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.)
Friday, August 16, 2024
Elder of Ziyon%20Mahmoud%20Abbas%20Speech%20-%20Palestinian%20President%20Abbas%20Address%20Turki_%20-%20www.youtube.com.png)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
