Why Would Hamas Surrender?

Its fighters has held off 4th strongest army in world for 668 days

Israel is now declaring it will continue the genocide until Hamas surrenders, releases the hostages, and relinquishes all control over Gaza. And it’s getting ready to “finish the job.”

Unlike the Israeli government, I’m all for doing whatever it takes to get the hostages back—except killing random innocent Palestinians, as Israel has been doing since October 2023. As for Hamas relinquishing control—absolutely—but without Israel’s “help,” considering Israel supported Hamas from its founding right through October 2023. The Palestinians themselves, with international organizations, need elections where all parties compete, and the victors take power, alone or in coalition.

That new government would engage with Israel to negotiate an agreement to end the conflict and guarantee—under the surveillance of NATO, the UN, the Arab states, the EU, whoever—that Israelis and Palestinians alike will have democratic rights, peace, and above all, security, including, of course, from any and all attacks from each other.

The United States, back when it still was the United States and not some fascist replica, actually performed this security coordinator role in the late 1990s and reduced acts of violence to nearly zero.

But the one Israeli demand—everything with them is a demand—that’s a total nonstarter is that Hamas surrender and admit it lost the war.

Why would they? They won.

True, and terribly, they lost many tens of thousands of their people. Gaza is in ruins. And Israel inflicted all that on them.

But that doesn’t mean they lost. During the Vietnam War, the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong lost 1.1 million people (military and civilian). The Americans lost 58,000.

Who won?

Vietnam did. The Americans withdrew. The two Vietnams became one—which was the North’s primary goal—and that was that. There isn’t an American or Vietnamese alive who thinks the U.S. won that war. The Americans declared victory when they got their POWs back. That was their only gain. And now, all these years later, there is one Vietnam. It’s hard to believe so many died to prevent what was not only inevitable but right.

That’s how asymmetrical and colonial wars end: the occupier leaves.

Similarly, Hamas won the Gaza war. Not when it launched its monstrous attack on Israel on October 7th—but when Israel seized the opportunity of that attack to launch a genocide. That decision by the Israeli government has turned Israel into an international pariah, with its leaders branded war criminals by the International Court of Justice. It has endangered Jews worldwide. It has left Israel with the support of a bare majority—if that—of diaspora Jews, and virtually none among young people in general. Globally, it has one ally: the Trump Republican Party.

And for the first time since 1948, Israel now faces a true existential threat—unless it ends its genocide and the occupation.

Zionism, once viewed by Jews as a historic success, leaves as its legacy two nakbas: the Palestinian nakba of 1948, and now, the self-inflicted Jewish nakba of 2025.

Depending on how you look at it, that may be bad or good. But one thing it’s not is a victory for Israel and a defeat for Hamas.

Hamas “won” the war. Israel lost.

And now it’s Israel that needs to negotiate the terms of surrender that will allow its people a future. Terms that will include reparations—reparations underwritten, as they must be, by the United States, which enabled the genocide, and the complete withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

Hamas can’t wave a flag of victory—not after the war crimes of October 7, and certainly not with so many Palestinians lying dead. But they won. And the cause of a free Palestine won too.

Israelis have their own democratically elected government to thank.

And they might. After all, a majority of the population supports the genocide, including the continuing loss of their soldiers for a terrible cause.

Forgive me if I cry not just for the Palestinians but for Jews too. Look what Israel has done to the Jewish people’s legacy. Zionism was a catastrophic mistake.