Hamas wanted exactly what is happening now: thousands of civilians are dying in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s reputation in the world is damaged, and the terrorists’ allies in Tehran and Moscow are happy. It is wrong to follow Hamas’ script.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and ruthlessly and cruelly killed hundreds of civilians, it seemed as if the murderers were primarily interested in bloodlust. The terrorists not only killed, they took time to torture and rape. Not only did they kidnap 247 people, they even took corpses to the Gaza Strip to parade them there. Their mission was: “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.” This is what it says in a notebook that was found near a dead Hamas terrorist in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Since then, it has often been said that no state can accept such an attack without reacting massively. That was and is correct. Another sentence that was also occasionally uttered after October 7th is equally correct: Israel has fallen into the trap of Hamas.
Virtually everything that has happened in the Gaza Strip since October 7th has been according to Hamas’ script. Shortly after the attack, a senior Hamas official told a Russian broadcaster: “Israelis are known for loving life.” He saw that as a weakness. “We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We see our dead as martyrs.” Because even if this is often forgotten: Hamas wants to destroy Israel. It has this in common with the Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. “We are determined to fight Israel until it disappears from the map,” announced its leader Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday.
The war has been going well for Hamas so far
Hamas didn’t just accept the Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip – its goal was for as many Palestinian civilians to die as possible. Was Israel’s military response therefore a mistake? No. It was a mistake that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the goal of the war to be “total victory” without explaining what that meant. That it was never clear when and how the war would end.
Netanyahu speaks of the need to destroy Hamas, demilitarize the Gaza Strip and “de-radicalize” Palestinian society as a whole. But how is this supposed to work, when will this be achieved? Hamas is a terrorist organization that thrives on hatred, on hatred of Israel – among the Palestinians, but also in the Arab and Muslim world and beyond. The more hate, the better for Hamas.
Seen this way, the war has been quite successful for Hamas so far. Perversely, the October 7 terrorist attack did not damage Hamas’s image, but rather undermined Israel’s reputation. The country must defend itself against accusations of carrying out genocide in the Gaza Strip before the International Criminal Court. Hardly anyone talks about the fact that rockets are still being fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip. Much less than in December or even October. But in the last seven days alone I had to Almost 80 rocket alarms in Israel to be triggered. Hamas, which started this war, is doing everything it can to keep it going.
No plans for after that
For Russia, the advantage of the war in Gaza is that Ukraine now has to share global attention, as well as the support of the USA. In any case, Hamas’ allies in Moscow and Tehran are happy when Israel is pilloried as part of the “collective West”, something that confused leftists in Western democracies do so diligently that in the USA it even increases the re-election chances of US President Joe Biden are impaired. With its murders, Hamas has also managed to stop the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, at least for the time being, which in turn pleases Russia and Iran. And Israel? Even if it were to destroy Hamas, it could end up weaker than before.
(Photo: ntv.de)
The war against Hamas is already the longest in Israeli history and one of the bloodiest for the Palestinian civilian population. Israel not only has no realistic strategic goals and no exit scenario, it also has no implementable plans for the period afterwards. If Israel is forced to remain in the Gaza Strip for the long term due to a lack of alternatives, it would be another victory for Hamas, since in the sick logic of Islamist terrorism, death and oppression are desirable – the more dead, the more massive the oppression, the stronger it becomes international pressure on Israel until, as Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran hope, the country will one day be completely isolated.
Netanyahu knows all this, of course, but he doesn’t care. There are currently well over a million Palestinians in Rafah, most of whom fled there because Israel told them they would be safe there. They cannot return to the destroyed north of the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu wants to send the army to Rafah once the civilians have reached safety there. Israel has designated a humanitarian zone for this purpose calculation According to the newspaper Haaretz, it is as big as Tel Aviv airport and where tens of thousands of people are already staying. The humanitarian catastrophe threatens to get even worse.
Israel needs a way out of this war – for the Palestinians, but also for itself. This is not easy and not a given, because the threat from Hamas and the other Palestinian terrorist groups continues, and alternatives to war will not be easy to find. There will also be no peace just because the war stops. But the past few months have shown that following terrorists’ script is a bad idea.