History Speaks
Without the tunnels Hamas would be destroyed in a couple weeks by the IDF; with no tunnels and no embedding (say they fought in uniforms, in a traditional fashion) they'd be destroyed in a literal day. Israel has F-35s, Hamas has no air force and viable anti-aircraft weapons. The embedding among civilians and tunnelling are obviously methods to facilitate guerrilla warfare, not a conspiracy to kill their own civilians. Yes, Hamas's conduct - especially the 7 October massacre, given what they must have known the likely response would be - exhibits reckless disregard for Palestinian civilian life. That is a core reason why they are being protested by Palestinian Gazans. I'm quite happy and eager to join the people of Gaza in blaming Hamas for its vile conduct. What I'm not willing to do is endorse a ridiculous conspiracy theory that their guerrilla methods are an attempt to kill as many of their civilians as possible to make Israel look bad. The effect of this is to strip away any responsibility Israel has for its highly autonomous, extraordinarily criminal targeting decisions, like the "where's daddy?" program of systematically bombing homes full of families to kill a single jr alleged Hamasnik, or its use of free-free zones where unarmed women and children can be shot at sight (neither of which have anything to do with the militarization of civilian infrastructure, which of course endangers civilians but does not appear to have anything to do with the large majority of civilian fatalities in Gaza).
Haviv Rettig Gur
You still here? Other than calling everything a "conspiracy theory," you're not making an argument. They do not occasionally say that Gazan deaths are "worth it" - they discussed explicitly how this was their great lever on Israel and how these sacrifices will deliver the victory. And then they built 500 kilometers of tunnels solely for Hamas fighters and hostages. The sheer scale of the project reveals the amount of time they expected the fighting to go on and the devastation they expected it to entail - while civilians weren't allowed into the tunnels. October 7 was meticulously engineered to ensure an Israeli invasion; the tunnels were meticulously engineered to ensure a long and bitter war. My view of them comes from two decades of actually listening to them, listening to how they deploy the Algeria example every time someone on Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya challenges them on the Gazan death toll, something they've been doing at least since 2014. This point is, in fact, what some of the marching Gazans are now yelling. Put your Arabic to good use and listen to them. This is the heart of their strategy, and it's entirely sensible and totally monstrous. It isn't about making Israel "look bad." The expectation was mass mobilization of the Muslim world - Sinwar was bitterly disappointed with Hezbollah's hesitation and the revelation of Iran's relative weakness. They also hoped the West would come crashing down on Israel's head and put in place propaganda bodies to try to achieve that outcome, a great deal of it coordinated with Al Jazeera. So calling this point a "conspiracy theory" is willful blindness. Or just propaganda. Every data point we have confirms that this was their strategy; they literally had no other war-fighting theory or strategy. But please, tell me more about how Hamas cares deeply about Gazan civilians.