they exist only due to Hamas tolerance - and in any case, they’re all quite killable.
If no Palestinian leader is capable of ruling his people for the better, then I’m quite OK with sending them to a far off land that’s willing to take them for enough money - I don’t think we tried Angola or DRC yet.
I think it depends on context. If Hamas tried to kill/suppress them all as part of a deal with Israel or the US in which they were viewed (rightly/wrongly) as giving up the cause, I strongly suspect they might not fare well.
Could be. Hard to tell. They might have a problem of internal rebellion, anyway, making it mostly a moot exercise.
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