The decision in front of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Cabinet is an awful one.

20 Israelis are alive in the tunnels of Gaza, where they are brutalized every day. Hamas is, of course, a terrorist organization, but also at least the equal of any sadists who have organized into a militia.

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The cruelty of Hamas knows no bounds. The recent release of the videos of two hostages, obviously being starved and evocative of the most haunting photos of Holocaust survivors when they emerged from Nazi concentration camps, tells the whole world with eyes to see just what monsters run Hamas.

The remnants of this terrorist organization live on in the darkness of Gaza’s tunnels. Hamas was shattered and descended into chaos during the nearly two years of war, which they began with the invasion of Israel and the massacre of 1200 innocents, wounding of 5,000 more, and the kidnapping of 250 others. The Israel Defense Forces and the security services of the Jewish State have killed all of the senior leadership in Gaza. The “leaders” of Hamas who are residing in Qatar and Turkey also know it is just a matter of time before justice comes for them as well.

But there is a remnant left and a few thousand maniac killers with RPGs and IEDs. The remnants of the diseased organization have no plan and apparently no intention of doing anything other than destroying Gaza by obliging the IDF to occupy the entire strip and go tunnel by tunnel to kill them and then destroy the tunnels.

There might have been a deal for at least 10 of the surviving hostages had France’s president Emmanuel Macron not — for reasons no one can lay out that do not end up at the door of the changing demographics of France — declared his intention to recognize a non-existent Palestinian state, one which will not come to pass in his lifetime because of 10/7 if ever.

The point of this is to hammer home this point: Those 20 hostages are suffering horribly because of the idiocy of Macron. The ruins of Gaza will be further reduced to rubble because of Macron. Every single death and injury that results from the new Israeli offensive into areas of Gaza untouched by the war to date will be on Macron’s shoulders.

When the French president posted his decision on X in late July, he also posted that the “urgent need today is for the war in Gaza to end and for the civilian population to be rescued.” His idiocy condemned the hostages and the civilian population to a brutal escalation because, predictably, Hamas rejected the carefully negotiated draft ceasefire as they viewed Macron’s announcement as a victory for themselves.

They are psychopaths driven by an eschatology that seeks martyrdom, and the semblance of “leadership” is all dead, so imagine all the conversations between the Lord of the Flies gatherings in whatever Hamas calls its headquarters now. Sinking into irrelevance, Macron threw them a lifeline and a reason to carry on: Some illusion that was enough to spark in them the resolve to refuse to surrender the hostages and save their families above ground from more pounding from an IDF that will not stop.

Netanyahu and his Cabinet are reported to have now accepted the harsh reality that Hamas will never give up the only leverage they have over Israel, and to try again, thus to squeeze some small amount of reality into their fever dreams.

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If any hostage gets out alive now, it will be despite Macron’s performance politics. If the IDF gets close but does not close fast enough to rescue the captives and they are murdered, Macron might as well have pulled the trigger.

Harsh but true. If only to prevent future “leaders” from similar debacles, the serious people in the world have to brand Macron for what he is: an accomplice to Hamas.