More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in the month since Hamas’ terrorist attacks inside southern Israel, the group’s health ministry in Gaza says.

But Hamas officials say the mounting death toll, believed to include thousands of children, has not caused the group to regret its actions in southern Israel, which Israeli officials said killed 1,400 people.

In fact, Hamas leaders say that their goal was to trigger this very response and that they’re still hoping for a bigger war. It’s all part of a strategy, they say, to derail talks over Israel normalizing relations with regional powers — namely, Saudi Arabia — and draw the world’s attention to the Palestinian cause.

Hamas, these officials say, is more interested in the destruction of Israel than what it sees as the temporary hardships faced by Palestinians under Israeli bombardment.

“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the group’s governing politburo, told The New York Times in an interview.

  • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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    1 year ago

    What choice did they realistically have? Be strangled out slowly by Israel while watching settlers pushing borders slowly but surely? No one has given a shit about Palestine since before ISIS / Syria, by my recollection.

    That said it’s also, of course, completely inexcusable to kill and take hostage civilians no matter the underlying justifications they might have.

    This is just a shit storm about 80 years in the making. And there just isn’t a solution in sight.

    • qnick@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What choice did they realistically have?

      Victim blaming as it is. The choice was not to murder people.

    • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hamas isn’t the Palestinian people, their leaders are wealthy and living abroad. Stop muddying the waters and acting as if Hamas is an oppressed group, they’re not, they’re terrorists. They are NOT representative of the Palestinian people.

      • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Is there a reason why we make this distinction for Gaza? Not every country gives its people the ability to elect its leadership, and my understanding is that the ruling party in Gaza is Hamas.

        Why is this conflict not portrayed as state on state violence when it’s two state actors?

        • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Because neither Gaza nor the whole of Palestine are a state. That’s been the end-goal of the peace process for a few decades now, but it isn’t the current reality.

      • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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        1 year ago

        It’s the Palestinians in Gaza paying the price regardless. Right or wrong they haven’t ousted Hamas and thus, right or wrong, Israel sees them as one and the same as proven by their indiscriminate bombings.

        I didn’t state Hamas represents all Palestinians.

        Likewise I didn’t state Hamas is oppressed, a terror organization can’t by definition be “oppressed” in the sense that we should pity them.

        What I did state was that driving someone into a corner like Israel has been doing with Palestinians for decades leads to attacks. And it’s not like 100% of Hamas members are non-Palestinians.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hamas is not Palestinians. Hamas steals aid meant for Palestinians. They embed themselves in civilian areas. They take investments that other groups make to improve Palestinian lives, and dismantle them to use for weaponry. They stockpile food, medicine, and water and don’t share it with civilians when Israel cuts off those crucial resources.

      The leaders of Hamas are rich fucks living cushy lives in the UAE and could not care less about Palestinians. This isn’t some freedom fighter group that’s out of options. It’s terrorists who purposely co-opt language from peaceful protestors to make them sound like extremists.

      • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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        1 year ago

        I agree in general, but let’s not pretend they have 0 support from Palestinians, or that there are no Palestinians active in Hamas. Israel sees them as one and the same as evidenced by their indiscriminate bombings. Just as Hamas sees all Israelis as violent settlers and directly responsible for massacres like Deir Yassin and the Nakba in general. Neither which is true, of course. All military, paramilitary and terrorist organizations work hard to dehumanize and generalize their opposition to ruthless brutes when that in reality is only a small part of the actual people involved and impacted by the conflict. For every ruthless murderer killed on either side hundreds or thousands of innocent die.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          To me it’s immaterial that some Palestinians support and are part of them. You would need a significant level of support for it to be significant. Israel tries to paint everyone the same to justify their acts, but it’s absolutely incorrect.

          What I mean in general though is Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a liberation front. They aren’t freedom fighters with their backs against the wall and out of options. They’re just craven butchers.

    • ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      The choice was really simple. Not opposing a two state solution would have been a great start. All their actions have been to subvert peace or compromise using violence at every turn.

      Now you can twist that however you like, but will you really deny that having an independent internationally-recognized Palestinin state is better than endless war, thousands of civilians dead, etc? Albeit perhaps less than they want or think they deserve? It would be a start.

      Face it, their “all or nothing” approach is exactly responsible for the current state of affairs. They don’t deny that, they are proud of it. Read their own words.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hamas or Israel? Hamas actually announced support for a two state solution back in like 2006, and also in 2017:

        The 2017 Hamas charter presented the Palestinian state being based on the 1967 borders. The text says “Hamas considers the establishment of a Palestinian state, sovereign and complete, on the basis of the June 4, 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital and the provision for all the refugees to return to their homeland.” This is in contrast to Hamas’ 1988 charter, which previously called for a Palestinian state on all of Mandatory Palestine. Nevertheless, even in the 2017 charter, Hamas did not recognize Israel.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution

        Israel, on the other hand, has never granted Palestinian statehood on terms they could possibly accept. Look at the Oslo Accords - all kinds of concessions for Palestine, this insane military framework going through the West Bank - but no statehood. Basically every time there’s a “peace process” they pose these decreasingly compelling terms.

        One state solution is making more and more sense to me these days. It sounds like a radical solution given the polarization and history, but there’s a lot more opportunity for a workable solution that way that actually allows reparations.

        • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          that’s advocating for a single state (theirs) and Israel to cease to exist. how very reasonable of them

          • dx1@lemmy.world
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            The concern is exactly the opposite. Israel has been procedurally annexing Palestinian land for decades - the concern, if anything, is that a one state solution would abrogate the rights of Palestinians, because that’s precisely what Israel has done with annexations repeatedly in the past. It’s in fact a requirement to abolish the religious/ethnic supremacism inherent in the Israeli state, in which political parties are even banned from even opposing a Jewish nationalist identity (the 2018 “nation-state” law), and start from scratch with a constitution that actually guarantees equal rights across ethnic groups, in order to achieve equal rights in the region, barring something like the bottom half of Israel being given up to allow a contiguous, fully independent state between Gaza and the West Bank.

            The problem most of you aren’t dealing with is that Israel was founded fairly recently (75 years) on the ethnic cleansing/expulsion of the Palestinian population. These endless repeated claims about “Israel’s right to exist”, “Israel’s right to defense”, “Israel’s right to sovereignty” - many of them aren’t even true under international law in the first place, and they ignore the problem that the land they currently claim was unlawfully obtained, and that the people it was stolen who still live under Israeli rule have been oppressed, starved, murdered, poisoned, etc. for decades, under a dehumanizing system of apartheid. There is no just solution attainable in this conflict without concessions from Israel.

            • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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              1 year ago

              so you are saying the only solution is for Israel to not exist. sounds like you want peace as much as hamas does

              • dx1@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Differentiate the state of Israel - a religious and ethnic supremacist state from its beginning, by definition - and the inhabitants of the state. Getting tired of that little rhetorical trick where disagreeing with a state actively committing a genocide is supposed to make you sound “antisemitic”.

    • 5BC2E7@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They could have abandoned their goal and seek coexistence. But using your logic ask yourself what choice does israel have as a response to an enemy like hamas?

      • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What is happening in the West Bank right now where there is no Hamas? Are you purposely ignoring that israel is giving paramilitary terrorists weapons to shoot innocent Palestinians AND protects those Israeli terrorists with their army?

        ISRAEL is the party that does not want peace. They have openly stated they want to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Their government has stated wanting to nuke Gaza.

        • 5BC2E7@lemmy.world
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          I am sure that they have all sorts of people and some of them were always this way but I suspect they were radicalized with the terrorist attacks. I mean at a personal level if someone kills your family you’d probably don’t care about nuances or context. It just happens that they have more means to carry out their “vengeance”.

      • ASprigOfSage@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not bombing the shit out of innocent civilians and not committing war crimes is a great start for coexistence. To late for that now though… the only course from here is either a complete cease fire and the releasing of Palestine back to the plaistinians or complete brutal genocide of an entire group of people. It seems the governments of the world are attempting to choose the later…

        • 5BC2E7@lemmy.world
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          This has been developing for longer than recent history. I sort of agree that israel should have continued one of the last 2-3 wars until the fundamentalist extremists surrendered or were killed. Instead of giving land back and attempting to serk peace. I think it was a mistake to try 5-6 times. after 2 or 3 it’s clear the enemy doesn’t want anything less than a war of extermination so they should give them that.

          • ASprigOfSage@lemmy.world
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            I guess the question remains, Who is the enemy to you? Is it Hamas? Is it the people of Palestine? Is it the children and innocent people being slaughtered in mass? Where does the violence stop? What is the limit of “acceptable losses”? Why do the cries and suffering of one group get listened to more than another group?

            Fuck Hamas and fuck the Israeli government. Bring peace, not death and war.

            • 5BC2E7@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I consider Hamas as the enemy of israel. And i am not sure if I consider hamas an enemy of palestine but they are certainly bad for the ones that are not in favor of a war of extermination.

              I understand that palestinians even had a civil war because too many of them were against peace even after they lost the war. I suppose israel had concerns of escalation and didn’t join the war in favor of those who wanted coexistence.

              So ideally palestinians should be “telling on” hamas to israel. Hamas is the enemy in general.

      • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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        1 year ago

        The same as Hamas, not kill civilians indiscriminately. But both sides are horrible and I’m not the least bit interested in a breakdown of who’s the worst. They both suck, and have for more than half a century.

        That’s why I say this is a shit storm loooong in the making.

        • 5BC2E7@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          So you implied that hamas didn’t have a choice but now you say they did have a choice? Which one is it?

          • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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            1 year ago

            I meant war and conflict in general as what choice do they have. Didn’t you read all of the first post? Killing civilians is always inexcusable.

    • TheBlue22@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Palestinians didn’t have a choice on who “leads” them either. Hamas hasn’t held a vote for 20 years.