Ruminations: Surrender or Die

"We will continue the war until the end. It will continue until Hamas is destroyed, until victory."
"Whoever thinks we will stop is detached from reality."
"[Every member of Hamas is] marked for death."
"Surrender or die."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Trucks with humanitarian aid wait to enter the Palestinian side of Rafah on the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip on December 11, 2023. (Giuseppe Cacace/AFP)

Skilled at perpetually extracting compassion from the world community, portraying itself as the champion of Palestinian human rights, Hamas has never hesitated to sacrifice the lives of Palestinians for the greater cause of destroying Israel and accomplishing the mass murder of Jews, for their charter sets out just that very goal it is determined to bring to fruition. And while Hamas trains Palestinian children in Gaza to become the next generation of dedicated shaheeds fully incorporated into holy jihad as their purpose in life for the glory inherent in killing Jews, it portrays itself abroad as both liberator and victim.

Palestinians generally have taken great pains to persuade the outside world that they are victims of Israeli aggression, that Jews have committed the greatest of sins in 'occupying' land consecrated to Islam by reinstating their ancient ancestral lands into 20th Century Israel for all future generations of Jews to find haven from a hostile world. Jews have rediscovered anew just how hostile the world is to their presence after an all-too-brief post-Holocaust interregnum from discrimination and persecution.

Palestinian public relations campaigns have convinced the gullible West that Palestinians are invested in the concept of a state of their own alongside that of Israel, that perpetual slogan of a 'two-state' solution to the current state of simmering conflict. But it's really a one-state 'solution' that they hold dear, the prospect of which they shield from the West, but pursue by indoctrinating their young to consider Israel an interloper, illegally and immorally sitting on Palestinian geography, and it is the duty of all Palestinians to 'resist the occupation'.

Smoke trails are seen as a salvo of rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, as seen from southern Israel, December 21, 2023. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Funding terrorist attacks is a great inducement in support of appealing to Palestinians' sense of nationalism and victimhood. Fatah's campaign is more subtle but it is one of total reclamation of the land and destruction of Israel; Hamas is more upfront about its ambitions, hiding from no outside source its lethal intentions against Israel and Jews living in their ancestral homeland. The savagery of the October 7 incursion into Israel with its planned sadistic rapes, mutilations and mass murder was Hamas showing the world what it is dedicated to: pure terrorism.

And show the world it did, in evidence they produced themselves through videos proudly demonstrating their capacity to inflict pain and suffering on the innocent, from babies to the elderly and infirm, from girls and women being repeatedly raped, tortured, mutilated and finally murdered; even dead bodies of old men, of African farm workers, of women are desecrated, driven through the streets of Gaza City, eliciting great whoops of joy at the bodies of dead Israelis, whipping up enthusiasm for striking at the corpses. Incredibly, even the airing of these monstrous atrocities failed to convince the world that Israel's loss is worth mourning.

Yet now that Israel is responding, even while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue bombarding Israel with rockets, the world condemns Israel for the deaths of Palestinians. While Israel warns civilians to remove themselves from harm's way, Hamas orders its civilian population to remain in place, and will even shoot to kill those who waver and intend to move to safety. Western media hang on every statistic that the Hamas Health Ministry publishes of Palestinian death numbers attributed to Israeli bombing in Gaza. Wildly inflated numbers to elicit greater sympathy cannot be validated.

Israeli soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in this handout picture released on December 21, 2023. Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS

That bombing is strategic and meant to target Hamas infrastructure, including the vast network of tunnels it has built under the Gaza Strip's cities, towns and 'refugee camps'. The tunnels and their shafts are built into and under mosques, hospitals, UNRWA-operated schools, apartment complexes and ordinary houses. In those tunnels, weapons caches are stored, and Hamas operatives find safe haven when they shoot off rockets from depots placed in crowded civilian areas, inviting a response from the IDF. The greater the number of civilian casualties, the lustier the outcry from the press and Western governments, playing right into Hamas's schemes.

The tunnels have been useful in providing hiding places for some of the hundreds of Israeli children, elderly, women and men that the terrorist groups and ordinary Palestinian civilians have taken hostage. Each time rockets are aimed at Israel, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank cheer and applaud when they reach their goals. Support among the Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, is robust, the majority support Hamas and feel the atrocities of October 7 were justified in the name of 'freedom' for Palestinians.

Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been playing host and interveners between Israel and Hamas in negotiations for temporary ceasefires when prisoners in Israeli jails can be exchanged for hostages. It is in very fact, Hamas terrorist elites that are giving the orders and calling the shots. All of the commanders of the terrorist groups, in the wake of October 7 made themselves very scarce, going into hiding to preserve their lives, leaving their lower-order operatives to battle with the IDF under their instructions.

Their lives are expendable, those of the civilian population are ultra-disposable, while the commanders shield themselves from repercussions of their wholesale slaughter of Israelis and foreign farm workers on October 7. With pressure on Israel to be 'proportionate', and empathy for the plight of the Palestinians brought upon them by their psychopathic leadership Hamas leaders feel emboldened to dictate acceptable strategic variances from combat for access to humanitarian shipments of aid to the embattled Strip.

Armed, masked men reportedly affiliated with Hamas can be seen atop trucks carrying humanitarian aid that arrived in the Gaza Strip via Egypt's Rafah crossing, December 17, 2023. (Screenshot, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

When agreement is secured to open border crossings, another opportunity is presented to terrorist leaders to slip out of the Gaza Strip in an escape from the punishment meted out by Israel's military. At the same time, while tractor-trailers stuffed with needed food, water, medical supplies, oil and gas are brought in to relieve the crisis for civilians to endure the conflict, the trucks and their humanitarian goods are commandeered by Hamas operatives for their own use, once more depriving the civilian population of access to life-saving food and medicine.