The Heroes of the Palestinian 'Resistance'

"The Hamas goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time."

"[Hamas] strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Muslim, male or female. Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."

"Palestine symbolizes the resistance that shall continue until liberation is accomplished, until the return is fulfilled and until a fully sovereign state is established with Jerusalem as its capital."

"Not one stone of Jerusalem can be surrendered or relinquished. The measure undertaken by the occupiers in Jerusalem, such as Judaization, settlement building and establishing facts on the ground are fundamentally null and void."

Hamas Charter

A Palestinian youth walks inside a tunnel used for military exercises during a weapon exhibition at a Hamas-run youth summer camp in Gaza City July 20, 2016. An extensive labyrinth of tunnels built by Hamas stretches across the dense neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip, hiding militants, their missile arsenal and the over 200 hostages they now hold after an unprecedented Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.  Adel Hana, AP Photo

The debate that now rages in the West over the brutality and carnage represented by the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists on Israeli border communities that saw sadistic savagery meted out on helpless civilian populations in an orchestrated orgy of bloodlust was revealed widely as a revelation of the extreme fanaticism of Islamist expression of rage and hate against the presence of an ancient people returned to their ancestral homeland in a rebirth of a nation. The land reclaimed and formally institutionalized into a UN-recognized country whose legitimacy cannot be questioned.

 

Despite which the founding Charter of the Hamas terrorist group has as its theocratic foundation the elimination by any means possible, of an entire nation of people, in a country dedicated to the universal preservation of Jewish life. A nation, moreover, that has accepted the presence of Arab Palestinians as citizens, along with a wide number of other ethnic, cultural, and religious groups from Christianity to Baha'i, Druze and Kurds, Circassians and Africans. 

Hamas and its secular-sister Palestinian organization Fatah, along with Islamic Jihad have distinguished themselves over the decades for their forays into terrorism, from hijacking planes and ocean liners, to suicide bombers and events such as bombings of Jewish community centers, synagogues and other like institutions globally. Few more shocking than the Black September (PLO special unit) attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972 that saw Palestinian terrorists slaughter 11 Israeli athletes.

 

A video still from recovered Hamas body camera footage shows their infiltration into southern Israel from Gaza on Oct 7, 2023.EYEPRESS/Reuters

The latest atrocities carried out by Hamas operatives on October 7 represent the most savagely brutal of all such attacks. Where videos, most of them taken by the Hamas operatives as proud evidence of their inhumanity, took videos of the atrocities they perpetrated against helpless civilians. In them can be seen hacked off arms and legs of mutilated victims, an infant with its skull cracked open, a dog shot repeatedly, a young corpse dressed in Mickey Mouse pyjamas, fragments of skulls littering house floors, and bones scorched to black-coal density.

 

Those same videos included footage of the attackers of those homes in towns and villages and kibbutzim, revelling in their butchery, boasting to one another of their descent into hell as proud accomplishments among the gore they created as they tracked down families, broke into safe rooms, set houses on fire and celebrated their courage. In proof of which they took care to retain trophies, not only the videos from their body cams, but physical evidence of their triumphs.

 

These are the proud Palestinian heroes who routinely store weapons at or close to heavily populated civilian sites inclusive of hospitals. According to a NATO report, Hamas fire "rockets, artillery and mortars from or in proximity to heavily populated civilian areas, often from or near facilities which should be protected". Moreover, journalists from a variety of media outlets have been eyewitness to rockets launched adjacent to hospitals.

Hamas has been using a bunker beneath Dar Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, as a major military base. Israeli intelligence officials suspected during the 2009 conflict that Hamas was using the hospital as cover. Hamas "closed off some of the departments, stationed armed guards and closely examined everyone in the hospital. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the de facto Hamas administration, set up his headquarters in the hospital's burn ward", documented the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information center.

In 2015 Amnesty International wrote that civilians were "interrogated and tortured or otherwise ill-treated in a disused outpatient clinic within the grounds of Gaza City's main al-Shifa Hospital. At least three people arrested during the conflict accused of 'collaboration' died in custody". Fatah accused Hamas of using the hospital's X-ray department as a prison and interrogation room.

Israel's chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari Photograph:(Reuters)