BY JOHN FREDERICKS

JERUSALEM—After spending five days touring Israel with my wife Anne, our company CEO, and about 40 media colleagues on a fact-finding mission hosted by NewsMax founder and CEO Chris Ruddy, we reached four major conclusions:

1. The legacy media in the United States is providing incomplete coverage of Israel and Gaza that significantly misrepresents the situation on the ground. They are lying to us on an unprecedented scale.

2. Current Israeli policy in Gaza faces challenges that require strategic reassessment and decisive action. Detractors of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu are akin to the U.S. Republican Party pre-Trump: managed decline to eventual oblivion.

3. Questions have been raised about UN operations in the region—many IDF soldiers and officers we spoke with expressed concerns that some UNRWA employees may have connections to Hamas and were involved in the October 7 attack. Some IDF personnel also believe UNIFIL in Lebanon has not adequately prevented Hezbollah from building tunnels near the Lebanon border into Israel. Drug trafficking is also a concern.

4. There is zero chance for a two-state solution post October 7 massacre.

I will be sharing detailed insights from our trip over the coming weeks on my radio-TV show, social media videos, and this platform.

For now, I want to share an outstanding piece written by Brice Couturier, a distinguished French journalist who is not Jewish.

By Brice Couturier

Israel cannot win this war because it was not designed to be won.

Not because it is militarily outmatched, but because it is caught in an equation deliberately made insoluble. On October 7th, by massacring civilians and abducting hundreds of hostages, Hamas triggered a war with no bearable outcome. Israel was not only surprised. It was trapped.

It is important to understand: Hamas is not seeking victory; it seeks the destruction of Israel. They do not care if Gaza burns, as long as Israel bleeds. This is an eschatological strategy: lose everything, as long as the other falls with you. And their strategy relies on entanglement, on emotion, on manipulating Western consciences. Their strength is not military, it is dramaturgical. And perhaps the most chilling thing is this: they have understood the West better than many Israeli strategists. Their real front is Western public opinion, not the IDF.

By taking hostages, they forbid peace. By hiding among civilians in the most densely populated territory in the world, they forbid war. Hamas has invented a geometry of the trap: Israel is locked in a war where every victory is a loss. In this asymmetrical, post-modern war, it is not reality that counts—it is the image of reality.

This trap could not work without the involuntary cooperation of Western democracies. By reversing the pressure—not on the hostage-takers, but on those trying to rescue them—they legitimize blackmail. By recognizing a Palestinian state unconditionally, they turn a terrorist strategy into political capital.

Let’s be clear: a ceasefire accompanied by the release of all hostages is a mirage—an illusion of Western projection. Hamas especially does not want an end: it wants the conflict to fester, for the hostages to rot underground, for the agony to last. The hostages are trophies, levers, spotlights trained on Gaza to keep the war going. They will not all be returned: that is precisely why they were taken.

So only a terrible alternative remains:

Either Israel persists—perhaps for years—occupies Gaza down to the last tunnel, at the cost of countless deaths, diplomatic disaster, and with no certainty of success.

Or it withdraws, quietly accepting that another October 7th is already in gestation.

It is no longer about winning, but about choosing the form of one’s defeat (or of a half-victory, say the optimists). Some claim, in Clausewitzian logic, that a war once begun must be carried through to the end, otherwise it will return—worse. Others believe that an incomplete victory is better than a total disaster.

I repeat: the most tragic part is that Hamas’s strategy has worked. And it works because we let it work. Hamas has understood: in a world governed by images, terrorism pays—provided it is well staged.