January 13, 2025 | Washington Reporter

What does Donald Trump’s “Hell to Pay” look like?

January 13, 2025 | Washington Reporter

What does Donald Trump’s “Hell to Pay” look like?

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that if the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, including seven American citizens, are not released before his inauguration on January 20, there will be “hell to pay.” That vision of “hell” looks like Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists, as well as their enablers in Iran, the UN system, and Islamist-supporting Qatar and Turkey being held to account.

Certainly there are multiple malign actors at work such that Hamas was able to invade Israel, perpetrate a genocidal pogrom by launching air, sea, and land invasions on southern Israel, murdering over 1,200 Israelis, raping untold hundreds of women, men, elderly, and children, and stealing 256 souls as hostages into Gaza’s subterranean terror dungeons.

The manifold expansion of the list of terrorism supporters grows further when considering that these precious souls, now numbering 98, have been held for 465 days and no one has been made to pay for this horrific abuse of human beings – indeed, many have lauded the work of some of the world’s most abominable criminals.

Hell to Pay starts with the worst of the worst, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. There is no reason to hold genocidal maniacs from Hamas “accountable.” Hamas must be completely destroyed — that’s the only accountability required. Its political arm must be disbanded, denuded, defunded, and discarded. It cannot have any role whatsoever in representing the Palestinian people in the future — it should be afforded no international legitimacy.

Just as there was a deradicalization of Germany and Japan after WWII, the ideology of Hamas must be made illegal and prosecuted to the fullest extent, including incarceration, deportation, and, if appropriate, the use of the death penalty. Israel has only exercised the death penalty once, for the execution of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the Final Solution.

Deradicalization is not unknown to us here in America. When the Union won the Civil War, the ideology of slavery was excised from the American lexicon ​​— while the memory of slavery was not. We must remember evil, but it must be illegal to perpetrate it.

Israel will do the lion’s share of the military and justice portions of the Hell to Pay undertaking.

America’s portion of Hell to Pay under President Trump will come in the form of funding. Both from us to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and from the Qatar-Iran Axis to anyone in the region. Of course we will cut all funding to United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the terror-supporting UN agency that claims its job is to help Palestinians, and we will also cut all aid to all Palestinian entities, as we did in Trump 1.0. Palestinians are not partners for peace and the PA continues to reward terrorists who murder American citizens in violation of the Taylor Force Act.

Holding ourselves accountable is important as well. America, under Joe Biden, funded UNRWA to the tune of over $1 billion and refused to cut funding until it was proven, through Hamas’s own video footage, that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 massacre. Under Trump 1.0 we knew UNRWA’s true colors. Team Biden chose to ignore reality. UNRWA, in fact, is complicit in Hamas’s reign of terror in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Jordan. UN Watch, the NGO that does the best oversight of UN agencies, published an important series of documents proving UNRWA complicity with terrorists. Its most recent reportThe Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, was published in December 2024.

We know a lot more about the UN, the Middle East’s terrorist actors and funders now than we did at the end of the first Trump administration. Indeed, now we know where else we should cut funding and where we should enforce sanctions. One of the Biden administration’s final acts was an attempt to “reprogram” $95 million from the Egyptian military (which receives $5 billion a year) to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). This must be stopped immediately by President Trump and his national security team.

While Egypt probably won’t miss the $95 million (and that can be returned to the U.S. Treasury), there is no reason to reward Lebanon with any assistance. The LAF has been impotent along with its UN partners in United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in doing their jobs: curtailing the rise and expansion of Hezbollah, especially south of the Litani River. Biden’s hapless team continues to believe that there is a viable government in Beirut. There isn’t. Lebanon’s leaders just elected the head of the LAF as the new president of the country after two years without a president. Investing any money there and expecting results is a mistake. Let them prove themselves with what they have on hand and do their jobs.

America additionally contributes approximately one-third of UNIFIL’s budget to keep Hezbollah at bay. Instead, UNIFIL has allowed Hezbollah to become the most powerful Arab army in the Middle East. The combination of UNIFIL and LAF enablement of Hezbollah, along with billions of dollars in weapons transfers from Iran, were all but snuffed out by the Israeli Defense Forces beginning with Operation Beepers and continuing with the elimination of the entire leadership of Hezbollah.

The LAF and UNIFIL did not lift a finger except to protest Israeli incursions. Hell to Pay in Lebanon looks like providing no further U.S. assistance to the country or to its UN partners. It looks like continued Israeli mop up operations to eradicate Hezbollah as a threat to northern Israel.

The 119th Congress has already initiated Operation Hell to Pay by sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC). It will be signed into law shortly after January 20, and the kangaroo court that currently has charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal and could similarly charge American service members as war criminals will face repercussions for its actions — financially and personally.

The incoming Congress will save U.S. taxpayers from funding Biden’s follies in the Middle East by returning to the Treasury the planned disbursement of billions of dollars to Middle Eastern countries that are not our allies: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the Palestinians as well as all of their UN partners. Hell to Pay will look like helping to pay down our deficit.

There is more Hell to Pay, of course. For the enablers. Sanctions on the Islamo-fascists in Iran must be reinstated and enforced. When Trump left office, Iran was broke — it is time to bankrupt the mullahs again. Trump must also allow Israel to do what it needs to do regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities. That will be a costly payment to be extracted from Iran.

Hell to Pay will be extracted from the enablers of Hamas in Qatar and Turkey. Biden named Qatar a major non-NATO Ally. He relied on the Qataris to help him save face after his disastrous surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But that status can be removed. Qatar has not acquitted itself as an ally during the past 465 days, and their Hell will come in the form of a cut off in access to us in America. They aren’t suave and sophisticated. They are terror-funders who undermine American national security.

Turkey is a NATO treaty ally and it will be harder to extract fire and brimstone, but not impossible. Sanctioning President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the place to get started. He is not an ally: he has harbored terrorists from Hamas and he has called for jihad against our ally, Israel. He must be punished — and financial sanctions is a good way to start.

Finally, the international community must pay the ferryman for its slow descent into Hell. The UN system that failed to support a UN member state under attack is riddled with failed leaders, shameful behavior, and corruption scandals. America must not continue to pay one-third of the UN’s budget. There should be blanket cuts across the board that will return billions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury each year, and numerous UN entities should be permanently shut down.

We should shame the global donor community of OECD nations that has been willingly guilted into supporting UN entities because they are too lazy to investigate how their own taxpayer funds are spent and have turned a blind eye to Hamas atrocities. Universities across the U.S. will have hell to pay for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by tolerating anti-Semitism on campus. Their endowments must be taxed as a down payment of their portion of Hell to Pay. Access to federal funding must be viewed critically and not as a given for any school.

Hell to Pay will just be a down payment for America and for Israel. We will cut funding and support our ally while putting other nations and the United Nations on notice that their behavior is closely scrutinized. We pray that the threat of Hell will be enough to secure the unconditional release of all of the hostages, but we must also plan to act quickly if the threat of inferno is insufficient.

Hell to Pay will end very poorly for our enemies and the enemies of our allies.

Bonnie Glick is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She served as the Deputy Administrator and COO of USAID in the first Trump administration.

Issues:

Issues:

International Organizations Iran Iran Global Threat Network Iran-backed Terrorism Israel Israel at War Palestinian Politics

Topics:

Topics:

Iran Israel Syria Middle East Hamas Iraq Hezbollah Islam Lebanon Palestinians United Nations Afghanistan Islamism Gaza Strip Egypt Joe Biden Donald Trump Turkey Germany United States Congress Israel Defense Forces Yemen Taliban United States Department of the Treasury NATO Qatar Benjamin Netanyahu Jordan Palestinian National Authority Palestinian Islamic Jihad Beirut World War II Japan UNRWA International Criminal Court Lebanese Armed Forces United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon United States Agency for International Development Non-governmental organization Litani River American Civil War Semitism UN Watch Bonnie Glick Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Taylor Force Act Adolf Eichmann Final Solution