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.
If you hear run-of-the-mill Gazans when interviewed on TV (well, maybe not in the US because the propaganda over there is insane so I suspect there’s no showing of normal Palestinians up close and personal, as just people, on TV) they’re often saying of those run of the mill people who died (so children, family and acquaintances, not “fighters”) as being “martyrs” and of possibly dying, including themselves, as “becoming martyrs”.
So yeah, that’s probably a general coping strategy over there for the situation they’re in, which would mean that the occupying power increasing the indiscriminated killing of Palestinian civilians is bound to push them in even greater numbers towards Hamas’ ultra-radical take on how to resist the Occupier.
Hamas is an Insurrection Movement: whilst the means they used on the 7th are abhorrent, that does not change the fact that their reason to be, structure and purpose are those of an Insurrection Movement in a Territory controlled by an Occupying Power, same as the people fighing with guerrilla warfare tactics the US troops in Iraq and Cohalition troops in Afghanistan.