That was the line that followed Saturday’s bloody events, when an Israeli military operation freed four hostages in central Gaza and killed at least 274 Palestinians, many of whom were civilians including dozens of children, according to Gazan health authorities. Locals described to my colleagues the “doomsday” scenes in the crowded Nuseirat refugee camp, with firefights and Israeli aerial bombardments turning streets into a “hall of blood,” as one eyewitness put it.
Israeli officials were jubilant about the mission and pinned the collateral damage on their enemy. “Every civilian life lost in this war is a result of how Hamas has operated,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Peter Lerner told ABC on Sunday. Israeli officials routinely deny charges that they have deliberately targeted civilians and blame Hamas for operating in areas where civilians are put at risk. A growing body of international legal experts and jurists allege Israel has committed war crimes; Israel is locked in trial proceedings at the highest U.N. court on genocide charges and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant both may see the International Criminal Court issue warrants for their arrest.
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“The fact that your adversary is breaking international humanitarian law does not change your obligations,” Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers Law School, told my colleagues. “The foreseeable harm to civilians was disproportionate to the legitimate aim of rescuing the four hostages.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since it began its campaign of retribution against Hamas, which launched an unprecedented terrorist strike Oct. 7 on towns and villages in southern Israel. The war, by various measures, is among the most destructive conflicts of the 21st century, with much of Gaza pulverized by Israeli offensives and the bulk of its population displaced by the fighting and plunged into a spiraling set of humanitarian calamities.
Stung by the events of Oct. 7 — the bloodiest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust — the Israeli public has generally shown little compassion for Gazans caught in the crossfire. Some prominent Israeli officials and politicians have openly declared that there are “no innocents” among Gaza’s 2 million plus inhabitants. As it was, the desire for collective punishment on the residents of Gaza, where Hamas has held sway for more than a decade and a half, existed in Israel well before Oct. 7.
“People have not cared about the Palestinian casualty count the whole time, and the media doesn’t really report it, so I wouldn’t expect them to start caring about it now, during of all things a rescue operation,” Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group, told the Guardian this week. “As we have seen before, there is an Israeli narrative in the war and an international narrative, and they don’t really meet.”
Hamas has its own narrative, too. The group, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, casts itself at the heart of the resistance to Israeli occupation and says it successfully blew up the status quo that surrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the frozen peace process between both sides. In April, even as the group faced major losses to its armed wing and the hideous toll exacted on Gaza’s civilians grew, Khaled Meshal, one of Hamas’s leaders in exile, told an audience in Qatar that his faction was further down “the path of liberating Palestine and defeating the Zionist project.”
Meshal was speaking in the wake of an Israeli airstrike that killed some family members of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. The incident apparently elicited a similar reaction from Yehiya Sinwar, the shadowy Hamas leader within Gaza who is considered to be one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack. In an April 11 message to Haniyeh, Sinwar allegedly told his colleague that the loss of his sons and other Palestinians during the war would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”
The details of Sinwar’s correspondence were reported Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal, which obtained dozens of messages he reportedly relayed to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas officials and others outside of Gaza. (The Washington Post was unable to independently verify the Journal’s reporting.)
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message, according to the Journal, to Hamas officials working to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials. The inference here, the Journal noted, was that Sinwar believed further Israeli hostilities and mounting Palestinian casualties played into his organization’s hands. In a separate message, he likened the loss of Palestinian lives in Gaza to the death tolls in other revolutionary conflicts, including Algeria’s war for independence. He said that “these are necessary sacrifices.”
Hamas officials on Monday welcomed a U.N. Security Council resolution to support the American-backed cease-fire plan for Gaza. On Tuesday, they also responded to the latest proposed cease-fire deal, with the United States and other Arab nations fitfully trying to broker a truce between Israel and the Palestinian faction. “The proposed deal would begin with a six-week cease-fire that includes the withdrawal of Israeli troops from heavily populated areas of Gaza; the freeing of all women, elderly people and children held hostage in return for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails; the return of displaced Palestinians to their homes throughout Gaza; and a surge in humanitarian aid to the starving enclave,” my colleagues reported.
In its response, according to officials with knowledge of the negotiations, Hamas wanted further clarity on a timeline for a permanent cease-fire and details regarding the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops. Talks will continue with Secretary of State Antony Blinken slated to travel to Doha, the Qatari capital, on Wednesday. For their part, Netanyahu and his right-wing allies have balked at the notion of a cease-fire ahead of “total victory” over Hamas — an objective many Israelis, including former wartime cabinet member Benny Gantz, who quit this weekend, believe is impossible to achieve.
On Tuesday, Blinken told reporters that “if Hamas doesn’t say yes” to the current deal on offer, then the war continuing would be “clearly on them.” But he also gestured at Netanyahu’s seeming unwillingness to come to the table with a clear “day after” plan for Gaza that would help heal the wounds of the war as well as push Israelis and Palestinians toward reconciliation.
“There has to be a clear political plan, a clear humanitarian plan, in order to ensure Hamas does not in any shape or form resume control of Gaza,” Blinken said.
