OPINION
The social media platform X is awash with daily posts claiming Israel is targeting Palestinian civilians in its war on Hamas, despite daily assurances from the IDF that Israel is doing its best to avoid killing and injuring civilians whilst fulfilling its promise to Israeli citizens to annihilate Hamas to prevent further attacks. Israel has reached saturation point but does not take responsibility for all Gazan deaths.
“They are killing their own people,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari said Saturday.
Hagari noted that one-fifth of the rockets that have been fired by Hamas and Islamic Jihad have missed intended targets and landed inside Gaza, killing civilians. That number, Hagari said, amounts to more than 550 rockets.”
Fox News
Governments, MSM and social media demand that Israel exercise restraint and preferably stop the war altogether, conveniently forgetting that Israel has endured decades of regular rocket attacks and cannot countenance a repeat of the latest horrific Hamas massacres, torture and kidnappings on 7 October.
Why do so many social media posts label Israel’s actions as terrorism when it is simply protecting its citizens? October 7th was an act of pure terrorism, yet none of these anti-semitic posts acknowledge Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
New Zealand is not clear about which part of Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and neither are the NZ Greens who are openly pro-Palestine. Are the Greens also pro-terrorist – something they’ve not made clear to the NZ public?
New Zealand’s designated the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organisation, we recognise Israel’s right to defend itself, we are concerned that the situation will escalate in the coming days and New Zealand again calls for restraint, the protection of non-combatants, and the upholding of international humanitarian law by all parties.
Chris Hipkins 8 October 2023
Is Hamas’s “military arm” any different from the ‘civilians’ who assisted Hamas on 7 October?
Hamas hides its armouries, rocket launchers and military bases close to or inside mosques, hospitals, schools and residential buildings and uses civilians in military exercises. The line separating civilians from active terrorists is anything but clear.
Some 20,000 “uninvolved” workers from Gaza used to enter Israel every day until the slaughter. They did so for months and months. They worked in the communities of the Gaza border, in Sderot, and in Ofakim, and some of them took detailed notes about their destinations: how many houses there were, where the living rooms, the bedrooms, and the security rooms were, how many family members lived in each house, whether they had a dog, where their cars were parked. They documented everything. And all of it went to Hamas. It was part of the infrastructure of the pogrom – the contribution of the “uninvolved” to the atrocity.
If that’s not bad enough, Salah Arouri of Hamas claimed the 7 October atrocities were carried out by Palestinian civilians!
“When the Gaza Division fell apart,” Arouri explained, “people from the Strip went in and clashed with the settlers. As a result, people were killed.”
That’s a downright lie you could drive a tank through using video evidence from Hamas operatives’ body cameras recording their killing, torturing and kidnapping spree for the purpose of bragging about killing Jews.
The “uninvolved,” many thousands of them, “demonstrated” at the border fence on the eve of the massacre. They planted explosive charges along the fence and marked off the weak points. They participated in the great deception that Hamas pulled off more successfully than it had ever imagined.
Tens of thousands of “uninvolved people” just like them – hundreds of thousands in the army’s count – took part in “marches of return” along the fence over the years, lobbing charges and firebombs onto our side, launching incendiary balloons and setting our fields afire. Their hearts seethed with hatred and entertained a dream – to return to Ashkelon, Lod, Acre, and Ashdod, and to replace us.The “uninvolved” danced like dervishes around the trucks that hauled away the abducted children, the old men and women, and the young men and women, crying “death to the Jews” and helping Hamas to place them in hiding. The “uninvolved” helped Hamas to move its rockets to concealment. “Uninvolved” mothers proclaimed that they were proud to send their children into battle in order to turn them into shahids (martyrs). And “uninvolved” teachers taught the children of Gaza that it’s a religious obligation to kill Jews. Hundreds of thousands of “uninvolved” Gazans took part in the funerals of the arch-murderers whom Israel eliminated over the years. For those who really want to go back there – Google and watchdogs like MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch will provide the terrifying texts that were read out at those funerals, the masses roaring their agreement.
Now the shoe is on the other foot because Israel is pounding Hamas into extinction and the “uninvolved” are collateral damage crying foul.
Who knows how wide the terrorist net extends in the wider Hamas movement, or how many Palestinian civilians support Hamas violence?
Violence is an indisputable characteristic of Palestinian communities, not welcome in the neighbouring Arab countries of Egypt and Jordan, and Lebanon must rue the day it took in Palestinian refugees as it still struggles with violence between rival militant Muslim factions in its Palestinian refugee camps.
If you support Palestinian terrorism, you are a terrorist, a fact Israel knows only too well.
Hamas and the Gazans are one and the same – in elections, in their hearts, in their actions, and in their assistance. Many of them knew about the war preparations, furthered them, and kept them secret. The IDF is a moral army. It will not line up a civilian population in the crosshairs of its rifles, tanks, artillery, and aircraft, but if this population unintentionally comes to harm, heaven forbid, it’s worth our while to know exactly whom we’re dealing with.
Israel Hayom