It's appropriate to compare this to WW2 ---
though on a much smaller scale, the solution is essentially the same.
Hamas is not comparable to Germany or Japan in WWII. They are not a national government with a world class military machine that poses a serious threat to large numbers of countries surrounding them.
As a threat to Israel Hamas is as much needing to be totally destroyed as the German and Japanese regimes needed to be destroyed in order to remove them as a future threat. The point that Hamas is focused on destroying only Israel (and not the other surrounding countries) confirms the need for it to be destroyed by Israel, and to downplay Hamas as a threat is to suggest that destroying Israel is OK, maybe desirable.
Rather, Hamas is a radical terrorist organization that Israel allowed to take over the administration of Gaza and grow in power, because that divided and weakened the Palestinian resistance to Israel's gradual colonization of the West Bank.
You can make similar speculations about any aggressor which came to power and threatened others, saying the ones attacked were to blame by letting that aggressor come to power in the first place. You could blame the other European countries for having created Germany originally, etc. There's no end to theories how a bad guy came to take power and later victimized someone who is really to blame because of earlier mistakes, or even that they conspired to create this bad guy for some sinister reason.
No matter what may have caused the bad guy earlier, this real threat still has to be eliminated now, without excusing it or permitting it to go forward with its aggressive plans. Its guilt now for its crimes is not excused by theorizing that its victims today made some mistake decades or centuries ago which are the real cause. What the bad guy is doing wrong today is just as bad and needing to be corrected regardless what sequence of psychological factors may have contributed to the bad guy's resulting later aggressions.
Subjective speculations about "resistance to Israel's gradual colonization" are no more legitimate than any other speculations by stalwart propagandists trying to promote an ideology about how things ought to be, this more perfect world vs. that, this crusader's vision vs. that crusader's worldview about who owns what territory, or which side God is on, or who the true aggressor is, etc.
All we really know is that Hamas launched an attack on Oct. 7 -- no other blame or guilt can be objectively established which everyone agrees on.
Hamas did not pose a serious threat of conquering and occupying Israel, tiny as that country is.
Just because the scale is smaller does not reduce the threat to those attacked or the needed retaliation. Hamas has no entitlement to make any demands. To eliminate the future threat requires unconditional surrender by Hamas, with no cease-fire until that happens, just as this was required at the end of WW2. The difference in scale does not change the fact that the solution to the problem is total destruction of the aggressor.
The best they could do was mount a sneak attack that would have failed, if the Israeli government had been vigilant and prepared for it.
You could speculate likewise that the U.S. and Europeans made similar mistakes before WW2. Maybe -- more speculation which there will never be total agreement about. But even so, the solution now -- as in WW2 -- is total elimination of the aggressor regime, Hamas, total surrender by all those who participated in the invasion. And then doing what is necessary to be more vigilant and prepared in the future.
Their strategy was to capture hostages and use them to gain concessions from Israel. That's the kind of thing terrorists do.
And the kind of thing to stop it is to crush all of them, make them surrender without conditions, eliminate any chance of those persons repeating it in the future. That's the kind of thing which has stopped them in the past. Of course in cases where the "terrorists" really are the good guys, then the ruling power elite are the ones who have to be crushed if it's practically possible (or weakened, or thwarted/undermined as much as possible).
Taking hostages was not the goal of Japan or Germany in WWII.
Nor was it the goal of Hamas. It was a strategy (means to the goal) which posed the same kind of threat to Israel (on a smaller scale) as the threat from Germany and Japan in WW2. And unconditional surrender of the aggressors is the solution in both cases.
Those countries were out to invade and occupy other countries in their region.
Essentially the same kind of aggression in both cases, despite the difference of scale.
