The Wall Street Journal released a report today on the situation in Nuseirat, where Hamas held four Israeli hostages. It detailed discussions among Gazans on “the folly of Hamas keeping Israeli hostages above ground in a residential area near a bustling market”:

Some people said they were surprised by the revelation, because it is hard to keep a secret in the densely built neighborhood. Even a cough can be heard through the walls of the concrete and cinder-block apartment buildings, they said.

Others were furious that Hamas had put civilians in danger. Any Israeli military action in the narrow streets of Nuseirat was bound to result in large numbers of dead and wounded, some residents said.

Some locals said Hamas should have held the hostages in tunnels. Others said they should have been returned to Israel as part of a deal to end the war. The failure to secure a cease-fire despite months of negotiations is causing growing frustration in Gaza, people across the war-torn enclave say.

“Hamas should give us a map of the safe zones we can stay in, because if we knew there were hostages in the neighborhood, we would have looked for another place,” said Mustafa Muhammad, 36, who fled from Gaza City to Nuseirat early in the war with his wife and infant daughter.

The question of civilian involvement in Hamas’s war on Israel is one that experts and journalists have rightly struggled with. Many of us are predisposed to presume the innocence of those deemed to be “civilians.” But the line “Some locals said Hamas should have held the hostages in tunnels” tripped me up. Gaza’s schools, hospitals, and mosques are overrun with terrorists. Yet the problem for some civilians — at least ones interviewed by the Journal, but I’ll guess many more — is not that Hamas kept hostages but that they kept them where Israel could reach them. Even the desire expressed by some that Hamas should return hostages to Israel “as part of a deal to end the war” suggests a deeper moral rot than I want to believe possible among supposedly innocent civilians.

Some residents knew that the family holding three of the hostages was Hamas-affiliated. Some were reportedly surprised to learn that the jihadist family was close enough with terrorists to house hostages — but had no prior qualms about the family’s Hamas ties. Survival instinct is one thing; complicity is another.