Interestingly, I don't think the NYT ever mentioned Hamas' deception plan before. In the article it says "While Hamas leaders have spoken vaguely in public about how they tried to deceive Israel in the years leading to the attack, the minutes reveal the extent of that deception." The hyperlink points to an Arabic-only interview with Hamas' Khaled Meshal, saying pretty explicitly that Hamas wanted to give Israel the impression that it wanted calm and to help the people of Gaza receive aid, fuel and electricity.
What the NYT and other media don't seem to recognize is that while Hamas was deceiving Israel, it was deceiving Gazans as well.
As of October 6, 2023:
* More truckloads of aid were entering Gaza than at any time since before Hamas took over Gaza. Gaza was also exporting near-record numbers of goods to Arab and European countries.
* The GDP per capita in Gaza had, for the first time in a decade, increased two years in a row before October 7 2023.
* The unemployment rate had gone down in 2022 and was probably down in 2023 before October as well.
* In 2023, Israel allowed some 18,000 Gazans to have jobs in Israel for the first time in many years.
We've all seen the videos of how Gaza had thriving fancy restaurants, malls, high end shopping and catering halls.
Things were getting better in Gaza because there was calm. The calm did foot the Israelis - into providing more services for Gaza. The situation on October 6 proves not only that Israel never had any "genocidal" plans for Gaza, but it wanted Gaza's economy to thrive and give Gazans a reason to want to continue the calm.
Hamas used the Gazans to fool Israel. They made a conscious decision to start a war that they knew would destroy Gaza's economy, kill thousands of Palestinians, and cause far more damage than the 2009 or 2014 wars did.
This is besides building a tunnel network directly underneath civilian apartments, schools and mosques.
If Hamas hates Palestinian civilians so much, then how come most Palestinians (outside Gaza) support Hamas so enthusiastically? And the same question goes for Western supporters of Hamas - if they were really pro-Palestinian, how could they support a group that has made it blindingly clear that they look at Palestinian civilians as only valuable when they are suffering, injured or dead?
The answer to this (and, indeed, most similar questions of seeming illogical decisions by Palestinians and their supporters) is antisemitism.
As the NYT article shows, Hamas originally wanted to do much worse. They hoped for simultaneous attacks by Iran and Hezbollah, they had considered a 9/11 style attack on the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv - in short, they wanted to murder tens of thousands of Jews, not just 1,200.
People who are pro-Hamas are not pro-Palestinian in the Western sense - they share Hamas' antisemitic desire to perform a genocide of all Jews in the region.
#ICYMI: Children at Brooklyn October 7 Anniversary March: F*** Israel!; Hamas Needs to Build More Tunnels, Go into Israel and Attack Them pic.twitter.com/gbKniMmNki
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 12, 2024
To them, wanting to kill Jews is the definition of being "pro-Palestinian."
No matter the cost.
If the goal is to destroy the Jewish state and not to help Palestinians, then there is no daylight between the "pro-Palestinian" crowd and the neo-Nazis. They pretend to care about Palestinian civilians but their support for Hamas proves that they, like Hamas, only value Palestinians who can be used for propaganda purposes.
It is a cynical way to manipulate Western opinion by appealing to Western values, when in fact these people despise Western values. They only want to see dead Jews.
