For Israel's Sake, It's Time to End This War

We seem to be nearing yet another chance to free the remaining hostages and bring the war in Gaza to an end. This time, the government must seize that opportunity.

I remember the day I realized this war had to end.

It was September 1, 2024, the day we learned that Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza had found the bodies of Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi in a Rafah tunnel.

Like so many Israelis and Jews around the world, I had become deeply attached to Hersh’s story. I had met his parents several times, had been moved by their appeals, and had lent my voice to their calls for his freedom. For weeks, it seemed as though his release was imminent, that Israel and Hamas were just days away from reaching an agreement that would see him freed. As his mother, Rachel, said at his funeral, “the hope that perhaps a deal was near was so authentic, it was crunchy. It tasted close.”

And then, all at once, our hopes were dashed.

The realization that Hersh and the five other young people would not be returning alive to their families was devastating, and it led me — and, I have since learned, many others — to conclude that the time had come for a deal to bring the remaining hostages home, no matter the cost. The risks inherent in withdrawing from Gaza and releasing large numbers of convicted murderers were serious but theoretical; languishing in Hamas captivity were more than one hundred innocent people, many of whose lives were in real and immediate peril, and the priority had to be saving as many as we still could.

Ten months later, we seem to be nearing yet another chance to free the fifty remaining hostages and bring this war to an end. This time, the government must seize that opportunity.

On October 12, 2023 — five days after the horrific attacks that changed the course of Israel’s history — we at The Jerusalem Post published an editorial calling on the world to support Israel as it embarked upon its military campaign to eradicate the threat posed by Hamas.

“This is a war against a cruel and relentless enemy driven by bloodlust and hate,” we wrote at the time. “Hamas cannot be reasoned with. It cannot be contained. It must be resolutely defeated, and that defeat must be crushing and unforgiving.”

Some weeks later, as the war in Gaza raged, I sat down with a senior Israeli official. I asked him how Israel intended to destroy Hamas, given that its violent ideology would no doubt endure and inspire more carnage in the future. “We are not fighting ideas; we are fighting a military force,” the official told me. “And we are going to defeat it.”

Twenty months later, that mission has largely been accomplished.

Hamas of June 2025 is not Hamas of October 2023. The terrorist group has been decimated; around 20,000 out of Hamas's pre-war fighting force of 25,000 have been killed. The group’s entire military leadership — including October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar and the shadowy arch terrorist Mohammed Deif — has been eliminated. Hamas as an organized military force no longer exists and what remains of it is a shadow of its previous self. It no longer has the commanders, the fighters, the firepower, or the infrastructure to carry out anything remotely resembling October 7.

Prime Minister Netanyahu first used the phrase “total victory” in January 2024, three months into the war. A couple of weeks later, following a meeting with then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he declared that “total victory” was “within touching distance, a matter not of years or of decades but of months.”

But “total victory” is a slogan; it is not a military strategy. And eighteen months later, it remains elusive.

I have been a firm and vocal supporter of the military effort against Hamas from the very start. I have written columns, spoken to various audiences, engaged in heated debates, and gone on international news networks to defend Israel’s actions more times than I can count. And I continue to believe that the defensive war launched by Israel following the October 7 attack was both necessary and just.

And indeed, the Jewish state’s forceful response has proven itself in spades.

Israel’s strategic posture has improved immeasurably over the past two years. Hezbollah’s ill-fated decision to join the war on October 8 set the stage for an Israeli pounding that massively degraded it as a significant military threat; the group’s pompous leader, Hassan Nasrallah, met his end at the bottom of a crater in what had been his Beirut headquarters. No longer able to rely on Hezbollah’s support, the teetering regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad finally fell in December and has been replaced by a government that is openly discussing reaching an accommodation with Israel. The recent twelve-day war with Iran vividly demonstrated Israel’s military superiority and exposed the Islamic Republic as a paper tiger, dealing the regime’s nuclear program a major blow and casting its leadership into crisis. Iran’s so-called “ring of fire,” the network of proxies with which it had threatened Israel with strangulation for decades, has been reduced to smoldering ash.

The contrast between these brilliant military successes and what is fast becoming a quagmire in Gaza could not be starker.

As the number of fallen soldiers continues to mount, as the remaining hostages near their 650th day in captivity, as an ever-growing majority of Israelis tell pollsters they want this war to be over, as the cost to Israel’s economy continues to rise, and as Israel grows more and more isolated, the time has come to say “enough.”

What hasn’t been achieved in twenty months of war will not be achieved now.

Continuing the military campaign in Gaza serves no practical military purpose — at least none that our leaders have articulated. It endangers the lives of both soldiers and hostages. It further strains our reservists and their families. It entangles us in Gaza’s humanitarian plight and deepens our responsibility for its civilian population. It burdens our economy, baffles and frustrates our allies, and keeps us mired in a war that most of us no longer support.

Loathsome and duplicitous as it is, Hamas has been consistent in one thing: its insistence that the return of the hostages be tied to the end of the war. While our leaders have been right to push back on that demand for much of the war, as our forces went about dismantling the terrorist group’s capabilities and ensuring it could never again carry out a massacre like that of October 7, there is no longer a legitimate reason to do so.

This war will end — today, tomorrow, or months from now — with the release of the hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. The only question is how many hostages and soldiers will be lost, how many resources will be squandered, and how much international support will erode in the interim.

We should be honest: Hamas will continue to exist after this war ends. Even if its leaders are exiled and it is formally removed from power, as recent ceasefire proposals suggest, its poisonous ideology will continue to course through Gaza. But the threat this weakened Hamas may pose will be vastly diminished and if the group violates the ceasefire, Israel will be well within its rights to go back in and do what it must.

The war must end now for all of these reasons, and for one more: we need to rebuild and heal. After the cataclysm of October 7 and trauma of the ongoing war, after the crisis of faith in the institutions and security bodies we had thought would keep us safe, and after the painful wartime debates that have torn our battered country apart, we need to take the time to look within and mend our fractured nation.

We have every reason to salute our men and women in uniform and marvel at the powerful message they have sent our foes over the past twenty-one months. We can take pride in the resilience of our society, in the durability of our economy, and in the steadfast support of our friends and our allies.

But now, for the sake of the hostages, for the sake of our soldiers, and for the sake of a nation in need of healing, the time has come to end this war — and to begin rebuilding our future.