War in the Middle East: Sacrificial terror instead of the fight for freedom – the perfidious tricks of Hamas

Jabalia was once a small town in the north of the Gaza Strip. It is now considered a refugee camp in which between 50,000 and 100,000 people live on 1.5 square kilometers. It is the largest of eight refuges of its kind in the Gaza Strip – and has repeatedly been the target of attacks by the Israeli army over the years. In the most recent one, countless residents died. The ruling Hamas speaks of almost 50 deaths. However, their information is not always credible.

Hamas accepts mass deaths of innocents

In addition to Hamas fighters, the victims also included a terrorist leader, Ibrahim Biari. He is said to have played a key role in the October 7th massacre in Israel. Of course, civilians also died in the major Israeli attack. It is part of the perfidious tactics of the Islamists ruling in the Gaza Strip to accept the mass deaths of innocent people. Because the resulting hatred of the “aggressor”, in this case Israel, is the fuel with which Hamas fuels its fight.

Jabalia is repeatedly targeted by the Israeli military (IDF). Which is neither new nor coincidence. In the camp, which is de facto a district of Gaza City, the fourth generation of people are now living in cramped conditions, in poverty, without adequate sanitation and inadequate infrastructure. Jabalia is a Hamas stronghold and is a refuge for its fighters and supporters. In 1987, the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, took place here.

Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and a year later Hamas came to power in the last elections for the time being. Since then, the terrorist organization has ruled there with a hard hand. Of course, it could change something about the conditions in Jabalia – and other refugee camps. But why should it when highly radicalized young people are thriving there?

refugees on their own territory

The fact that Palestinian refugees still live in their own places in the purely Palestinian-inhabited Gaza Strip is due to a decision by the United Nations in 1949. At that time, the UNRWA aid program was set up for those Palestinians who had to leave the new national territory after the founding of Israel. Originally there were around half a million people. Since refugee status is inherited, almost six million Palestinians are now considered refugees. Even if they live in Palestinian territory.

UNRWA has now become both a part and an actor in the Middle East conflict. Critics accuse the aid organization of hostility to Israel, anti-Semitism and sometimes even supporting terrorism. At the beginning of the 2000s, the then head of the organization had to resign because Hamas had infiltrated parts of UNRWA. For years, Hamas has used UNRWA-run schools as a launching pad for rocket attacks on Israel. Pierre Krähenbühl, the head of the aid organization at the time, said in an interview that military equipment had been found at three schools. In other cases, Islamist fighters were “near school buildings.” “But that’s not surprising in the densely populated Gaza Strip.”

Hamas: 8,500 dead in Israeli attacks

Hamas has been using the unprecedented narrowness of the Gaza Strip for its own purposes for many years. It is hardly possible to distinguish between civilians and armed fighters; every attack almost inevitably leads to the death of innocent people – and to an outcry in neighboring Arab states and parts of the West. It is unclear how many people have died in the four wars between Israel and Hamas since 2008, as is the proportion of civilians among them.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza is currently reporting 8,500 deaths as a result of Israel’s retaliatory strikes, including 3,000 children. The information provided by the Gaza leadership can almost never be verified. What is certain is that instrumentalizing the victims almost always works. The German Central Council of Muslims is now accusing Israel of war crimes: “We are now seeing indescribable suffering falling on Gaza. The war bombing of Israel is, in our view, a war crime and shows once again that war can never be an answer, terror really is to fight,” said Mazyek Aiman ​​on ZDF.

Hospitals as protective shields

Hamas’s habit of using hospitals as a protective shield is particularly malicious. According to the Israelis, Hamas’s command center is located under the largest and best-equipped hospital in the Gaza Strip, the Shifa Hospital. The clinic not only houses 700 beds, but is also a contact point for thousands of wounded and civilians who are hoping for care and want relative peace from the IDF attacks. Some of the people were probably ordered there by Hamas in order to abuse them as “human shields,” as Israeli media write.

It was only in mid-October that there was a large explosion at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, which, according to Hamas, killed hundreds of people. Gaza’s leadership immediately accused Israel of bombing the clinic. The government there rejected the allegations and presented evidence that a rocket from a second terrorist organization, Islamic Jihad, had crashed in the Gaza Strip. It is still unclear which version is correct. But the wave of outrage began immediately: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke of a “hospital massacre” and Hezbollah, which rules in Lebanon, called for a “day of anger.”

Islamists speak of “Holocaust”

In the Gaza Strip, the choice of words is much more drastic. Ismail Haniya, one of the Hamas leaders, spoke of a “new Holocaust” and compared the situation in the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto. Although these comparisons are hard to beat in terms of inhuman cynicism, this rhetoric has caught on with many supporters of the Palestinians, who sometimes even accuse Israel of genocide. “The Islamist forces me to see him as my enemy and to think again in terms that I, as a modern European, had wanted to forget or at least: that I had never wanted to act on again,” writes Dutch writer Leon de Winter about the acts of violence militant Muslims.

Sources: , “”, , , DPA, AFP, , “”