Hamas’s Second-Stage Strategy
“I just want to remind the world, Palestinian mothers love their children just as much as any other mother in the world," Jordan’s Queen Rania said on CNN last week. “For them to have to go through this is just unbelievable. And equally, I think that people all around the Middle East, including in Jordan, we are just shocked and disappointed by the world’s reaction to this catastrophe that is unfolding.
In the last couple of weeks we have seen, you know, a glaring double standard. . .
. Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family, at gunpoint, but it’s OK to shell them to death?" Suddenly the talk of Israeli grandmothers and babies being butchered by Hamas has given way to reports of Palestinian children killed by the Israel Defense Forces. And so Queen Rania asks: Aren’t Palestinian lives as precious as Israeli ones? Of course they are.
But to focus on death counts alone—without looking to how and why people were killed—is to reduce this war to a grim PR battle of photos and numbers. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said this war has entered its second stage. He was talking about Israel, but it applies equally to Hamas.
The barbarism of Oct. 7 was only the first stage of the Hamas war plan. The second stage was to force an Israeli response in Gaza that Hamas knew would mean the killing of innocent Palestinians—which boosts the terrorist group’s propaganda.
Whether the IDF is taking the right steps to minimize the loss of Palestinian civilian lives can be argued. But nothing Hamas does is to protect the Palestinian people. Look at how Hamas prevented Palestinians from leaving northern Gaza in accord with Israeli warnings.
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