How do we know Israel is winning its war against Hamas in Gaza? Because the Biden administration wants it to stop. At every stage of Israel’s war of survival, a chorus of Cassandras have told us that Israel cannot defeat Hamas; that the Israel Defense Forces would suffer catastrophic losses if they tried to winkle Hamas out of its tunnels; that invading Gaza would cause unparalleled deaths among Palestinian civilians and cost Israel its post-Abraham Accords links with the Gulf Arab states; and even that Israel is committing “genocide.”
Nonsense and lies, all of it. By the last week of February, the IDF had reduced Hamas rocket fire into Israel from a daily torrent to a sporadic irritant. Three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions in the Gaza Strip had ceased to function; the last four were boxed in at Rafah, on the southern border with Egypt. U.S. and Israeli intelligence estimated that between a quarter and a third of Hamas’s fighters were dead. It may be true that you cannot kill an ideology. You can, however, disrupt its adherents’ forces and incapacitate their leaders.
