By Toby Abse
What the mainstream media generally describe as ‘the war between Israel and Hamas’ has in reality amounted to a massacre of Palestinian civilians. Around two thirds of the 29,410 Gazan dead (22nd February 2024) have been women and children. Unlike the Israel Defence Force (IDF), and unlike the more secular Palestinian armed groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the deeply religious conservatives of Hamas do not believe women should participate in their armed wing. There is also no evidence that Hamas, unlike some other jihadi groups elsewhere in the world, recruit boys as child soldiers. Moreover, the adult male casualties include a fair number of elderly men, unsuited for military service, as well as doctors, ambulance drivers, nurses, small shopkeepers, UN and NGO employees and, last but in some ways not least, 110 journalists. Therefore, the claim made by one Israeli general in an Italian television interview that 9,000 of the dead were Hamas fighters is manifestly absurd. It seems more plausible to assume that only a thousand or two of those killed by the Israelis were Hamas militiamen, given that Hamas fighters have access to a large network of underground tunnels, whilst never providing any kind of air raid shelters for the ordinary civilians facing Israel carpet bombing.
More Palestinian civilians have been killed in this rather one-sided war than in any of the wars Israel has fought in the past, including the 1948 war that the Palestinians call the Nakba. Moreover, over two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have been displaced from their homes, which is more than double the roughly 750,000 driven out of what became Israel between 1947 and 1949. Whilst one should acknowledge that Hamas’s killing spree on 7th October 2023, in which around 1200 Israelis – many of whom were women, children and elderly men – were murdered, often with extreme brutality, was a traumatic event for a people that imagined it was protected by the most efficient army and intelligence service in the world, killing about twenty times as many people in retaliation is by any rational standard a totally disproportionate response, even if one ignores the fact that international law proscribes the collective punishment of an entire people for the action of a relatively small terrorist group.
Israel has broken almost every one of the generally accepted rules of war established after the end of World War Two. It has systematically bombed schools, hospitals, refugee camps and places of worship, including not just mosques but also Christian churches that no rational person would have believed were the hiding places of a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim group. It cannot claim that this was the accidental side effect of carefully targeted attacks on military targets, or even economic infrastructure. There is overwhelming evidence of the systematic destruction of residential areas; most of the displaced Gazans have no homes left to return to. In addition, it has deprived the Gazan population of electricity, fuel, food and purified drinking water – deliberately wrecking desalination plants that purified seawater.
White flags, red flags
The destruction of almost every hospital, along with the almost total block on the arrival of necessary medicines and equipment, has vastly increased the prevalence of disease amongst an already vulnerable, malnourished population, most of whom are able to eat at most one meal a day. Finally, the IDF ignores the oldest and most elementary rule of war, shooting people waving white flags with their hands in the air. The best known instance of this occurred when they killed three Israeli hostages who had escaped from their Hamas captors.
Given that after four months of a combination of carpet bombing and ground invasion, the Israelis have not achieved their official but unrealistic war aim of completely eradicating Hamas, what is the real point of continuing the military campaign? It is obvious that Benjamin Netanyahu has one aim, which is to stay in office and thus avoid trial and imprisonment on corruption charges. The success of Hamas in breaching the Israeli siege of Gaza on 7th October demonstrated his incompetence in terms of protecting the security of Israel and its citizens, since he was personally responsible for moving two thirds of the IDF to the West Bank to support the increasingly aggressive settlers, thus leaving Israel’s southern border very poorly defended. He has tried to shift the blame onto the Army commanders and intelligence chiefs, but his main tactic is to present himself as a war leader who will stop at nothing to defeat the country’s enemies in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran. Up until 7th October he had been quite happy with the status quo, believing Israel could continue to manage the Occupation of the West Bank and keep Gaza isolated from the rest of the world. However, he is now increasingly at the mercy of two members of his Cabinet, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have always dreamt of driving the Palestinians out of the whole of the old pre-1948 Mandate Palestine. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism are two Extreme Right groups whose votes are crucial to Netanyahu’s parliamentary majority. Despite his denials, Netanyahu must have been involved in their attempt to get the Democratic Republic of Congo to accept the Palestinians once it became apparent that neither the Jordanian King nor the Egyptian President was prepared to go along with a second Nakba.
The main internal threat to Netanyahu comes from the families of Hamas’s Israeli hostages. In November 2023, they were the principal force pushing him into a brief truce, which gained the freedom of dozens of hostages. Whilst a Hamas attack in Jerusalem played a part in the breakdown of the truce, Netanyahu had no interest in it continuing, despite the real possibility of obtaining the release of the remaining women and children, and perhaps elderly male hostages. The end of the war would in all probability lead to his downfall, and a long truce could have eventually turned into a permanent ceasefire.
The Israeli killing of Saleh al- Arurari (the Hamas Deputy Leader) in Beirut, as well as the more recent assassination of two high-ranking officials of the Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah, seem to suggest that Netanyahu, and the aggressive Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant – who referred to the Gazans as ‘human animals’ – are seeking to provoke Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, into escalating border skirmishes into a full-scale war that would be used to justify a third Israeli invasion of Lebanon, along the lines of those of 1982 and 2006. Because the disastrous economic and social conditions of Lebanon mean Nasrallah has nothing to gain from such a war. Similarly, Iran’s deteriorating economy and growing popular discontent with the theocratic regime and its expensive foreign policy mean that Ayatollah Khamenei, for all his anti-Israeli rhetoric, is far from eager to plunge his country into war on behalf of the Sunni Palestinians, or even his fellow Shias in Hezbollah.
Toby Abse is a member of the Socialist Alliance and AGS national committees
Photo by Fredrik Ohlander/Unsplash
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