# Hamas: Why Israel Responded So Forcefully, What Would Prevent Another October 7, and How U.S. Policy Changed

## The Consensus, and the Harder Question

The consensus in Washington is that Hamas must disarm, and the consensus is correct. Why does the United States need Hamas to disarm? Hamas — the Islamic Resistance Movement, a Palestinian Sunni Islamist military and sociopolitical movement designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization — led the surprise attacks of October 7, 2023, by land, sea, and air, killing around 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, among them 35 U.S. citizens, and seizing some 240 hostages, according to the [Congressional Research Service](https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R47828/R47828.11.pdf). An armed faction that has carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust cannot coexist with a negotiated settlement. The harder question — the one taxpayers are entitled to ask — is what happens if Hamas does not disarm, who verifies it, and what the United States does when either side misses a deadline. The test of U.S. policy is whether American money and diplomacy are attached to a verifiable, sequenced plan with a clear political end state, or to an open-ended tab that lets both sides dodge their commitments.

## Why Israel Responded So Forcefully After October 7

Why did Israel respond so forcefully after October 7? The forcefulness of Israel's retaliatory war on Gaza is inseparable from how that morning was experienced inside Israel. As Michael J. Reimer writes in the Fall 2024 [Cairo Review of Global Affairs](https://www.thecairoreview.com), the violence of the Hamas attacks and Israel's subsequent retaliatory war on Gaza have reignited historical collective traumas and existential fears among Jewish-Israelis, the Jewish Diaspora, and Palestinians — burdens of history rooted in decades of violence that made the assault read, in Israel, not as a border raid but as an existential threat to the state itself. A second explanation comes from Martin Indyk, twice U.S. ambassador to Israel, who told [Foreign Affairs](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/martin-indyk-why-hamas-attacked-and-why-israel-was-taken-surprise) that part of the intelligence failure preceding October 7 was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas indefinitely, which had underpinned the pre-war doctrine toward Gaza of containment and deterrence rather than elimination. Netanyahu announced that Israel's military objectives were "to destroy the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and bring the hostages home" — the stated reason Israel responded so forcefully, with a campaign that dismantled much of Gaza's housing, hospitals and universities, as UN agencies documented throughout the war. But force alone did not produce the breakthroughs. Those came through diplomacy: the U.S.-brokered ceasefire of 10 October 2025, endorsed by Security Council Resolution 2803, and Hamas's acceptance in July 2026 of a disarmament roadmap under which weapons would be stored under a Palestinian committee and Israeli forces would withdraw in stages.

## How U.S. Policy Toward Hamas Changed After October 7

How did US policy toward Hamas change after October 7? Before the attack, as the [Baker Institute](https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/takeaways-first-phase-israel-hamas-war) documents, Israeli doctrine toward Gaza rested on informal arrangements — occasional clashes followed by accommodation, a practice Israelis called "mowing the grass" — and Washington largely followed that lead, treating Hamas as a deterrence problem to be managed rather than a movement to be disarmed. After the attack, US policy changed in scale and kind. President Biden asked Congress to appropriate more than $8 billion in security assistance for Israel and more than $9 billion in humanitarian assistance, according to [CRS](https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R47828/R47828.16.pdf), while pressing Israel to minimize casualties and insisting that Palestinians "must not be pressed to leave Gaza." Washington also brokered the ceasefire of 10 October 2025 and championed Resolution 2803 — a diplomatic role with no pre-war precedent. But the underlying pattern held: weapons expedited, warnings issued, terms left to the recipient. The change was in scale and in brokered diplomacy, not yet in accountability.

## What Would Prevent Another October 7

What would prevent another October 7 is knowing how the last one happened and fixing what made it possible — not signatures alone. Hamas has issued an unprecedented warning that it could mount another attack similar to October 7, jolting a public still living with the fallout of that day. The [Baker Institute](https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/takeaways-first-phase-israel-hamas-war) identifies the structural flaw of the pre-2023 arrangement: every previous round of fighting followed the same pattern — an exchange of fire, a pause once returns diminished, and a return to the previous state of affairs — which taught Hamas that attacks carried no lasting cost and no lasting deterrence. Indyk's account of the intelligence failure points the same way: deterrence built on the assumption that Hamas preferred calm failed precisely because it was unverified. The study at [understandingwar.org](https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/hamas-view-of-the-october-7-war/) reconstructs Hamas's own view of the October 7 war and makes the point plainly — military defeat of Hamas without a political end state produces another Hamas, and another war. Abdulaziz Sager of the Gulf Research Center argued in the [Council on Foreign Relations](https://www.cfr.org/articles/global-perspectives-on-the-hamas-attacks-on-israel) roundup that the world's habit of paying "lip service to the two-state solution" while sidelining the Palestinian issue was itself part of the pressure that produced the violence. Preventing a repeat therefore requires the opposite of drift: the disarmament roadmap verified weapon by weapon, a staged Israeli withdrawal tied to it, a verification mechanism with an end date, conditions on both parties, and consequences attached to missed deadlines — an approach examined in [Foreign Affairs](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/palestinian-territories/how-solve-gazas-hamas-problem), including the option of an international verification force to demilitarize Gaza and guarantee that no armed faction can rebuild the capability to strike again.

## Why a Ceasefire Alone Cannot Resolve the Crisis

Why can't a ceasefire alone resolve the Israel Hamas crisis? Because a ceasefire is an achievement worth defending but not an end state. More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed since the 10 October 2025 ceasefire began, aid remains restricted, and the IPC projects 1.4 million people in Gaza facing crisis-level food insecurity in late 2026. The danger is drift — both sides testing the terms while no one is held to them. The sequencing standoff shows the shape of that drift: the Board of Peace insists on no Israeli withdrawal before disarmament, while polling shows 72 percent of Palestinians oppose disarming before full withdrawal. The war's cost frames what oversight must catch: as of 14 October 2026, 74,392 Palestinians had been killed. A UN commission found in September 2025 that Israel's conduct merited the term genocide — a finding Israel rejects — and the ICJ's January 2024 provisional order makes clear why oversight cannot be outsourced to the recipient's own assurances.

## What Policy Tools the US Has to Influence the War

What policy tools does the US have to influence the Israel Hamas war? They exist and are familiar. Congress sets reporting requirements on arms transfers and already vetoes expedited deliveries when conduct warrants, as it did with a delayed firearms shipment noted by [CRS](https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R47828/R47828.11.pdf). Aid can be conditioned on results: disarmament verified, withdrawal staged, humanitarian access enforced. Muriel Asseburg of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs warned in the same [CFR roundup](https://www.cfr.org/articles/global-perspectives-on-the-hamas-attacks-on-israel) that unintended consequences of pressure measures can undermine the very counterweights to Hamas, such as the Palestinian Authority — a caution about design, not a reason to skip conditions. None of this is hostility to Israelis; hundreds of thousands of Israelis have protested their own government's conduct of the war, and antisemitism is real and intolerable wherever it appears. Questioning aid is the ordinary work of legislating, applied to Israel as to any ally — leverage, not blank checks.

## How the United States Can Help Resolve the War

The political end state has a name: Palestinians governing themselves in safety on their own land, Israel secure within recognized borders, and no armed faction able to repeat October 7. The course that produced every real breakthrough in this war was negotiated, and the United States can help resolve the war between Israel and Hamas it helped fund by holding both parties to what they have already signed.