Five men belonging to the Hamas-run police force were killed in Khan Younis, and another strike in Gaza City left three dead, including a child. The news wires reported the tally with their customary mechanical brevity. In European chancelleries, the press statements are undoubtedly being drafted already, heavy with the predictable vocabulary of proportionality, de-escalation, and international humanitarian law. It is the language of a continent that has forgotten how wars are fought and how enemies are destroyed.
Let us dispense with the primary fiction first. The phrase Hamas-run police is a Western bureaucratic euphemism designed to soothe sensibilities that cannot stomach the nature of totalitarian governance. In Gaza, there is no distinction between the gendarmerie and the militant wing. The internal security apparatus is the connective tissue of the regime. It secures supply lines, suppresses civilian dissent, hoards diverted humanitarian aid, and ensures the political survival of the leadership hiding below ground. Striking these officers is not a municipal dispute gone wrong; it is the systematic dismantling of the administrative machinery that sustains an Iranian proxy force.
The death of a child in Gaza City is an absolute tragedy, the kind that ought to sicken anyone with a pulse. But war is not an academic seminar held in Geneva, and urban warfare in one of the most densely populated combat zones on earth does not afford antiseptic outcomes. When an asymmetric adversary deliberately embeds command posts, weapons caches, and patrol routes within residential architecture, civilian casualties are not an accidental byproduct. They are an operational inevitability engineered by the defending force. Hamas understands the Western media cycle far better than European ministers understand Hamas. Every strike that claims a non-combatant produces the exact strategic yield the group requires: diplomatic pressure on Jerusalem to halt operations before the job is finished.
This dynamic exposes the profound cognitive rot at the heart of contemporary European diplomacy. Across Brussels, Paris, and London, politicians continue to chant the mantra of an immediate, permanent ceasefire as though peace were simply a matter of sufficient goodwill. They offer no operational roadmap for who disarms the remaining battalions, who prevents the reconstitution of the tunnel network, or who deters the patrons in Tehran who funded and directed the catastrophe in the first place. It is a posture born of strategic luxury, cultivated by decades of outsourcing European defence to the American taxpayer while lecturing the rest of the world on the virtues of soft power.
For those of us who have spent years tracking Russian revanchism and the slow, agonizing erosion of deterrence on NATO’s eastern flank, this wishful thinking is painfully familiar. It is the exact same intellectual vanity that convinced European leaders that Vladimir Putin could be bound by trade pacts and gas pipelines. The refusal to acknowledge that hard power remains the ultimate arbiter of international politics has hollowed out European statecraft. Now, faced with a vicious, multi-front war on the Mediterranean periphery, the continent’s foreign policy establishment reacts not with strategic clarity, but with squeamish moralizing.
The strikes in Khan Younis and Gaza City are grim, attritional, and ugly. That is the nature of an existential campaign against an embedded fanatic movement. Israel’s security apparatus is operating under the cold arithmetic of survival, systematically eliminating the tactical and administrative nodes of an organization committed to its annihilation. Tehran watches every strike, calculating whether its investment in forward proxies remains viable or whether the cost is becoming prohibitive.
If European leaders truly desire an end to the bloodshed and the protection of children in Gaza City, they should cease demanding a return to the status quo that made this war inevitable. Hamas cannot be managed, reformed, or negotiated into moderation. It must be decisively broken as a governing and military entity. Until that occurs, strikes on its enforcers and the tragic, collateral cost of fighting in ruins will continue. Those who pretend there is a painless shortcut are not advancing peace; they are simply prolonging the slaughter.