Haviv Rettig Gur
This is wisdom. War is actually hell, unspeakable hell. And Hamas hungers for it and built Gaza for it for 17 years. The vast tunnel system under Gaza’s cities is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. Hamas bent Gaza’s entire economy to its construction. And the tunnels’ sole purpose is to force this level of destruction if an enemy ever comes for Hamas. This is why no civilian has been allowed to step foot in any tunnel in ten months of war. Hamas’s basic strategy is the mass destruction of Gaza’s population and infrastructure as a means of inflicting costs on Israel. You don’t have to love Israel. You can hate us with a passion. I honestly don’t give a shit. But it’s a simple, horrifying fact that Sinwar’s current strategic predicament isn’t Gaza’s devastation but the fact that Gaza isn’t devastated enough for his purposes. If the death toll was ten times bigger, he believes, then he’d have won already. He’s talked this way for years. Haniyeh too. Y’all just weren’t listening. Gaza’s purposeful destruction as catalyst for Israel’s destruction: That’s the Hamas strategy. And it will fail. And Hamas will never stop trying again and again, because it has no other message, no other strategy, and though it doesn’t say it aloud, because it has sunk too many lives and too much suffering into this bloody path to ever be able to contemplate that this could all have been for nothing. It doesn’t matter if you like us or not. If Hamas is still in charge in Gaza after all this, Gaza will never be rebuilt, will never stop suffering. That, too, is a simple fact. So irrespective of what you think of Israel, if you don’t hate Hamas, you don’t understand the first thing about what just happened to Gaza.
Andrew Fox
Today’s Hamas social media line-to-take is the first photo. I’ve seen it twice already. They appear to be trying to spin the damage to Gaza as something unusual or especially vindictive on the part of Israel. The second and third photos are Mosul. We did that. (Including 2000lb bombs, btw - and up to 26,000 civilian fatalities in that campaign overall. No silly shrieking about genocide in Mosul, though. Odd, that.) In Mosul we were fighting ISIS. Hamas and ISIS are different, but in terms of animalistic, inhuman behaviour (against Israelis AND their own people) they are entirely comparable. Israel’s war against Hamas is every bit as valid and necessary as our war against ISIS. All three photos are what block-to-block, building-to-building urban warfare looks like. The only difference in the Gaza pic is that Hamas wanted this to happen. They deliberately used almost every building to fight from, to dig tunnel shafts from, to launch rockets from and to cache weapons in. Don’t be sucked in by Hamas propaganda. Gaza is just a terrible urban war with all the usual human suffering that comes with it. It’s what happens when Jihadist psychopaths like Hamas and ISIS start these wars. Nothing more. h/t @havivrettiggur for the inspiration for this post.
