Hamas cannot hope to win on the battlefield in Gaza, and it fully understands this. It hopes to stay alive through Western pressure on Israel — helpfully provided by French President Emmanuel Macron, British P.M. Keir Starmer, the entire legacy media, and virtually every government-funded NGO and college campus.
Last week's anti-Israeli propaganda push was genocide. This week, it's starvation.
So let's talk about starvation as a tool of war — and about a similarly implacable enemy.
As spring turned to summer in 1945, Japan was fully beaten but would not surrender. The Imperial Japanese Fleet, which had briefly ruled the Pacific, was now powerless to resist — either resting on the ocean floor or starved of fuel. Yet while American aircraft carriers freely roamed the coasts, their dive-bombers flattening targets at will, Tokyo's state media still beat the drums of war for a militarized population.
Every Japanese — man, woman, and child — was expected to fight and die for the Emperor.
"All women and children, spurred by the pre-invasion song 'One Hundred Million Souls for the Emperor,' had been equipped with a sharpened bamboo spear in preparation for a fanatical defence," Brett Collier, a POW guest of Japan, reminded Telegraph readers more than 20 years ago.
"The war had been lost and millions of people would have starved if the atom bombs had not been dropped."
Or as Paul Fussell put it: "Thank God for the atom bomb."
Army Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay — of all the serious men who defeated Japan and Germany in just three-and-a-half years — took his job more seriously than most. When he wasn't busy dropping conventional bombs, incendiaries, or the occasional atomic bomb on Japan, his B-29 Superfortresses dropped more than 12,000 mines on Japan's ports. His goal was to disrupt the entire country's food and fuel supplies and starve a nation of millions into submission. Militant fanatics too hungry to fight, the thinking went, can't fight.
Ipso FAFO, to coin a phrase.
With his characteristic bluntness, LeMay called it Operation Starvation. Seriously, look it up.
Unlike Fussell, LeMay didn't mention God: "If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."
When dealing with a murderously fanatical enemy, LeMay and the rest of our military and political leadership understood that the only way out was to kill, shock, or starve them out of their fanaticism. It's a terrible thing, but if there is a fourth option, no one in humanity's countless wars has come up with it.
Is there starvation in Gaza? Almost certainly, but the worst of it — no matter what the West’s pro-Hamas media claims — lies squarely with Hamas. It's hijacked food trucks, attacked aid convoys, and threatened or murdered Gazans who try to distribute supplies outside party control. For Hamas, every dead or malnourished Gazan featured in the New York Times is a propaganda win.
Israel has not used starvation or mass civilian bombings as tools in its war against Hamas. I say this with complete certainty because, after almost two years of heavy urban fighting, the ratio of civilian to military deaths is lower than in any other modern war on record.
Ever.
From my vantage point, Jerusalem seems to think that if it kills enough Hamas, that will be enough — the people don't need to be made to suffer and die in the same way the Germans and Japanese did to force a capitulation.
It remains to be seen whether Jerusalem is correct. I hope that's right, although maybe I'm getting soft in middle age.
A war that began with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the deaths of 3,000 American servicemen was never going to end nicely. A war that began with a surprise terror invasion and the rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping of 1,200 Israeli civilians still has no end in sight.
And it won't end until Israel kills, shocks, or starves Hamas and the group's Gazan enablers out of their fanaticism.
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