President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself but warned of the mounting toll of civilian casualties, urged Israeli compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL), and called for a pause in hostilities to enable the exit of foreign nationals and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has called for a ceasefire. The demands to show restraint and suspend military actions in Gaza reflect muddled morality and confused thinking. Who kills babies and mothers? Who abducts children and elderly as hostages to be used as bargaining chips in negotiations? Who hides among densely packed civilian populations to make them targets of inevitable retaliatory strikes, thereby multiplying the civilian toll of dead, wounded and suffering? Hamas, Hamas and Hamas. Never Israel.

The atrocities of 10/7 were not spontaneous acts by Hamas fighters who went rogue in a frenzied killing spree, but a carefully planned pogrom. The political calculations by the Hamas leadership would have sought to provoke Israeli retaliatory strikes on the densely populated Gaza strip in order to inflame the Arab street, enrage Muslims around the world and provoke anti-Israeli demonstrations by ‘useful idiot’ supporters. It was a cynical and calculated ploy to kill as many Jews as possible in Israel, and also to sacrifice large numbers of Palestinian lives in Gaza in pursuit of the political goals of Hamas. Culpability for all civilian lives, Palestinian as well as Israeli, therefore lies with Hamas. Its actions knowingly caused the Israeli bombs to rain on Gaza. Israeli strikes would end if Hamas surrendered. Future Israeli strikes on civilian areas would be averted and collateral civilian casualties minimised if Hamas stopped hiding its leaders, fighters and weaponry among civilian populations.

The decision to minimise or maximise civilian casualties in Gaza therefore is primarily Hamas’s to make. It’s to their leaders, enablers and backers that Albanese, Biden and Guterres should address their appeals, not to Israel. Conversely, to criticise Israeli strikes as disproportionate and in violation of IHL effectively endorses Hamas’s tactic of directly targeting civilians of all ages and genders to kill, rape, mutilate and kill parents in the presence of children before killing the latter, kidnap hostages, and trap innocent civilians of their own side as human shields against punishing but predictable Israeli strikes. Mass demonstrations in cities across the Western world to cheer, celebrate and exult in Hamas’s depraved barbarity are a terrible indictment of the failings of the Western world’s education system and immigration policy settings. Their present rage at Israel ought to be tempered with shame at their recent celebrations of Hamas’s butchery that caused it.

For context, do the maths. Over 1,400 people were killed and 240 abducted to Gaza. Adjusting for respective populations, that is the equivalent of around 48,000 and 8,000 Americans killed and kidnapped, or 56,000 in total. The number of US soldiers who died in the entire Vietnam War is 58,220. As the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, 10/7 was not Israel’s 9/11 but the return, after 80 years, of the memory of attempted Jewish extermination.

Israel’s war – in Gaza, but against Hamas – is not taking place ‘in a vacuum’, to use UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s words. Polls before 10/7 showed 58 per cent of Gazans support Hamas and 67 per cent support armed attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel. The attacks of 10/7 must be contextualised by history, geography, demography and Israel’s strategic logic of deterrence based on military asymmetry and wildly disproportionate casualties. Not weighed against the inapplicable normative standard of a proportionate use of force. Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and the expulsion of Jews ‘from the river to the sea’. Hamas and Israel cannot coexist and there is no pathway ahead without the defeat and destruction of Hamas. Calls for restraint contradict affirmations of Israel’s right to self-defence. If it has the right to defend itself against armed attack and the accompanying responsibility to protect and preserve Israel as a state where the world’s Jews can live in safety and security, then it must have the right to destroy Hamas using all means necessary.

Civilian casualties are deeply regrettable in any war, but also inevitable in every war. IHL developed in recognition of this double reality and is a valuable normative instrument to regulate armed conflict between military forces. Its three key principles are distinction between soldiers and non-combatant civilians, proportionality in the use of force, and necessity of force being the option of last resort to achieve the objective. It should not be too hard to see why the principles fall apart in the ‘context’ (there’s that loaded word again) of Hamas: its identity as a heavily armed militia, not soldiers in uniform; its tactics of targeting Israeli civilians and endangering Palestinian civilians as human shields by placing fighters under hospitals and ammunition in schools; its strategy of inflaming anti-Israeli opinion everywhere to delegitimise the Jewish state; and its explicit, charter goal of liquidating Israel and ethnically cleansing Jews.

Against the reality of groups that wage war with no thought of being restricted by any normative constraints, IHL relies on a world of make-believe fiction. Our military officers receive IHL lectures and training at various levels of their professional qualifications. Forgive me for being sceptical of the thought that IHL forms any part of the curricula of Hamas training. Until such time as ‘the international community’ is able to devise and enforce IHL strictures on groups like Hamas, its application to wars against them by state actors must be interpreted and applied more flexibly than when two opposing armies fight, as in Russia vs. Ukraine.

The civilian toll in Gaza is greatly magnified because, as they say, while Israelis use missiles to protect their people, Hamas uses its people to protect its missiles and shield its fighters. Hostilities could not resume after a ceasefire absent fresh Hamas attacks. Those calling for a ceasefire must be forced to confront the logic of their call. It necessarily means accepting the 7 October attacks as a fait accompli, rewarding the brutal Hamas tactics of killing, kidnapping and sacrificing Israeli and Palestinian civilians, denying Israel the right to self-defence in practice while paying lip service to it in rhetoric, and encouraging repeats of the cycle not just by Hamas, but also by other terrorist groups mimicking the successful Hamas tactics and strategy. All who celebrated 10/7 and call for Israeli restraint and a ceasefire should be required to watch the raw footage that Israel has prepared of what happened on that evil and sorrowful day and be asked immediately afterwards: Do you really want Israel to stop before the job is done and Hamas is finished off?