Opinion | The Horror Show of Hamas Must End Now

On Saturday, Hamas gunmen paraded three skeletally thin Israeli hostages for a propaganda video in which they were forced to thank their captors before their handover to the Red Cross. One of the hostages, Eli Sharabi, returned to Israel to learn that his wife, Lianne, and their teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel, had been murdered on Oct. 7.

It was heartbreaking and grotesque. Other hostages are reported by The Times to have spent their captivity bound, tortured, deprived of food and denied medical care for shrapnel wounds and other injuries. Some have barely seen sunlight in nearly 500 days.

By Monday, Hamas had declared that it was postponing the release of additional hostages “until further notice,” claiming Israeli violations of a six-week truce agreement. Hours later, President Trump warned that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas didn’t release all remaining hostages by noon on Saturday. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned that Israel would resume “intense fighting” if hostages were not released by that time. Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza.

The president’s threats are long overdue. Anyone who thinks that Hamas can be allowed to continue to torture Israelis, tyrannize Palestinians and remain the ruling power in Gaza, free to someday set fire to the region again, needs to be disabused of the idea. That goes especially for Arab states like Qatar and Egypt that depend on U.S. protection and largess even as they have harbored Hamas leaders or failed to stop the group from arming itself to the teeth before Oct. 7.

Where do we go from here?

The administration should give the region a choice between two possible options. One is that Gazan civilians leave the territory, principally to neighboring Egypt, so that Hamas and its labyrinth of tunnels can more thoroughly be destroyed by a renewed Israeli offensive without risk to innocent life. Israel should not reoccupy the Strip, and the return of those civilians to Gaza must never be closed off. But it should also depend on those civilians forswearing allegiance to Hamas, along with a de-Hamasification program for Gaza that bars former Hamas members from any positions of power and that publicly exposes their apparatus of repression against ordinary Gazans.

The second option is that Hamas’s chieftains be pressured by their patrons into exile, so that Gazans might rebuild their lives under better leadership. This is what happened in 1982 when the Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat and his minions were forced out of Lebanon to exile in Tunis. Exile is much better than Hamas’s cruel rulers deserve, but it’s an option that spares a lot of bloodshed.

The choice ought to be clarifying. Governments that are firmly opposed to the first option on practical or ethical grounds should work that much harder to achieve the second. What they can’t do is accept a status quo in which Gaza remains indefinitely under Hamas’s thumb and Israel remains perpetually at risk.

Something similar unfolded five years ago. In January 2020, during his first term, Trump unveiled a Middle East peace plan that was treated with almost universal disdain. In exchange for a geographically diminished Palestinian state with limited sovereignty, the plan gave Israel control over a unified Jerusalem and the Jordan River Valley and required that it relinquish none of its settlements in the West Bank. Palestinian leaders immediately rejected the offer. Others dismissed it as “a political document by a president in the middle of an impeachment trial,” as The Times reported that month.

Netanyahu pocketed the deal and went a step further: He threatened to annex the parts of the West Bank that the deal envisioned remaining in Israel’s hands, irrespective of what the Palestinians did. It caused a crisis — and created an opening. By the summer, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had agreed to normalize ties with the Jewish state in exchange for dropping annexation.

If the tragedy of Gaza is ever resolved, it will probably happen through the same combination of potent threats, loud bluster and diplomatic indirection — but much faster. Little Qatar, which hosts a vast American air base and depends on the United States for its security, can exert pressure on Hamas by imprisoning the group’s leaders, who currently live in splendor in the sheikhdom, and cutting off their funds. Egypt, whose external debts have ballooned in recent years, can pressure Hamas by letting Gazans in and otherwise cutting Gaza off. Both countries may balk, but they are vulnerable to being squeezed by the administration.

Then there is Iran, Hamas’s principal patron, which suddenly seems interested in diplomacy with the United States thanks to its proxies’ military losses in Lebanon and Syria and the near-collapse of its economy. It, too, can be pushed to pressure Hamas to release the hostages and leave the territory — provided the U.S. pressure is credible, acute and immediate.

Will it work? Nothing is for sure. The hostages are in grave danger whether the six-week truce continues or the war restarts. Gazan civilians, treated for too long as human shields by Hamas, remain at risk no matter what happens.

But what hasn’t worked, and what can’t, is expecting Hamas to behave as anything other than the barbaric terror group that it is. Trump may be wrong about many things, but he’s right about this: This horror show of Hamas must end now.