It is time to confront one of the most dangerous illusions of our time: the belief that the International Stabilization Force for Gaza can bring order, reconstruction, or peace without dismantling Hamas. A force that enters Gaza while Hamas remains armed will not stabilize anything; it will merely stabilize Hamas itself. It will become, in practice, an International Stabilization Force for Hamas, a shield that protects the very organization that plunged Gaza into tragedy.
No serious strategist can pretend that disarmament is optional. A stabilization force that cannot confront the terrorists who rule Gaza is not a peacekeeping mechanism; it is a political anesthetic. It buys time for Hamas to rest, reconstitute its battalions, rebuild its tunnels, and prepare for the next war. It allows the group to deepen its grip on the population and to rewrite the narrative so that its catastrophic decisions appear as heroic resistance.
One cannot reconstruct a city by empowering the people who destroyed it. One cannot speak of recovery while guaranteeing the survival of an armed movement that openly vows to repeat October 7 whenever it can.
Some governments now maneuver to shield Hamas from the consequences of its actions. They speak of stability while pursuing a very different goal: preserving Hamas as a tool of influence. To justify this duplicity, they spread the fiction that Hamas cannot be dismantled because its ideology supposedly resides in every Gazan home. This is false. Gazans were not born into Hamas; they were subjugated by it. They did not choose this movement; it imposed itself through fear, coercion, and the destruction of all alternatives.
We must say it plainly: there are states that want Hamas to survive precisely because it amplifies their regional leverage. They defend Hamas not out of solidarity with Palestinians but out of cold strategic calculus, to preserve their influence. President Trump, who forced a ceasefire and exposed many of these games, should recognize exactly what is happening.
President Trump’s 20-point plan was not a rhetorical exercise but an attempt to impose order on political chaos. He acted with the same clarity and determination that drove the Abraham Accords, cutting through decades of paralysis with the insistence that progress is possible only when illusions are rejected. Trump did not indulge fantasies about Hamas. He built a plan based on the recognition that peace requires confronting those who reject peace. His work was a reminder that leadership matters.
Hamas’s own leadership has spoken with astonishing clarity. On December 6, in a speech delivered in Turkey, Chairman of the Hamas political bureau Khalid Masha’al declared that Hamas will never disarm, never renounce its weapons, never accept external oversight of Gaza, never permit any force, international or otherwise, to constrain its military operations. He boasted that Hamas’s arsenal is “the honor and pride of the nation.” This is not a negotiating position; it is a declaration of perpetual war. When the leader of Hamas publicly states that the group will not allow any international force to control Gaza, it becomes impossible to pretend that the ISF can operate unless it is prepared to accept Hamas’s authority.
For far too long, Arab societies have been held hostage by ideological currents imposed upon them rather than chosen by them. The Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative of “resistance” that thrives on perpetual conflict, and the Iranian regime’s empire of resentment have suffocated the region’s potential. These forces do not defend Arabs; they undermine Arab futures. They do not honor Islam; they distort it into a justification for violence. And the Iranian people — one of the most cultured and brilliant civilizations on earth — deserve better than rulers who export fires to Arab lands while extinguishing hope at home.
The path forward is not mysterious. President Trump opened it. But it can only continue if we confront reality rather than hide behind diplomatic formulas. Hamas must be dismantled — not tolerated, not reinterpreted, not “managed.” Any force entering Gaza must have a clear mandate: the complete disarmament and demilitarization of Hamas. Without this, the ISF will be a mask for impotence, a new layer of tragedy atop an old one, and another chapter in the long story of illusions that pretend to be solutions.
The time has come to speak with clarity: Gaza cannot be rebuilt while Hamas exists. Peace cannot be built while Hamas rules. And an International Stabilization Force that does not understand this is not stabilizing the region — it is stabilizing its nightmares.
