Quote Originally Posted by JamesWales View Post
The answer - tragically for the people of Gaza - is probably when Hamas are removed from power.
I don't think it is about Hamas any more (if it ever was) for Israel or Israel's backers. Hamas was 'the enemy' in October 2023 but has been massively reduced as a fighting force, even if most of its experienced cadres have been replaced by unarmed teenagers to keep the numbers up. Hamas is a shell of its former self. Israel (and the USA) have recently started to paint a picture of Hamas as rebuilt and back to the numbers and 'threat' of 2023 - but that is pure propaganda to try to justify the current scale of killing.

Many people in Israel don't believe the continuing destruction of Gaza and its people is about defeating Hamas. Many (latest polls suggest a majority) don't think a complete military victory is possible; a large minority think the war is continuing because Netanyahu needs a forever war to stay out of gaol; the language of the political and military leadership in Israel has become more and more explicitly about ethnic cleansing and annexation to achieve Greater Israel 'from the river to the sea', and the spectre of a gutted Hamas is a convenient cover for that political and ideological objective.

The countries backing Israel's war on Palestine appear happy to go along with that, and keep the arms and money flowing, and keep playing the 'get out of gaol free' card on behalf of Israel in international forums (from the UN General Assembly to the International Court of Justice). With the exception of Trump's USA most have started to push the Two State Solution mantra (as Biden did briefly last year). Trump doesn't bother. It is now a fiction anyway - there is no practical way of creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel because the facts on the ground (created over the past 30 years) make that an impossibility - even on a Bantustan model. The call for a Two State Solution is just noise to cover continuing complicity in Israel's drive to create a single Jewish supremacist (apartheid) state in the whole of Israel/Palestine, and possibly beyond (southern Lebanon, Syria beyond the Golan and - for Ben-Gvir and Smotrich - into Jordan and the Sinai).