By Avi Abelow, JNS
No serious actor is prepared to root out the threats to Israel and regional minorities except the Jewish state itself.
Everyone keeps telling us, loudly and optimistically, that U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace framework will bring “peace to the Middle East.” That sounds great on paper. In reality, the map of threats has not changed; only the public relations have. Read the facts on the ground and decide for yourself.
Gaza: Hamas continuously and publicly refuses to disarm, despite its agreement in Trump's Gaza deal. Hamas remains armed and in control of all the civilian centers in the Gaza Strip, the terror infrastructure, the tunnels, and the command centers. No Arab state has stepped forward to dismantle it.
The United States has circulated a draft U.N. resolution proposing an “international security force” (ISF) to stabilize and demilitarize Gaza, but a draft on paper is not the same as boots in tunnels and weapons hauled out of hidden bunkers. The ISF concept reads well in New York, Brussels, and Washington. In practice, can we rely on an international force with political constraints to risk their soldiers’ lives to demilitarize Gaza and destroy the terror infrastructure?
The only country willing to risk lives to do this is Israel because our country’s existence is on the line. The draft for the United Nations itself confirms the ISF would be tasked with disarming Hamas, but the track record of international forces in our region is poor.
Lebanon: Despite the Trump administration's diplomacy to the contrary, Hezbollah also refuses to disarm, and the Lebanese army will make that happen. Instead, Hezbollah has rebuilt on Israel's Northern border and expanded its arsenal; tens of thousands of rockets and missiles now once again threaten Israeli population centers.
Even international and U.S. envoys acknowledge the failure to demilitarize southern Lebanon. UNIFIL’s presence helped create a buffer that, in practice, constrained Israeli action while allowing Hezbollah to entrench and rearm for years. We cannot pretend that the same failed model will not be replicated in Gaza if we accept another international security scheme without ironclad guarantees and enforcement.
Syria: Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa's ISIS/jihadist forces continue to kill Christians, Druze, Kurds, and Alawites in southern Syria. There is no general “peace” by any measure there.
Iran: The regime is accelerating its march towards nuclear capability, expanding enrichment and hardening sites, while stonewalling meaningful limits. The clock on Tehran is not a parlor debate; it is an existential timeline for the entire region.
All of this adds up to the stark reality that, despite rhetoric from Washington, we are not getting closer to uprooting the jihad death cult in the region, and no serious actor is prepared to root out the threats to Israel and regional minorities, except the Jewish state itself.
The argument that an ISF will sufficiently demilitarize Gaza assumes that the regional actors who enabled and armed Hamas will now disarm the terrorist organization; the ISF will have the mandate, means and political will to enforce disarmament house by house and tunnel by tunnel; and Hamas will comply in good faith.
All three assumptions are wildly optimistic. Qatar, Turkey, Egypt and Iran have been key players in Gaza’s current reality; why would they now shoulder the burden of dismantling what they helped create?
The Trump administration's lead diplomats, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, believe transactional deals with these countries will get them on board to usher in an era of peace. But Witkoff, Kushner and Trump himself ignore the 1,400-plus-year jihadi Muslim ideology to subjugate all kafirs ("nonbelievers") all over the world.
They are making transactional deals with the administration, but it is more about waiting out Trump's term and taking a step back to rearm. This is not peace, and not a short-term solution in the West's interest.
History matters. UNIFIL was supposed to prevent Hezbollah from rearming in southern Lebanon; instead, it became part of a status quo that allowed entropy to favor the enemy. We cannot afford to repeat that model in Gaza. If international deployments serve primarily as a buffer against decisive action, then they help entrench the very threat they claim to solve.
This is not a call for recklessness or lawlessness. It is a demand for clarity and Israeli sovereignty over our security decisions. We have fought, bled and performed miracles on the battlefield to reach our current military position. While the Qatari-Iranian-funded attack on Oct. 7, 2023, was an attempt to destroy Israel, we succeeded in beating back our enemies. But we still do not have the victory needed to deter our enemies.
Victory is not simply the elimination of terrorists; it is a durable condition in which Israeli citizens sleep without the fear of an Oct. 7-level atrocity ever again. Victory means internalizing how the enemy interprets defeat. And in the Middle East, the only message of defeat is loss of land.
That requires more than talk and temporary mandates. It requires demilitarization that cannot be reversed the moment international attention drifts away. It requires capability, intelligence, and the willingness to destroy the military infrastructure, tunneling networks, and arsenals that produced the Oct. 7 carnage.
A cosmetic solution that preserves Hamas’s command structure or allows external patrons to keep their influence will be a recipe for future disaster. The only reliable guarantor of our safety is Israel, which has the will, intelligence and moral imperative to protect its citizens. Other international partners can assist in humanitarian and stabilization roles, but they must not be permitted to become fig leaves that replace the decisive action required.
We should welcome genuine international help if it is genuinely enforceable, transparent, and accountable. We must reject diplomatic experiments that undermine Israeli sovereignty or tie our hands while enemies regroup. We will not trade enduring security for the illusion of peace on paper.
We must be clear-eyed. We cannot mistake diplomatic Band-Aids for policy that secures our future. While the world wants a neat and quick solution, we want long-term safety. If Israel is to survive and flourish, the final arrangements must guarantee that our enemies cannot return to the positions from which they attacked us.
That only happens if they understand it in their language: by the loss of land on the part of those who attacked to destroy Israel. Anything less is a replay of past failures.
