Ed wrote a post earlier today about Hamas’ latest attempt to pressure Israel into ending the war using videos of hostages taken on 10/7 as bargaining chips. The NY Times has an analysis piece which points out that, despite devastating losses, Hamas is still convinced it will be rescued from defeat by international pressure on Israel.
Israel has killed thousands of Hamas’s fighters, taken out most of its senior military command and destroyed much of its arsenal and underground tunnel network…
And yet Hamas has refused to surrender. The group wants to secure its future in Gaza, but its unwillingness to give up to Israel and disarm is also rooted in its ideology.
Talk about stating the obvious. All of Hamas actions are driven by ideology and what that ideology is routinely gets skipped over by western news outlets. They are religious cultists with a political goal. As such they are willing to tolerate any amount of death among themselves and the civilian population to survive.
“Surrender, as Israel and America are calling for it, is not in Hamas’s dictionary,” said Khaled al-Hroub, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar who has written books about the group.
Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, said recently that if he cannot get what he described as an honorable deal to end the war with Israel, then the conflict would become a war of liberation or the group would face “martyrdom,” according to a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official familiar with Mr. al-Haddad’s thinking.
What Hamas considers to be an “honorable deal” is an agreement that could lead to the end of the war and enable the group to continue wielding power in Gaza.
And so the war grinds on. Even some people in Gaza now understand that they are no less hostages of Hamas than he Israelis captured two years ago.
Mr. Shehab, the displaced man in Gaza City, said, would be the least Hamas could do to take responsibility for “the catastrophic error” of the October 2023 attack — one that “caused plunder greater than the Nakba of 1948,” the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians after Israel’s founding.
But he had little hope Hamas would agree to step aside. “We’re trapped,” he said. “Honestly, the only real difference between Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages is we’re above ground and they’re below.”
This is the truth of the situation and it has been from the start. Hamas’ only real weapon in this war is the civilian death toll. The higher that number goes, the better off they are and the more likely they are to survive. Survive to do what? To rebuild and prepare for the next terrorist attack on Israel as one commenter points out.
Everything you need to know about what is going on in Gaza comes down to this: (1) Hamas’s charter states that Hamas exists for one purpose: absolute and uncompromising destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state; and (2) The intentional involuntary martyrdom of Gaza’s civilian population in furtherance of that goal is a weapon that Hamas will not relinquish.
So long as Israel’s only choice is to fight the war now or to fight it later, i.e. the only outcome if Hamas survives, it might as well keep fighting now.
It’s about time the world started assigning blame where it belongs for this humanitarian nightmare. Israel has as much right to demand Hamas’s surrender as the allies in WWII had the right to demand unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan.
The bottom line: Hamas delenda est.
The world needs to stop focusing so much on Israel and stop giving Hamas a free pass! Hamas has no right to expect or demand or negotiate anything at this point. They are a sick, barbaric terrorist organization with genocidal fantasies. They started this war. They are the aggressors. They were the ones who murdered thousands of Israelis and maximized civilian casualties in Gaza. They have now completely and utterly lost. The only thing they are doing is prolonging the misery, death and destruction in Gaza and destroying any chances for long term peace.
The only thing left for Hamas to do at this point, is to release the hostages and surrender.
That’s the only way this war ends.
It should be the only way but leftists around the world are doing their best to keep Hamas in power by placing all the blame on Israel.
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