Endless Conflict: ‘Our Beloved Gaza Is Gone’

Nicholas Kristoff

Over the course of the war in the Gaza Strip, I’ve occasionally quoted a linguistics scholar in Gaza, Mohammed Alshannat, who is pretty much the opposite of Hamas. In his writings before the war, Alshannat admired Western democracy, condemned suicide bombings and yearned for Arabs and Jews to live in peace and harmony. With the ceasefire, he is now trying to recover the bodies of relatives and bury them.

“Our beloved Gaza is gone,” he texted in English, adding that the survivors envy the dead: “They don’t have to see it.” I understand this exhausted man’s heartbreak, after months of hunger and homelessness and seeing his son injured. The ceasefire is welcome, but there’s no clear path forward and not much to celebrate.

“All I want to do is put my tent on the rubbles and cry,” Alshannat wrote. “Pray for us.”

The Gaza war has been a tragedy and a failure for all. Hamas committed horrific atrocities in October 2023 that didn’t empower Palestinians but left them in misery. Israel then waged a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians without so far accomplishing its goals of completely dismantling Hamas or of freeing all the hostages. Americans enabled this killing by providing billions of dollars in weaponry without meaningful restriction, making a mockery of our lofty talk of a “rules-based international order.”

What has all this war achieved? Hamas is degraded militarily but remains in charge and continues to hold Israeli hostages. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders for suspected war crimes. Thousands of Palestinian children are amputees, and 377 aid workers have been killed. And the holy grail of a sustainable peace in the Middle East seems no closer.

Today, Hamas in Gaza appears under the control of Mohammed Sinwar, the hard-line younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in October. Hamas officers are again patrolling Gaza streets. “The appearance of the militants didn’t suggest they were on their last legs: They appeared to be wearing clean uniforms, in good shape and driving decent cars,” my New York Times colleagues Adam Rasgon and Iyad Abuheweila wrote.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a farewell speech that “we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” Blinken emphasised that Israel needs to outline a post-conflict future for Palestinians and that “Hamas cannot be defeated by a military campaign alone.”

I fear that the message about the futility of endless war hasn’t gotten through to Israel or Hamas.

A reciprocal process of dehumanisation has led each side to conclude that the only thing the other understands is brute force. So both have engaged in horrific violence, with credible accounts of torture, rape and atrocities by each side.

Too many people denounce the atrocities of one side while making excuses for those on the other. Hamas kidnapped an 8-month-old Israeli baby, Kfir Bibas. And Palestinian children have been “killed, starved and frozen to death,” the U.N. chief for humanitarian affairs, Tom Fletcher, said, with more than 3,000 children younger than 5 killed in Gaza, according to Save the Children.

Israel hasn’t shown much humanity toward the children of Gaza — a Times investigation found that Israeli authorities severely weakened protections for civilians during its bombings — but then neither has Hamas. At one point, Yahya Sinwar suggested in private messages that Palestinian civilian bloodshed would benefit the cause, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Now we have a ceasefire, but is it more than a pause? I normally corner the market for hope, but I find it hard to be optimistic about Middle East peace. Violence has grown in the West Bank; settlers are out of control, even as President Donald Trump has lifted sanctions on them; and there is more talk of annexation of the West Bank by Israel, which would most likely mean denying Palestinians democratic rights.

Meanwhile, negotiators on Gaza pushed the knottiest issues to later phases of this agreement. That’s what Middle East negotiators always do, because it’s the only way to get anywhere. But I fear we won’t reach the end of Phase 2 and Phase 3 of this ceasefire agreement, any more than we got to the end of the Oslo peace process.

If you squint just so, it’s possible to visualise a way through the minefield ahead with leadership by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, using the leverage America has over Israel as a friend and arms supplier. That would mean a road to a Palestinian state in exchange for Saudi recognition of Israel, and I’m skeptical this will happen — but to Trump’s credit, it was pressure from him and his team that helped achieve the ceasefire.

Any architecture for a lasting peace will involve complex negotiations with Saudi Arabia and many other players, along with painful concessions by Israelis and Palestinians. Yet ultimately, any peace will require a moral foundation as well as a geopolitical one.

I don’t believe that Hamas and Israel are morally equivalent: On my visits to Gaza before the war, I always found Hamas to be repressive, misogynistic and homophobic, while Israel is better than Benjamin Netanyahu and has a rich civil society and a still vibrant democracy within its borders. Yet there is no hierarchy of human life: I absolutely believe in the moral equivalence of Palestinian, Israeli and American children — and a recognition of that shared humanity is the best scaffolding for lasting peace.