Hamas is guilty of genocide - against Palestinians

 Hamas is Perpetrating Genocide Against—Gazans

 There is no shortage of people claiming that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. That the allegation is not merely false but ludicrous has been established by, among others, military expert John Spencer, seven experts on genocide, and friend of the blog Andrew Pessin. An essential component of “genocide” is intent, and that, as Spencer puts it, “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war,” is simply indisputable. These measures include the massive aid Israel facilitates to Gaza, the building of field hospitals, the existence of military units to minimize civilian damage, and the millions of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians, not to mention all the explicit statements made by Israeli political and military leaders that their war is with Hamas—and that the war ends immediately when Hamas surrenders and returns the hostages.

 In fact, as Pessin has noted, the only genocidal party to the conflict is Hamas, against the Jews:

Hamas, the [direct] descendant of the same Muslim Brotherhood that contributed to the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews, the organization whose charter openly endorses the genocide of all Jews, who attempted an act of genocide on October 7, and who has openly and repeatedly declared its intentions to “repeat October 7” as many times as is necessary to remove the Jews. 

But what hasn’t been appreciated is that Hamas is also guilty of genocide—against Gazans. They are in fact engaging in the genocide of their own people.

One of the definitions of genocide under the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." And this is exactly what Hamas has been doing to the Gazan civilian population.

Hamas initiated the war with its barbaric massacre on October 7, a massive escalation that they knew would bring a similarly massive Israeli military response. They know that they are the target of Israeli airstrikes whenever hostilities break out. Yet for nearly two decades, they have not built a single bomb shelter for the people, even as they dug hundreds of miles of tunnels and bunkers for themselves. They knew that Israel would attempt to kill them and then deliberately created an infrastructure where the civilians of Gaza would literally be in the way. For two decades they had every opportunity to move their military facilities away from the people. But they didn't. As a matter of deliberate strategy.

In 2014, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, admitted that sometimes Hamas fired rockets from residential areas, although he claimed they were "mistakes." Yet the evidence that Hamas fires from houses, mosques, schools, and “safe” humanitarian areas, and does on a regular basis, and has done so for years, is overwhelming. Just this week they released a video of themselves, in civilian clothes, firing two rockets from inside a tent in a humanitarian area. They do this knowing Israel will quite legitimately strike back—which means they are calculating actions that will bring about the physical destruction of Gaza, its civilians, in whole or in part. 

They expect huge amounts of damage and death of civilians. They create the circumstances for it to happen. And they do so deliberately, in full knowledge of the consequences.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t merely fire from civilian buildings that should be “protected” by international humanitarian law but have fully militarized them, using hospitals, houses, mosques, and schools as command centers, to house their servers and fighters, to store weapons, to hide hostages in, and so forth, thus converting them into legitimate military targets. They have built those hundreds of miles of military tunnels under literally every building, booby-trapping buildings, making nearly every building a legitimate military target. Those booby-traps, and the extensive use of IEDs, have caused the deaths of numerous IDF soldiers in recent months; but unreported is how many ordinary Gazans may have been killed by Hamas simply trying to enter their booby-trapped homes or on the way.

They have turned all of Gaza into a life-threatening, legitimate military target.

And yet there’s more.

Numerous reports confirm Hamas’s efforts to prevent civilians from moving out of harm’s way, by blocking or blowing up roads or again by shooting them. Numerous reports also confirm that Hamas regularly steals the humanitarian aid that Israel helps deliver, often shooting Gazans who try to access the aid (or otherwise resist their rule). They have repeatedly attacked the very crossings that deliver the aid, shutting them down for days until Israel takes it upon itself to repair them and resume deliveries. In just one incident in May, 2024, Hamas killed four IDF soldiers in an attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing, shutting down one of the largest aid-crossing sites. Just reflect on the absurdity of this situation: Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, kill Israeli soldiers to stop the delivery of aid to Gazan civilians, while Israel sacrifices its soldiers to continue the delivery of aid, to Gazan civilians—and yet Israel is charged with “genocide”!

Not only do they deliberately use civilians as human shields across the entire Gaza Strip, in other words, they murder them to prevent them from escaping the danger and undertake extensive actions to deprive them of humanitarian aid—to starve them, in effect, while turning their abodes and places of refuge into legitimate military targets and thus sites to be destroyed.

All of the above occurs, undeniably, deliberately, with the intent essential for “genocide”: Hamas repeatedly undertakes actions that either directly cause, or whose clearly foreseeable consequences are, conditions bringing about the physical destruction, in part or in whole, of the Gazan civilian population. Murdering people attempting to get to safety, and starving them by stealing their aid, are as direct as can be, while initiating the war in the first place with that barbaric massacre, after having turned the entire Strip into a military site, is only slightly less so.

Penultimately, consider this: During the past ten months, when Hamas and the world have been decrying the destruction of Gaza and (falsely) alleging Israeli genocide, it has been within Hamas’s power to end it all instantly by surrendering and returning the hostages. As simple as that, they could stop the destruction, and have had the power to stop it every day for ten months—and chosen not to exercise it. This is a deliberate choice to sacrifice the blood and treasure of Gazans to pursue their nihilistic aims. 

And finally, their own statements prove that they want to see the deaths of their own people.

In just one of many similar statements by various Hamas leaders, late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in October, "I have said this before, and I say it time again: The blood of the women, children, and elderly…...We are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge, and [pushes us] to move forward."

Hamas is perpetrating genocide—against its own people.

(Originally this was a different article, but Andrew Pessin had reworked an earlier version, and then there was an editing catastrophe, so this is a combination of mine and Andrew's writings.)