Time to kill them all?

Yes. Yes, it most certainly is.

Their Time Is Up
The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us exactly who our Palestinian neighbors are. Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action.

Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother Shiri and his four-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors. For nearly eighteen months, we’ve been collecting forensic evidence about the specimens who live in Gaza. What do we know about them? The question matters. A lot. In fact, no other does, particularly as Israel and the United States are trying to ascertain how to proceed now that the first round of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas is nearing its end.

What do we know, then?

We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year. Which should come as no surprise considering the fact that 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished. How? When asked, 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel. The moderates, 17% of them, said they would be alright merely with embracing the Palestinian right of return, a kinder, gentler way to end the Jewish state.

And we know the stories: Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons. Liri Albag, for example, the brave IDF soldier who was released in January, was enslaved by one such family, which did not allow her to shower for 37 days and, witnessing her growing faint with hunger, ridiculed her and refused to let her eat any of the food she was forced to cook for her captors.

Such gleeful cruelty has no parallel in the civilized world. Sure, war is hell, and combat rarely concludes without a handful of shocking aberrations. A soldier may crack and do the unthinkable. A rocket might miss its mark, snuffing out innocent lives. That is all too regrettable, and all but unavoidable. But that is not what is happening in Gaza. The footage of a dead Jewish baby returning home to Israel for burial compels us to tell the truth: The assertion that most, or even many, Gazans are innocents hijacked by their tyrannical leaders is a polite fiction. There are certainly some somewhere in the strip, the very young and the very frail included, who neither partook in nor condone the atrocities of the past 18 months, but they should no more redeem Gaza’s genocidal enterprise than the hypothetical ten good men of Sodom and Gomorrah could the cities of the plain.

Like Abraham, our shared Patriarch, we, too, struggled to find the righteous among the wicked. We hoped that the Palestinians of Gaza will show something of the courage we had seen in Syria, Tunisia, or Libya and stand up to their maniacal overlords. No protest materialized, and support for the tyrants grew the more adept they proved at slaughtering the Jews. We hoped for a Palestinian Oskar Schindler, one righteous man or woman who would stand up to Hamas as righteous men and women stood up to the far mightier Nazis and say that no cause or ideology justified the brutal murder of an infant. None came forth. We offered large monetary rewards and safe passage to anyone delivering any information about our hostages; hatred spoke louder than self-interest and cash. Israel’s neighbors to the south had all the opportunities anyone could reasonably ask for to resist, repent, recalculate course. And at every turn, they returned to the singular idea that gives them life and meaning: Kill the Jews, all of them, gleefully.

If we didn’t understand all of this before, we ought to now that we are burying two dead children. And the lesson we must learn is simple. It comes down to one word: enough.

Enough, and way more than enough. The time has come for Netanyahu, the Israelis, and all decent, civilized people to harden their hearts, steel their resolve, and eliminate this evil from the world. If we do not, we will succumb to it ere the end.