Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong’s ceasefire call means Hamas victory, says global military strategist

One of the world’s leading military strategists says the call by Western governments including Australia for a ceasefire in Gaza now is handing Hamas victory.

Overnight the international condemnation of Israel ratcheted up another notch as the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging they used starvation as a tool of warfare.

The warrants are only enforceable if the pair travel to a country where the government is willing to arrest them and hand them over to the ICC.

US President Joe Biden said the warrants were “outrageous” and the White House said they would not be enforced on American soil.

Mike Waltz, who is expected to serve as the next National Security Adviser warned the ICC to expect a “strong response to the anti-Semitic bias” after Donald Trump is inaugurated as President in January.

The only hope for improving and stopping the cycle of violence is to allow Israel to continue.

By contrast, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Australia respected the independence of the ICC in a major split with the outgoing and incoming Administrations and her statement, posted on X, made no mention of Hamas freeing the hostages they captured on October 7, 2023 which prompted Israel’s retaliation in Gaza.

John Spencer from the Modern War Institute is one of the world’s leading specialists on urban warfare.

Speaking to the Latika Takes podcast as part of his visit to Australia this week, he said that calls for a ceasefire now would solidify Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation, grip on power in Gaza for the next decades.

“If you ceasefire now, Hamas, by my definition as a strategist has achieved victory,” he said.

“They will have achieved victory in attacking Israel and surviving as an organisation with power.

“Not an ideology, it’s a different concept, it will have survived as a ruling power in Gaza and the world would have forced Israel to be okay with leaving them in power.

“Yes they all have much less power than they ever have had in the last 20 years but it still has power.”

He said the change from Joe Biden to Donald Trump would rewrite the current situation in the Middle East because Mr Trump has stated his determination to go after Iran, which funds Hamas.

“That is probably the biggest change that will change everything,” he said.

“I want to see the Palestinian people’s lives improve.

He said leaving Hamas in charge would continue their subjugation.

“The only hope for improving and stopping the cycle of violence is to allow Israel to continue,” he said.

“There’s no way to do it quickly now — methodically removing Hamas, its arms and its power in Gaza.

“The US and others to include Australia and the international community’s acceptance, appeasement, reluctance to deal with the Islamic regime in Iran is the wild card that will change everything.”

The international community has upped its calls for Israel to end its war in Gaza which began after Hamas raided Southern Israel and took hundreds of Israelis hostage and killed more than 1200 in the largest single attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust.

Australia, along with many of its partners around the world, including New Zealand, Canada and Israel’s military backer the United States, has long called for Israel to lay down its arms, amid an international outcry over the flattening of Gaza and tens of thousands Palestinians and Hamas fighters reported killed.

But last week, the Labor government split again with the United States and shifted Australia’s position to support a UN resolution recognising Palestinian sovereignty.

Spencer, a retired US Army officer who served in Iraq, has visited Gaza several times since the war began after Hamas’ attack on October 7 in 2023 and has seen first-hand the enormous tunnel network under Gaza that he said was bigger than the London tube and New York Metro systems.

“There’s 450 plus miles (724 kilometres) of tunnels in Gaza,” he said.

“The one that I was in, in December, you could drive trucks through, it was massive.

“And they found many of those to include ones that actually go underneath riverbeds.

“There’s such a variety, where they have deep buried luxury tunnels with air conditioning, ceiling fans, refrigerators, you name it.”

He declined to set a timeframe for how long the war should and would take.