On May 30, two terrorists shot and killed Meir Tamari, a father of two, as he was driving. He was the twentieth person to die in a terrorist attack this year. Yoni Ben Menachem comments:

The attack was carried out by the “rapid-reaction unit” of the “Tulkarm Battalion,” a joint terrorist body of the [Iran-backed] Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement. . . .  Islamic Jihad sources say that the murder of the Israeli citizen Meir Tamari is part of the organization’s revenge response to IDF activity in [the village of] Nur Shams and to the targeted killing of its military elite in Gaza in May.

The Israeli security establishment is concerned about the spread of armed terrorist groups throughout Judea and Samaria equipped with large stockpiles of weapons and ammunition. There are about twenty armed terrorist groups carrying out attacks. The weapons flow through the border with Jordan, with the purchases financed by Iran. The strategy of the armed terrorist groups is to conduct a war of attrition against the IDF in all of Judea and Samaria and to draw in as many soldiers as possible. Iran sees Judea and Samaria as another front against Israel as part of its strategy of “uniting the fronts.”

Mahmoud Abbas has a Palestinian security force numbering 30,000 armed men under his command. But Abbas continues the policy he started in 2021 of avoiding conflict with the armed terrorist groups so long as they do not directly threaten his Muqata headquarters in Ramallah. According to senior officials in the Fatah movement, Abbas rejected the security plan offered to him by the Biden administration.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.