Andrew L. Urban
The other day, October 5, I wrote that Hamas would not release the hostages. I was wrong, thank goodness. I feared that this bunch of vicious, extremist Jew-haters would once again break their promise, perhaps in some cruel last minute trickery.
But I remain pessimistic about the future, notwithstanding all the valid arguments that peace should follow. The Hamas charter explicitly sets their objective as the extinction of Jews and their state. That’s ingrained ideology, not something they can simply abandon.
The first signs that justify my pessimism emerged immediately after the release of the hostages. “Ominously, Hamas operatives have fanned out across Gaza in recent days to fight anti-Hamas militia, raising the spectre of internal intra-Palestinian violence inside Gaza, which would make all groups reluctant to surrender their weapons,” writes Cameron Stewart in The Australian (14/10/2025).
Hamas has always refused to surrender its weapons “so the Egypt conference is likely to explore a middle-ground position, possibly including a decommissioning or a handover of Hamas’s remaining larger weapons to a neutral third party,” Stewart writes, more in hope than expectation.
Two quick outcomes are sought under the peace plan: establishment of an interim governing authority in Gaza and the disarmament of Hamas. If the majority of Gazans were sick of Hamas, they would themselves take care of the latter. But that is still a question hanging in the air. Gazan Palestinians voted them into power…and most favoured their deadly, gruesome behaviour on October 7….
The other huge question is whether it is ever possible to weaken the hatred of Jews in the mind of Palestinian society. Ancient hatreds are notoriously persistent.