The grotesque ceremony Thursday in which Hamas terrorists paraded the coffins of four dead Israeli civilian hostages — one of which had the wrong corpse — before a jeering crowd was the best argument for President Donald Trump’s plan to move Palestinians out of Gaza.
There is already legal precedent for doing so. Millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries that the Nazis had invaded during the Second World War, to prevent a subsequent provocation.
Trump made his suggestion last month — before proposing the idea that the U.S. should take possession of Gaza — based on the fact that Palestinians, led by Hamas terrorists, have launched so many wars from Gaza, for so long.
But aside from the wars, there is the sheer inhumanity of the Palestinians’ behavior in Gaza toward Israelis and Jews — no, not every single Gazan, but enough of the population to prompt alarm about a culture of hatred and death.
Recall that Palestinian civilians — not just terrorists — participated in the murder, rape, and looting on October 7, 2023 once Hamas and Islamic Jihad had launched their original attack. Civilians also took and held Israeli hostages.
One former hostage said after her release in the November 2023 truce that she had been abducted by civilians and then sold, like a slave, to Hamas. Others told similar stories about being sold, and forced to work for civilians in Gaza.
A few occasionally experienced acts of kindness, usually from Palestinian women. One recently freed hostage, who was held by an Islamic Jihad commander with several wives, said that one wife took pity on her and did her chores.
Mia Schem, one of the first hostages to be released in November 2023, spoke about how she endured an operation without anesthetic and lived in constant fear of being raped by the abusive father of the civilian family that held her.
“There are no innocent citizens there. They’re families controlled by Hamas,” she told the Israeli media. “They’re children who from the moment they are born, they teach them that Israel is Palestine and just to hate Jews.”
There are, of course civilians in Gaza, and people who are non-combatants. They are protected under international law — not from all the risks of war, but from being intentionally targeted (i.e. the way Hamas targets Israeli civilians).
There are also people who — quietly, and not so quietly — oppose Hamas rule. But few of them dare to speak out — not when Hamas has the guns, and regularly beats, tortures, and executes anyone who opposes their total domination.
On Thursday, Hamas brought a crowd of Palestinian civilians — including children — to witness the handover of the coffins to the Red Cross, which has shamefully allowed itself to be used, repeatedly, in macabre propaganda displays.
The two adult coffins onstage, in front of a depiction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire with blood pouring down his chin, listed the date of “arrest” as October 7. (In a nod to whatever shreds of decency remain in Gaza, the two child coffins were spared that desecration.) The crowd sang and celebrated, enjoying the grand party.
Israelis looked on in horror. One dead hostage had been an 84-year-old man, Oded Lifshitz; the others were a mother, Shiri Bibas, 33, and her two small children, Ariel, 5, and Kfir, 2. Kfir was 9 months old when he was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz. (Shiri Bibas, it transpired, was not even in the coffin; her fate, or the location of her remains, is still unknown.)
What kind of people laud the death of mothers, children, and the elderly? What kind of Nazis?
No civilization can live next to people who behave that way. That is why Trump’s Gaza proposal, which would once have been taboo, is suddenly making sense to many people.
It is no “genocide” to move such a society far, far away from its intended victims.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.