Dr. Keith Ablow: Israel is a Surgeon. Hamas is Cancer. Only Clean Margins Will Do.

The Israel-Hamas war is best understood using the medical model.  The medical model, for those who didn’t study medicine, is the notion that particular signs and symptoms constitute a specific disease state and that treatments can be tailored to target those diseases.

Gaza has become diseased.  It’s pathology is called Hamas—a savage terrorist organization that calls for the destruction of all Jews and perpetrated horrific acts of murder on October 7, 2023.  Those murderous acts included symptoms that can only have been wrought from a psychological and geopolitical disease state, including castrating and raping male victims,  dismembering and raping female victims and raping and beheading children.  Hamas terrorists also had sex with the dead bodies of their victims.

Hamas has become a malignancy within the body politic.  It observes no boundaries.  Left to grow, it would destroy everything in its path.

Seen through the medical model, the Israeli response of invading Gaza is no different than a surgeon who seeks to remove cancer from a patient.  In this case, the patient is the world.  And Israel is, appropriately, surgically removing that cancer—with complete resolve and without joy, just as a surgeon would.  They must “get it all.”  Leaving malignant cells would be inviting a recurrence of the deadly disease.

To extend the metaphor further, Israel-the-surgeon cannot possibly hope for clean margins without some collateral damage to tissues adjacent to the cancer.  Civilian deaths are as tragic and undesirable and, sadly, inevitable as the taking of healthy tissue when removing a malignant tumor.

What comes after surgery in Gaza to remove Hamas should also conform to the medical model.  The equivalent of chemotherapy and radiation should be unleashed to find any Hamas cell or operative anywhere in the world, in order to destroy that malignant entity.

You will notice that Hamas has not surrendered.  They have not sworn off the destruction of Israel or Jews or Christians or non-extremist Muslims.  Cancer never surrenders.  It doesn’t retreat into oblivion because one metastasis or a dozen are found and destroyed.  It will grow and kill everything, eventually, if any cancerous cell is left.  That cannot be allowed to occur.  It would be international malpractice of the worst kind.


Dr. Keith Ablow