Israel's war in Gaza runs a substantial risk of inspiring more Palestinian civilians to join Hamas, according to President Joe Biden’s top military adviser.
“Yes, very much so,” Gen. Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday before arriving in Japan, according to the Times of Israel. “That’s why when we talk about time — the faster you can get to a point where you stop the hostilities, you have less strife for the civilian population that turns into someone who now wants to be the next member of Hamas.”
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Brown took over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sept. 29, only to find expectations for his first month in office upended by Hamas terrorists who massacred more than 1,400 people in an Oct. 7 rampage across southern Israel. Biden’s team affirmed Israel’s right to launch a military operation to destroy the terrorist group, but the subsequent weeks have revealed U.S. dissatisfaction with Israel’s military tactics and resistance to humanitarian “pauses” in the fighting.
“At the same time, much more needs to be done to protect civilians and to make sure that humanitarian assistance reaches them,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in New Delhi, where he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with their Indian counterparts. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks. And we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them and to maximize the assistance that gets to them.”
Palestinian civilians have found themselves in a miserable plight over the last month as Israeli forces launched an intense and sustained bombardment throughout the Gaza Strip. The conflict has raised “a real threat of malnutrition and people starving,” according to a spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Program, while Hamas — which ordered civilians to ignore Israel’s warning to evacuate northern Gaza — has embedded their military outposts in civilian infrastructure, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, and points to the subsequent death toll among civilians to demand an end to Israel’s military operation.
“We will reach every person who has acted against the citizens of Israel — anyone who kidnapped and harmed women and children,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said this week. “We will get to them all, whether it takes a week, a month, a year, and if necessary, even years. We will not let anyone go. We will eliminate them [terrorists] all, they have no place under the sun.”
Gallant and his colleagues have set an impossible task, according to one of the top Palestinian rivals of Hamas.
“The goal that they are setting — they will never reach this goal ... because Hamas is not only in Gaza,” Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh, whose government was ousted from the Gaza Strip in 2007 during a civil war with Hamas, told France 24. “Hamas is an idea, it’s not only a military structure or an organization in Gaza. Hamas is in the West Bank and Lebanon and Syria, Hamas leadership is in Qatar, and everywhere. So to say that the goal is to eliminate Hamas — it is totally not going to happen.”
Brown, the top U.S. general, was more diplomatic in his assessment that the Israeli military task is “a pretty large order.”
Yet Hamas’s conduct during the war likewise has heightened Palestinian anger toward the terrorist group, as evidenced by an angry outburst at a Hamas interior ministry press conference.
“May God hold you to account, Hamas,” a man with a “wounded hand” shouted at the Hamas interior ministry spokesman, according to the Associated Press.
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Israeli officials have urged Palestinian civilians to flee for southern Gaza for weeks. They agreed on Thursday to begin daily four-hour pauses in the fighting to open humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of civilians, who have streamed out of Gaza by the thousands in recent days.
Blinken, for his part, emphasized that Israel needs to do more to avoid those civilian casualties.
“We have concrete plans, concrete things that we’re working on that would do just that,” he told reporters. "And as I’ve said from the start, this is a process, and it’s not always flipping a light switch, but we have seen progress. We just need to see more of it, and we need to maximize every effort to prevent Palestinian deaths and to advance the humanitarian assistance that’s getting to them.”