Hamas is going nowhere…

[Note from BenIndy contributor Roger Straw: After the heartbreaking and unforgiveable slaughter of Israeli innocents, now there is heartbreak and unimaginable devastation in Gaza.  This Washington Post analysis is spot on….]

Analysis by Marc Champion | Bloomberg, October 13, 2023

Israel’s 24-hour notice for more than 1 million civilians to evacuate Gaza City by midnight, dubbed impossible by the United Nations, suggests a ground invasion is imminent. Why the rush?

Hamas is going nowhere. It is by now clear that the purpose of Saturday’s attack and its haul of at least 97 hostages was designed precisely to draw Israel into a massive response on Gaza’s densely populated urban battlefield. There’s time to prepare Hamas’s destruction, rather than dance to its tune. The terror group has had years to prepare its defenses, so let it wait a little longer; they won’t improve. The pressure to move in quickly is political.

The slaughter of Israeli civilians last weekend ensured that Hamas lost, as my colleague Bobby Ghosh has written, the war of images. The group has forever been consigned to the same murderous category as Islamic State. But as in all other aspects of warfare, such early losses and victories can be overturned and the risk for Israel is that its ground invasion succumbs to exactly that.

Supplies of water, power and food to the territory’s 2 million-plus inhabitants have been cut, a crime against humanity, according to Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As of Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces said it had dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza. Human Rights Watch says it has confirmed the use of white phosphorous, an imprecise weapon that can cause horrific burn injuries. Already, more than 1,500 people have been killed and over 6,000 injured in Gaza since the air strikes began, according to the local health authority. The toll from a ground invasion with the city’s population still in place would be much, much higher.

This is what Hamas wants and planned for. The consequences of Israel losing the information war would be huge, perhaps as significant as anything it can achieve on the battlefield. It would enrage popular opinion in the so-called Arab Street, pressuring otherwise friendly governments to break ties with Israel and take sides against it. It would, equally, ignite Palestinian feeling on the West Bank, Jerusalem and even within Israel, potentially opening a second, internal front. It would increase pressure, too, on Hezbollah — which objectively can’t afford a war right now — to open a third front from Lebanon. That, in turn, would increase the risk of a regional war that includes Iran, something that its foreign minister threatened on Friday, while on a tour of allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

There are no winners in this scenario, other than the Iranian regime, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (he’d enjoy the distraction of Western attention from Ukraine) and Islamist terror organizations across the Middle East. Nor can it leave other parts of the world untouched. Already, France has announced a ban on protests involving Palestinian flags, for fear they lead to pitched battles with police. In the UK, a charity said anti-Semitic incidents quadrupled in the four days after Saturday’s attack, compared with the same period a year ago.

Israel has no good choices. The border crossing from Gaza to Egypt remains closed, with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi saying Palestinians should “stay steadfast and remain on their land.” Hamas also has told Gaza City residents to stay put, fully aware that “victory’’ in this conflict depends on expanding it beyond Gaza, which in turn requires a blunt Israeli invasion to deliver large-scale civilian casualties and the images that go with them.

The cynicism of Hamas is breathtaking. These are fanatics. The Israeli government can’t afford to give its enemies what they need in order to portray it as equivalent. It will count for nothing to say an invasion’s civilian casualties are collateral damage — as opposed to the deliberate murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas — if the time and preparations needed for a credible attempt to reduce them aren’t taken.

There are no sides in this war. There is only mourning.

[Note from BenIndy contributor Roger Straw: The article by Yasmine Mohammed below is moving, sad, and most likely prophetic – a must read. As of this writing, the New York Times reports that residents in the north of Gaza are abandoning their homes and fleeing south under threat of an Israeli ground invasion. “The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said on Friday that airstrikes had killed at least 70 Palestinians and wounded 200 others who were attempting to flee northern Gaza by car on a main highway. And an ongoing siege pushed Gaza’s medical system to the brink of collapse.” The article below was distributed by a Benicia friend who is Jewish. Another friend read it and commented, “Innocent people are innocent, regardless of their nationality or religion. Terrorists and war criminals should be held accountable, regardless of what flag they commit their crimes under. I’m terrified that we are witnessing the beginning of genocide against Palestinians. I so hope that is not the case.” Do read on….]

Gaza, My Lost Home – There are no sides in this war. There is only mourning.

Tablet, by Yasmine Mohammed, October 11, 2023

My father lived his whole life with the hope that there might be a peaceful two-state solution. He spent his last years making YouTube videos on the topic and telling anyone who would listen about his family’s olive groves in Gaza. I am actually kind of relieved that he left this earth before he had to watch Hamas slaughter his dream on video, for all the world to see. Hamas has ensured that there will be no more Palestine, and no more hope for an independent state.

People send flippant messages to me asking “are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine,” as if we are all watching a football match. Are you wearing a blue jersey or red? I am wearing neither. I am in black. I am in mourning for the lost Israeli and Palestinian lives. I am in mourning for the Palestine that could have been. With a gorgeous waterfront overlooking the Mediterranean Sea that was recently made safe to swim in, with fertile soil that once sustained ancient olive groves. With land rich with resources for success.

It also had the funding. Generous governments, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals have been flooding the area with billions of dollars for decades. But instead of focusing on a potential tourist industry or building hospitals and schools and helping the Gazan people thrive on the land, the area was overrun by terrorists.

The world knows Hamas now as terrorists who have committed depraved atrocities that would even make ISIS blush. But the people of Gaza already knew them. They have been suffering in relative silence under these monsters for years. Anytime a Gazan dares to raise their voice in criticism, their throat is slit immediately, making it brutally obvious that it’s best to keep quiet. Even those who hated Hamas chanted their allegiance to them loudly, in fear of their lives and their family’s lives.

Fellow Islamic regimes like Iran and Afghanistan are reveling in the rivers of Israeli blood. They do not see Jewish people as humans. They see them as things that need to be eradicated, as per the Hadith by their Prophet Muhammad which instructs them that Muslims must kill Jews until not one Jew is standing. Even the rocks and the trees will work with the Muslims against Jews, Muhammad teaches, calling out, “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me! Come kill him!”

Even in Egypt, a supposedly more progressive Muslim majority country, a police officer took it upon himself to murder two Israeli tourists who were visiting ancient ruins in Alexandria. He killed their guide too, who was probably trying to protect them. The tourist industry has been relatively nonexistent in Egypt due first to the revolution and then the pandemic. Now the country is suffering greatly under soaring inflation that is threatening lives daily. And yet, killing Jews was more important.

I never shared my father’s optimism. I never could imagine the two states living side by side. The past 75 years have been delaying the inevitable. These two Abrahamic faiths hate each other, and the only way there could have ever been hope is if both groups progressed beyond their ancient books. But both sides did the opposite. Israel has been pulled further and further into the Orthodox right wing and Gaza has become more and more extremist, electing terrorists who follow a literal interpretation of the ancient scriptures. There could have been hope 70 years ago, when Israel was being founded by secular hippies and terrorists had not yet overrun Gaza, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time now, and the mercury has been rising for decades.

Almost all of my father’s family is scattered across the globe, like most Palestinians. There are second and third generations being born in the diaspora with no connection to the land anymore. This is not new for the Middle East: Jewish people with roots in every country from Algeria to Yemen have been all but eradicated from their homelands; Egypt has very few people remaining from the hundreds of thousands who once thrived there. Hopefully a few Gazans will remain in Gaza. Maybe someday they’ll be able to live on their homeland without fear.

I have never been to Gaza, and my children have never been to Gaza. Maybe my grandchildren might go one day and read a plaque on some ancient monument that describes how this used to be the land of a people who called themselves Palestinians. They had a rich culture. Delicious food. Beautiful, bright clothing. Now they do not have a homeland anymore because they chose violence over peace. Despite the abundance of olive branches in Gaza, they chose to extend a knife instead.

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A human rights campaigner, Yasmine Mohammed advocates for the rights of women living within Muslim majority countries, as well as those who struggle under religious fundamentalism anywhere. She is the author of Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam and the President of the nonprofit organization Free Hearts Free Minds.