Every day we are confronted with disturbing images from Gaza: buildings reduced to rubble and emaciated people desperate for food. Without doubt, war is hell. UN Secretary General António Guterres and many other world leaders are calling for an end to the Gaza war, so why doesn’t it stop?

Israel has been very clear about its objectives in this war: return of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas. Hostilities could end tomorrow if Hamas returned the remaining hostages, laid down its weapons and surrendered. But this isn’t happening.

For those old enough to remember, this situation evokes memories of the challenge facing the Allied Powers in the second world war. Their prime objectives were the removal of Hitler and the defeat of the Nazi forces.

By April 1945, the Western Allies had devastated Germany. Allied bombing had laid waste to German cities, ‘killing over 305,000, wounding another 780,000, and rendering 7,500,000 homeless’. The Allies had captured over 120,000 German troops. Over 800,000 German soldiers had surrendered on the Eastern Front. The Nazi government could have stopped this carnage by surrendering. But Hitler remained defiant.

So, the Allies continued their fight for the total defeat of the brutal Nazi regime. Then, April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide and Goebbels followed suit the next day. Behind closed doors, the remaining Nazi commanders debated whether to surrender or intensify their military resistance. Finally, May 8, 1945, they unconditionally surrendered to the Allies, and the European war was over.

Like the Allies decades ago, the Israel government remains committed to its objectives. The war could end immediately if Hamas returned the remaining hostages and surrendered. But they remain defiant.

It is worth recalling how the war started. When air-raid sirens sounded at 6:30 am on Saturday October 7, 2023, Israelis living in the southern region of Israel suddenly realised they were under attack by Hamas terrorists. It was the first day of Sukkot, or Feast of Tabernacles, usually one of Judaism’s most joyful celebrations. But not this year!

This festival commemorates how God sustained some 600,000 former slaves in Egypt and their families during 40 years in the desolate wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula as they journeyed to the Promised Land in the Levant. It is a celebration of life! Usually.

But on October 7, 2023 it was a gruesome scene of death. The most brutal attack on Israel in its history is detailed in the Dinah Project report, published in Jerusalem in June. The report ‘is based on first-hand testimony from 15 of the returned hostages from Gaza … and a survivor of attempted rape at the Nova music festival, as well as interviews with 17 people who saw or heard the attacks and with therapists working with traumatised survivors’.

Among the approximately 1,200 people slaughtered … were found the bodies of young women stripped and tied to trees and poles, shot through their genitalia and in the head. Sexual violence was ‘widespread and systematic’ … rape and gang rape occurring in at least six different locations. But most victims were ‘permanently silenced’, either murdered during the assaults or left too traumatised to talk.

What are we to make of the mindset of the Hamas terrorists that motivated this barbaric humiliation, ritualised rape, and slaughter of Israeli civilians?

Douglas Murray, a British author, journalist and political commentator, addresses this question in his recent book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West. His book is

…a tour de force of journalistic rigour, first-person investigative research and well-reasoned argument. It was almost immediately on the bestseller lists in both the US and UK.

The answer to the question of what motivates the Hamas terrorists was provided by the jihadists themselves. They told Murray their ultimate victory was assured because ‘we love death more than you love life’.

The Hamas love of death, particularly death of the Jews from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea, comes from the Hamas Covenant 1988. Article 7 quotes the prophet Muhammad saying, ‘The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.’ The sombre reality is that extermination of the Jews will remain the goal of Hamas while it remains in power.

The Jewish love of life originates from the final appeal of the prophet Moses before the Israelites entered the Promised Land.

I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God … that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.

When Jews raise a glass in celebration they commonly toast with the Hebrew phrase L’chaim, meaning ‘to life’. This celebration of life has been at the heart of Judaism for at least 2000 years.

By launching an attack on Israel in 2023, Hamas hoped to foment a regional conflagration joined by the neighbouring Muslim states, as happened following the establishment of the Jewish state in 1947. The recent attack again posed an existential threat to the very existence of Israel. And that threat remains while Hamas continues to control Gaza.

Hence the recent statement by a senior Israeli official: ‘There will be no more partial deals.’ The official explained that Israel and the US now concur on the need to ‘shift from a framework for the release of some of the hostages to a framework for the release of all of the hostages, the disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip’.

With them, we can hope and pray that it will bring enduring peace to the region.

Dr David Phillips is a former research scientist and founder of FamilyVoice Australia.