Commentary
The Israel–Hamas conflict is getting uglier, with no real end in sight.
On Dec. 6, the U.N. World Food Program said that 97 percent of households in Northern Gaza have inadequate food. In Southern Gaza, 82 percent are utilizing “extreme consumption strategies.” Hunger is starting to cause Gazans to ransack aid trucks and turn their anger at Hamas, which they accuse of stealing food aid.
Also on Dec. 6, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered the southern city of Khan Younis, after reportedly making the entire northern city of Beit Hanoun “uninhabitable.” The IDF is surrounding the underground hideout of Gaza’s top Hamas leader and threatening to flood terrorist tunnels with seawater that could make what little drinking water and agriculture there is in Gaza even worse.
As a form of psychological warfare, the IDF dropped leaflets from the sky that quote a Quranic verse, apparently meant to cause fear among Hamas fighters, but doubtless causing the same among civilians. The leaflet includes the IDF logo and a verse in Arabic, “The flood overtook them, while they persisted in wrongdoing.” It includes the word “tufan,” also used by Hamas to describe the attack on Oct. 7 as the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Al-Aqsa, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is an ancient mosque administered by an Islamic religious trust. But it was previously the site of the Jewish temples of antiquity, the first of which the Babylonians destroyed in 586 BC. An Arab administrator called the “waqf” doesn’t allow Jewish people to worship in the area, which may limit conflict but is undeniably antisemitic. The Mount is highly sacred for all three Abrahamic faiths, including Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
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Some Jewish people on Israel’s political right want to take back control of the Mount, and marched through the area on Dec. 7. They clashed with police, who arrested one protester and confiscated signs. Police have also sought to stop a leftist convention, allegedly threatening the owner of the venue with a one-month closure.
Unspeakable rapes and sexual mutilations by Hamas were a common occurrence during the Oct. 7 attacks, and are now being investigated by U.S. and Israeli authorities. At least 10 returned hostages, both men and women, reported sexual assault during their captivity. Freed hostages were often covered in lice and wounds festering from lack of care. They were reportedly drugged with a tranquilizer before their release to make them look “happy.”
Others of the 110 still held hostage were allegedly not returned because Hamas doesn’t want them to report on their presumably worse sexual assaults. Of the hostages, Israelis are reportedly singled out for abuse. The frequent rapes raise the question as to whether Hamas systematically ordered or condoned them in advance. It certainly appears so. This is driving some of the rage on the Israeli side.
On Dec. 5, video emerged of the IDF dropping a 2,000-pound smart bomb in Gaza against what appeared to be a relatively small apartment building. Targeting decisions are aided by artificial intelligence (AI) with a human making the final decision. AI targeting is reportedly carried out in a rushed atmosphere that has been called a “mass assassination factory.” AI is allowing for targeting of junior Hamas members, rather than just the senior leadership, for the first time.
According to Israeli and Palestinian authorities on Dec. 6, more than 16,000 Gazans have been killed, about 11,000 of which were civilians and 5,000 of which were Hamas terrorists. A thousand of the terrorists were killed on Oct. 7 in Israel. An IDF spokesman lauded a ratio of 2:1 civilian-to-terrorist deaths as “tremendously positive” and evidence that the IDF wasn’t targeting civilians.
However, an additional 7,600 Palestinians are missing. If they’re counted as deaths, and considering only those terrorists killed in Gaza, the ratio would be closer to 4.65:1.
Given approximately 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas fighters, this ratio would imply a total Palestinian civilian death toll at the end of the war of approximately 160,000 to eliminate 35,000 terrorists. This doesn’t include additional deaths from the replenishment of Hamas ranks, IDF casualties, and the approximately 1,200 Israeli civilian deaths on Oct. 7. The asymmetry in deaths is consistent with a long line of past conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians.
All these deaths are unacceptable and would have been avoided if Hamas and its supporters in Iran had not engaged in the kind of antisemitic violence that extends back to at least 1921. Israel’s ferocity is explained by a history of Arab and Iranian antisemitic violence, buttressed by genocidal intentions on the part of many.
Hamas has long sought the “compulsory” destruction of Israel via “Jihad.” Even its latest, more moderate charter states, “There shall be no recognition of legitimacy of the Zionist entity.” This genocidal sentiment is unfortunately not with Hamas alone, but with the broader population in the territories.
According to a survey on Nov. 14 in Gaza and the West Bank, 75 percent of respondents support the attack on Oct. 7 and 74.7 percent support a Palestine “from the river to the sea.” Just 5.4 percent support a “one-state for two peoples” solution. If representative of the population as a whole, the survey indicates that about three-quarters of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank support violent ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.
That would be genocide by the UN definition. Given its propensity to actualize this sentiment through terrorism, Hamas is an existential threat to Israel, which has a right to exist and defend itself.
The resulting elimination of Hamas members will open their positions to new recruits. These youth will be hardened by the civilian casualties they have seen and eager for the next Jihad. As the vicious cycle of war repeats, it gets uglier and uglier.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
