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Hamas has done everything it can to maximize harm to the Palestinians in Gaza. Its attack on October 7, when 6,000 Hamas members smashed into Israel and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder Israelis, led ineluctably, as the terror group knew it would, to a ferocious counterattack by the IDF that would lead to many civilian casualties and the destruction of much of the infrastructure in Gaza. Hamas has always embedded its fighters, weapons, and rocket launchers in civilian areas and buildings — including schools, hospitals, mosques, and apartment buildings — in order to maximize civilian casualties from every IDF attack. For Hamas, these casualties are a good thing, for they can be used to score propaganda points against the hated Israelis, who are now being accused, preposterously, by every antisemite from Roger Waters to Francesca Albanese, of “genocide.” Given this cynical and cruel use of Gazan civilians, why do so many of the Gazans continue to support Hamas?
Elder of Ziyon discusses this phenomenon here: “How can you explain Palestinians supporting Hamas when Hamas hates Palestinian civilians?,” Elder of Ziyon, October 13, 2024:
Although we knew this, the New York Times reviewed some internal Hamas meeting minutes, and among the discoveries was that Hamas deceived Israel into thinking it wanted calm. It didn’t get involved in the mini-war with Islamic Jihad in 2022, for example.
When the IDF had a minor flare-up with the terrorists of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in 2022, Hamas did not join in to help the PIJ. It had already been planning its attack on Israel for more than a year, and wanted to lull Israel into thinking that it now wanted calm, and had no plans to make war on Israel — which on October 7 was revealed, in horrific fashion, not to be the case.
Interestingly, I [Elder of Ziyon] 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.
The New York Times has for the first time reported on Hamas’ deliberate deception of Israel in the two years before the October 7 attack.
What the NYT and other media don’t seem to recognize is that while Hamas was deceiving Israel, it was deceiving Gazans as well.
Just prior to October 7, the standard of living in Gaza was steadily improving, and ordinary Gazans had no idea that that welcome progress would be brought to a sudden halt, and reversed, by Hamas’ attack on that day.
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.
In 2023, the economy in Gaza was going well right up to October 6: more aid was entering Gaza in 2023 than in any previous year, and Gaza was exporting a near record number of goods to Arab and European countries in that year; in 2023 the GDP per capita in Gaza had increased for the second year running; the unemployment rate had gone down both in 2022 and in 2023, right up to October 6; furthermore, to help the Gazan economy, Israel had allowed 18,000 Palestinians from the Strip to be given employment in the Jewish state, receiving wages that were from three to four times what they would earn in Gaza itself. Gaza, in short, was doing well — but that would come to an immediate halt when Hamas smashed into Israel on October 7.
We’ve all seen the videos of how Gaza had thriving fancy restaurants, malls, high end shopping and catering halls….
Most Americans, alas, have not seen those videos of upscale restaurants and shopping malls bursting with goods in Gaza, but they occasionally have been caught on camera by foreign journalists who then managed to avoid having their film taken away by Hamas.
Hamas was determined to take Israel by surprise on October 7. The terror group deliberately allowed a lengthy period of calm and economic improvement, including having 18,000 Gazans take up Israel’s offer of well-paid employment. Israelis, being rational, assumed that Hamas had chosen, at least for now, to concentrate on winning popular support by improving the lot of ordinary Gazans. The Israelis did not grasp the depth of Hamas’ fanaticism: it was prepared to endanger the lives, and end the economic wellbeing, of Gazans, in order to harm the Jewish state and kill as many Jews as possible.
By building its terror tunnels so that fighters and weapons could be hidden, and also moved about undetected through the extensive tunnel network, underneath apartments, mosques, and schools, Hamas made life for civilians living above those tunnels even more dangerous, as the IDF would certainly try to destroy that tunnel network.
Palestinians outside Gaza — who haven’t themselves had to endure its despotic and murderous ways — are impressed with Hamas’ ability to inflict real harm on the Jewish state, its managing to kill 1,200 Israelis on October 7, its continuing ability to launch rockets at Israel, if at a much-diminished rate, and the fact that after a year of fighting Hamas is still standing, and its fighters are attempting to regroup in northern Gaza. They don’t grasp how the terror group’s entire strategy depends on maximizing the number of dead and wounded civilians in Gaza, in order to increase pressure from abroad, especially from the United States and the UN, to force the IDF to call a halt — a “ceasefire”— to its campaign in Gaza before its goal of completely dismantling Hamas as a military force has been attained.
Elder of Ziyon claims that antisemitism is such a powerful force that it overwhelms any resentment Gazans might feel toward Hamas for endangering their lives and wellbeing. No matter how clear it becomes that Hamas has a vested interest in more civilian casualties, hatred of the Jews will outweigh any desire among Gazans to punish Hamas for the misery it has caused them. Yes, as bad as the October 7 attack was, Hamas had been planning something much worse — something on the scale, and of the same type, as the 9/11/2001 attack by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It had planned to blow up the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv.
Those who support Hamas do so not because they care deeply about the Palestinians in Gaza, but because they are antisemites. Someone who was truly “pro-Palestinian” would want to remove the Hamas despots who have their foot on the neck of Gazan civilians. It is Hamas that has imprisoned or, more often, murdered its political opponents, as it did to hundreds of Fatah members in 2007. And just three leaders of Hamas — the late Ismail Haniyeh, Moussa abu Marzouk, and Khaled Meshaal — stole a total of $11 billion from the aid money that was meant for all the people of Gaza. It was those leaders, sitting in their luxurious hotel suites in Doha, far from the fighting in Gaza, who were content to see the number of Gazan deaths rise and rise, grist for the mill of the Hamas propagandists.
Hamas has no current interest in making life better for the Palestinians in Gaza. In attacking Israelis on October 7, Hamas destroyed the economic wellbeing of Gazans that had been steadily improving by every measure — in GDP, employment, and donor aid. Many thousands of civilians have died, despite Israel’s elaborate system of warning them away from areas about to be targeted, because Hamas chooses to hide its fighters and weapons among them. To be pro-Hamas at this point is to wish both for the genocide of the Jews and for the continued immiseration of the Gazan civilians.