OPINION:
Today marks three years since Hamas launched a brutal attack on its neighbor, killing approximately 1,200 innocents. More than 8,700 were injured, and more than 251 were taken into the bowels of the Gaza Strip as hostages.
Since that time, Israel has been castigated for doing the absolute bare minimum to defend and protect itself.
In September, Vice President J.D. Vance remarked, in a comparison to NATO and the U.S. on foreign policy, that the U.S. “cannot let our Middle East foreign policy be subservient to the state of Israel.” The comparison was odd, as Israel is not a NATO member and the U.S. has no mutual defense treaty with the nation.
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Mr. Vance has this inverted. The entire reason the Oct. 7 attacks happened — aside from Hamas’ brutal nature — is that Israel believed in the fantasy of the containment trap.
From 2007 until Oct. 6, 2023, Israeli strategy toward Hamas was explicitly built on containment and deterrence rather than confrontation, documented at length by numerous Israeli security analysts.
It was easier for Europe and the West to believe that Hamas was contained and would not execute such an op. Consecutive governments watched Hezbollah’s rocket stockpile grow from 20,000 to more than 150,000 and watched Hamas consolidate military capability under this same “mowing the lawn” approach.
The situation unfolded, and the response was prolonged because Israel was constrained by world public opinion. No one would question the U.S. response to terrorists if we lost the equivalent of 40,000 people in one day — Israel’s population is 9.7 million, making its Oct. 7 loss the U.S. equivalent of about 40,000 dead in a single day — but Israel is attacked at every turn.
Israel is the only nation expected to telegraph its every move and provide healthcare to the terrorist masterminds plotting to murder its citizens.
At least 25 Hamas terrorists were treated in Israeli hospitals in the months after Oct. 7, some alongside wounded Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Yahya Sinwar, most famously, was treated in an Israeli prison hospital for a brain tumor while serving multiple life sentences, years before masterminding the attacks.
Data from the United Nations Office for Project Services shows that 88% of aid trucks entering Gaza from May 2025 to August 2025 were intercepted and looted — by armed actors or civilians, the agency noted — before reaching their destinations. No other country has given more to Gaza. Nearly 100,000 trucks delivering almost 2 million tons of aid have entered the territory.
The Pallywood narrative of a “genocide” in Gaza is nonsense. There is no genocide or attempted genocide in Gaza, but there was an attempted genocide on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to which Israel justifiably responded.
Hamas is the entity using civilians as shields by burying munitions depots in residential areas, under hospitals, inside schools and under classrooms. It has run the government of Gaza since seizing full control in 2007, after its 2006 election victory. It operates the Gaza Health Ministry, which uses grossly exaggerated, thoroughly debunked casualty numbers to engender international sympathy. The “ministry” accidentally told on itself by revealing that the majority of its casualties since Oct. 7 are military-age males.
Gaza’s population growth rate has historically ranked among the highest in the world — belying claims that Israel’s campaign amounts to genocide. It has one of the lowest rates of child malnutrition in the entire Middle East, according to UNICEF’s Gaza Nutrition SMART Survey, released in August, which covered approximately 83% of the territory’s accessible population.
Israel risks higher casualty rates for its troops by choosing dangerous urban combat to minimize civilian deaths. Meanwhile, Israeli troops are picked off by snipers because if they defend themselves any more aggressively, they are lambasted more harshly than the terrorists who started it and continue it all to this day.
John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, detailed the degree to which Israel took precautions: evacuation warnings, roof-knocking, phone alerts — things that even the U.S. did not use in Iraq and Afghanistan — and how numerous missions were aborted specifically to avoid civilian harm.
All the while, critics parrot the fabricated and routinely debunked Hamas narrative of astronomical civilian casualties, many caused by its own inept, murderous hand.
Israel is a country forced to ask permission from the United States before it can share its innovations, such as David’s Sling, with countries like Finland. Israel is required to purchase U.S. weaponry and is required to give the U.S. ownership of its intellectual property when it scales up its technology with the U.S.
The Trophy APS now protects our Abrams tanks and puts tank warfare back on the menu. The Spike NLOS missile system gives our Apaches the ultra-long-range precision-strike capability we lacked with previous helicopter armaments. The ITAR-controlled partnership has not only upgraded our weapons capabilities but also provided thousands of jobs in the United States. Anti-Israel activists would be shocked to learn that we have dozens of foreign military financing agreements with other countries.
The idea that Israel runs U.S. policy is absurd.
The false narratives fueling this are the new Black Lives Matter.
Considering the truth, America should back off from its ally and stop taking a knee for Islamists.
• Dana Loesch is the host of the No. 1 nationally syndicated weekday talk radio program, “The Dana Show,” a bestselling author and a Second Amendment advocate. She lives in Dallas.
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