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ISRAELI WAR - For decades Hamas planned this latest Gaza war. They welcomed help from Iran’s finest engineers to build an underground tunnel system of more than 350 miles with over 5,700 shafts, with some passages big enough to drive a car through, with air filtration, electricity and water systems. All within the Gaza Strip which itself is only 140 square miles. Hamas used humanitarian aid to build underground factories for assembling various types of missiles and launchers so they could kill Jews. Hamas strategically placed these military locations under schools, medical facilities, mosques and private homes, in violation of every humanitarian law. For years, Hamas smuggled weapons through the Philadelphi Corridor from Egypt and the Egyptian side of the Mediterranean Sea using tunnels as the point of entry for its logistics operations. For months, Hamas employed reconnaissance envoys (including women and children) who entered Israel at the Erez Crossing so they could obtain medical services at Israeli hospitals. Some of the Israeli drivers who unknowingly transported these envoys to Israeli medical facilities were killed on October 7th. They were part of the peace group Road to Recovery and lived on the Israeli side of the Gaza border. Hamas knew a war was imminent and that Israel would have a strong military response to the massacre of civilians and the taking of hostages. With all this forethought and planning, why didn’t Hamas also build bomb shelters for the residents of Gaza?\
The answer is simple: “Tactical Civilian Sacrifice”. For Hamas, the more civilian casualties, the better.
Most people cannot believe that even a terrorist would be okay with the deaths of the people he or she is purportedly fighting on behalf of. But Hamas is like ISIS and the Taliban. They are not fighting for their people. They are fighting for their ideology. And Hamas leaders know that public opinion will be swayed when there are civilian casualties. And these leaders are correct. The news media show outrage when Gazans are killed, even though many of these Gazans are known terrorists.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimated that in Gaza pre-October 7th, there were more than 37,000 Hamas terrorists. Because of efforts by the IDF, Israel believes that Hamas has approximately 12,000 militants left. What will Israel have to do to eliminate the balance of the Hamas fighters? This answer is also simple: Go after these militants wherever they are even if Hamas has placed these fighters in schools, hospitals, mosques, and private homes. Israel has no choice on this. It must meet the terrorists on the terrorists’ turf. And this is what Hamas wants. Hamas knows that international support for Israel might be diminished by news outlets disseminating bloody photos of war. In contrast, the IDF has a special reserve unit whose sole purpose is to treat Gazan civilians who have been caught in the cross-fire because of the Hamas strategy of “tactical civilian sacrifice”. According to Capt. (Res.) Dr. Yishai Lev, “These medical reservists are supplied with advanced equipment that enables them to function like a full-fledged civilian hospital staff and they are working with Gazan medical institutions to help develop Gazan medical infrastructure.” The Gazan civilians receive the same level of medical care as a soldier or an Israeli civilian. Very different than Hamas, who on October 7th had maps of where volunteers from Magen David Adom, Israel’s version of the Red Cross, lived. They had targeted these civilians in an effort to prevent the saving of Israeli lives during the October 7th massacre.
On a military basis, Hamas is losing its war with Israel, but it is winning the war to exploit the Gazan dead. With the strategy of “tactical civilian sacrifice”, these deaths are necessary casualties in the Hamas “playbook” and to achieve its goal of having every country operate under the domain of their fundamentalist Islamic ideology, with Israel being the first democracy it hopes to topple. Hamas is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, another known terrorist organization. And no one should believe that the United States is immune or omitted from this goal. Schools have already have been peppered with pro-Hamas teachers and administrators, mass media is being utilized to broadcast pro-Hamas stories, and public confrontations have been organized and executed by experts.
Therefore, the question becomes: How can anyone support Hamas? It’s a regime that uses its own people as human shields, intentionally creates military compounds and operations in areas that should be safe zones, and then converts the corpses of its own people into public relations successes. And that’s why there are no bomb shelters in Gaza.
(Marcia Selz, Ph.D., is the author of “At Vitoria: A City’s Medieval Promise between Christians and Sephardic Jews”, and is the founder of the Coalition of Homeowner Associations-Council District 5. For the past 20 years, Dr. Selz has been a volunteer with Israel’s Sar-El program, working on an IDF base for one-two weeks each year. Since the massacre on October 7, 2023, Dr. Selz has joined the more than 30,000 people from 70+ countries who have volunteered in Israel in various capacities. Thus far, she has spent 13 weeks in Israel volunteering with the IDF, working on a medical supply distribution base.)
