16,000 dead so far in Gaza including 8,500 Hamas fighters out of an estimated 21,000 fighters. Around 50 Hamas commanders now neutralised and 9 of 14 Hamas battalions decimated. Mass terrorist surrenders increasing. Gaza City in ruins. Most of the civilian infrastructure in the Strip smashed. Civilians devastated. Hamas being coralled into Khan Younis in the south ahead of an IDF sweep and being threatened with a wipeout.
But Hamas is not a victim.
And, arguably, in sacrificing strategy in favour of tactics, Hamas paved the way not only for the comprehensive destruction of Gaza, but also the viability of them being allowed to ever again set up shop in the enclave.
One of Hamas’s goals and tactics was simply to kill Israelis—many of them.
The Washington Post reported that instructions found on dead Hamas fighters included, “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.”
Among the weapons used to kill and maim, Hamas also equipped its fighters with thermobaric grenades, which can quickly cause massive fires in a home. The fighters also had enough ammunition and food to keep going into Israel if they were able to do so, as well as maps, suggesting an even higher death toll was planned if possible.
However, Hamas’ October 7 attack was an action not to force Israel to the negotiating table, but to radicalise the Middle East and upset the growing relations between Israel and Arab states.
October 7 was less an indication of Hamas’ power and more an indication of its weakness as a viable Palestinian government because it opted for short-term/lived tactics at the expense of overall strategy.
Given its ideology to eliminate Israel, Israelis and Jews in general per its Charter, those hundreds of thousands in Europe and America who effectively marched in the streets for Hamas rather than “Palestine” thought they were demonstrating for peace and “statehood”, but without any semblance of a plan for a political settlement.
The demonstrations were actually anti- Israel, anti- “Zionism”, antisemitic; and were, without any expressed thought for a political settlement, as one Israeli colourfully described it, like “f*cking to achieve virginity”.
Or, using less colourful language, but an equally ridiculous sentiment given the Islamist entity’s views on the subject: demonstrations by Queers for Palestine…..
The basic issue with Hamas’ tactic versus strategy error on October 7 was that in its hurry to kill and slaughter Jews and become what it believed would be the (gruesome) toast of the Arab world, Hamas overlooked the absence of a political process in its calculations, a political process which enshrined the rights of Jew and Arab to exist side by side.
To this, it needs to be added that in its blood thirsty and violent attack on Israel in the name of “resistance”, Hamas also succeeded in undermining the credibility of an already weak, though legally official, PA in Ramallah.
Mahmoud Abbas has generally favoured negotiation and cooperation with Israel, a position already strained before October 7 but now even more discredited as Palestinians view the devastating Israeli response.
October 7 bolstered Hamas’s claim to be the leader of the Palestinian national movement (sic) not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and among the Palestinian diaspora and its non Muslim supporters abroad.
Thus, the mass demonstrations in Europe and America for “Palestinians” was always a vote for Hamas, no matter the means Hamas favoured.
But, in using the tactic of shocking atrocities and wholesale kidnappings, Hamas showed it was not interested in a two-state solution; only a one-state solution without Jews.
If the conflict is ever to move to resolution, the Arabs of Gaza have to revise their anti-Israel identity that is synonymous with antisemitic stereotyping, because supporting that, and egged on by radical Islamist groups such as Hamas now or in the future, is to support the destruction of the state of Israel.
On October 7, Hamas reinforced for Israelis the fundamental purpose of the state of Israel: a safe haven for Jews not only in the wake of the Holocaust but also, as the tsunami of virulent American and European antisemitism unfolded, from on campus and on the street hatred.
October 7 and the Hamas massacres showed how quickly that imperative of a safe haven for Jews was forgotten in the slogans and marches against “Zionism”, which brought to the surface a visceral hatred of Jews and the Jewish state in a near instant.
Antisemitism across the world had never subsided; the hatred had merely been lying dormant.
It had existed well before October 7, 2023 and all it took to be triggered was the Israeli audacity to defend itself robustly in trying to get its hostages back from a recognised terror entity which had massacred unarmed civilians and committed recorded atrocities against others.
Because what the world witnessed on 7 October was indeed a banquet of brutal depravities and drug-fuelled blood lust, nihilistic and callous.
The tactics that Hamas used to raid the Israeli border settlements were massed use of Kalachnikovs, thermobaric RPGs, and fuel to burn houses, cars and bodies aided by the element of total surprise.
The other tactic it used was rape, gang rape, sexual torture and sexual mutilation of Israelis of both genders and all ages. Hamas’ use of sexual violence was likely meant to show its power over Israeli women and girls, and to humiliate Israeli men and Israel’s military.
However, when Israel gathered itself together for a response, the outcome was around 16,000 terrorists and civilians dead (so far), Gaza City, Jabaliya in the north and Khan Younis in the south pounded mostly to rubble, and the Gaza Strip turned into a humanitarian catastrophe at every level of civic operation.
In pursuit of a twisted islamist ideology of ethnoreligious hatred, Hamas opted for tactics rather than an overall strategy to further what they claimed was their goal of responsible Palestinian statehood.
But as Sun Tzu said in his “Art of War”, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
And there was tremendous noise.
Of Israeli aircraft ordnance and tank shells and small arms fire before impending defeat.
Hamas is being crushingly defeated never to raise its head again in Gaza, and Palestinian statehood, whilst possible, has, arguably, been set back for a generation.
C.R.A.P - Countering Racist Anti-Israel Propaganda 