Could the devastation in Gaza have been averted? That is the question at the center of a commentary published by American Thinker, which draws on the work of historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson to argue that the destruction was not inevitable but the product of specific choices made by Hamas.
The piece, written by Mike McDaniel and dated October 16, 2026, opens by praising Hanson before summarizing his recent argument: that after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and resulted in the taking of 251 hostages, Gaza’s destruction could have been avoided had Hamas simply released the hostages and handed over those who planned and carried out the massacre.
The Charge of Complicity
McDaniel’s summary of Hanson’s case rests on several contentions. First, he writes that more than 2,000 so-called civilians — a term he pointedly questions for its applicability in Gaza — accompanied Hamas terrorists during the attack, engaging in killing, torture, rape, and looting, while what he describes as innumerable civilians beat and spat on dead and wounded Jews and hostages.
Second, the commentary argues that Hamas did not merely refuse to stand down and hand over the hostages and culpable individuals. Rather than seeking peace, McDaniel writes, Hamas and Hezbollah spent the 20 days between the October 7 attack and the entry of Israeli ground forces into Gaza firing thousands of missiles, rockets, and drones at civilians in Israel — barrages that would exceed 25,000 launches within a year, according to his account.
Third, McDaniel contends that the death toll in Gaza would have been substantially lower had the perpetrators of October 7 helped their own civilians avoid combat zones. He cites Hanson’s argument that far fewer Gazans would have died had Hamas not deliberately placed its tunnel entrances and exits beneath private homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.
In line with Hanson, McDaniel writes that Hamas purposely used civilians as human shields and hid in the tunnels it denied them. Even though Israel worked to warn civilians about when and where attacks would occur, many chose to remain, he writes — and Hamas killed some who attempted to flee while stealing most of the relief supplies Israel shipped into Gaza.
A Broader Claim About What Israel Needed
McDaniel goes a step beyond Hanson’s counterfactual, writing that even if Hamas had acceded to Israeli demands, released the hostages, and turned over those responsible, Israel was always going to need to obliterate Hamas and Hezbollah. He then quotes Hanson at length on the history that shaped that conclusion.
That history, as McDaniel relays it, includes the removal of the last Jewish settlement from Gaza by Israeli authorities themselves on September 12, 2005, some eighteen years before the October 2023 massacre. Hamas won a legislative majority on January 25, 2006 — its first and last election, per the piece — and afterward silenced the population, killed off lingering opposition, and never held another vote.
Instead, McDaniel writes, Hamas set up what he calls an Iranian-style theocratic autocracy with the express aim of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population. He identifies that aim as the reason for the existence of both Hamas and Hezbollah, and criticizes those who chant “from the river to the sea” — whom he describes as American useful idiots, most of whom he says don’t know which river or sea is meant — as calling for the genocide of every Jew and the destruction of Israel.
What Hamas Could Have Done Instead
The commentary poses a counterfactual of its own: that over the next eighteen years, all Hamas had to do was hold regular elections, cease attempts to kill Israeli Jews, invite Gulf investors to develop a tourist destination, and use some of the roughly $40 billion in aggregate UN, European, U.S., and Gulf state aid to build state-of-the-art housing, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and health care for its own people — rather than constructing what McDaniel calls a pathological 310-mile military labyrinth from which to launch attacks on Israel.
McDaniel insists such a path was impossible, arguing that Hamas was neither a political party nor a government but a murderous cohort dedicated to directing all international aid and resources toward a single goal: the complete destruction of Israel and the murder of every Jew within reach.
He invokes former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, quoting: “We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us.” McDaniel follows this with his own formulation — that there will be peace in the Middle East if Muslims lay down their arms, but if Israel does so first, genocide.
A Claim About Antisemitism and Politics in 2026
The essay then shifts to a broader argument about antisemitism. McDaniel writes that the more Jews preserve their culture and religion — and the more they thrive intellectually, economically, and politically — the more jealousy and hatred fuel venom against them.
In 2026, he argues, two forces have united in what he calls the new Democratic Party: the antisemitic socialism of the Western Left and the anti-Israeli Islamism of the growing Muslim and Arab population within the West. The result, in his telling, is that the once-somnolent, age-old bane of hating and killing Jews has reemerged, complete with what he describes as the same old lies and violence — and the same old silence from cowardly and terrified onlookers.
That is why, McDaniel concludes, Israel’s task of self-preservation is not over and may never be over. He asserts that Islam is dedicated, in text and intention, to the slaughter of every Jew and to conquering the world by the sword, and that Israel survives and prospers because it recognizes this reality and possesses the will and cultural qualities — appreciation for education, hard work, delayed gratification, and merit — necessary to survive.
His final assessment is that Israel perhaps did not need to level Gaza at the time, but that it will have to destroy the Islamists populating it, and Lebanon, sooner or later — and that in doing so, Israel will do Western civilization a great service for which, in his view, an enormous debt will be owed.
The piece is unmistakably a work of advocacy rather than neutral analysis, and it reflects the American Thinker’s editorial perspective. It does not present competing figures on the Gaza death toll, cite Palestinian or humanitarian accounts of the war, or engage with critics of Hanson’s argument. For readers seeking the counterarguments, those would need to be found elsewhere. What the commentary does offer is a clear articulation of one strand of pro-Israel argument in 2026: that the destruction of Gaza was a choice made by Hamas, not an inevitability imposed on it, and that the broader conflict is far from finished.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/could-gaza-s-destruction-have-been-avoided/