Indian Television shows how Hamas places rocket launches next to hotels and heavily populated buildings in Gaza.
(The American Interest) In this most recent exchange of hostilities between Hamas and Israel, a number of commentators have noted Hamas’ unusual war tactics. Jeffrey Goldberg asks, “Is Hamas Trying to Get Gazans Killed?” Even Mahmoud Abbas queried, “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?” As Bob Schieffer put it with a touch of euphemism:
In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that has embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause—a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters.
The dark strategy has even inspired Israeli Children for Peace to appeal to Palestinian children and a Francophone Israeli to reach out to a bereaved Palestinian mother.
It appears to some, like Michael Oren, that Hamas deliberately maximizes its own people’s suffering for PR. To others, such a strategy would be so base and unthinkable, that they consider the very suggestion of it “racist and reprehensible.” Hamas’ Khaled Mashaal officially denies that Hamas engages in such a heinous policy, even as other Palestinian Jihadis brag about media-assured benefits derived from their own civilians’ deaths. And now, the IDF has possession of a Hamas training manual that advises its combatants to use civilian shields.
According to its critics, Hamas’ war strategy works like this:
- Episodically attack Israel’s civilians in such as way as to provoke a counter-attack.
- Hide behind Palestinian civilians (preferably in crowded neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals), while encouraging them, even forcing them, to stay, guaranteeing that the return fire wounds or kills civilians and damages civilian structures.
- Encourage the Western news media to play up the civilian suffering, play down Hamas’ role in it, and accuse Israel.
- Conjure a firestorm of outrage around the world that eventually pressures Israel into desisting from counteroffensive measures.
- Survive to reap the propaganda victory and prepare the next round of hostilities.
- Repeat, with each exchange hurting Israel more, and each round of international news coverage further savaging the Jewish State’s international reputation.
No matter what the Israeli response, the Hamas strategy is win-win. If the Israelis abort a strike to avoid civilian casualties (as they often do), then Hamas is spared the blow; if an Israeli strike causes civilian casualties, Hamas has dead babies to parade before the cameras. And eventually, the bloodletting will get so bad, the pictures so damning, that Israel will stop.
Hamas’ endgame goals, at least at this stage of its asymmetrical war, are actually threefold: tie Israel down with constraints on its use of power, delegitimize and demonize it in the eyes of the world, and stir an aggressive “Muslim Street” in the West, where genocidal chants can lead to pogroms against the Jews worldwide.
This time, however, this “dead baby” strategy, despite a pedigree of decades, has become increasingly apparent to the observant, perhaps because Hamas has resorted to ever-more obvious tactics to victimize their own people: storing its weapons and firing them from residential areas, hospitals, schools and mosques and even, hiding its leaders under Shiffa hospital. (continue reading)