On February 16, 2005, Arik Sharon, Israel’s then Prime Minister, secured the approval of the Knesset, (Israel’s Parliament), for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza of all Israelis, be they soldiers or civilians. Subsequently, by the following September, the 7,500 Israelis living in Gaza were compelled to return to Israel proper, abandoning in the process 21 Jewish settlements and two synagogues. With not a single Israeli remaining in Gaza, the Palestinians residing there were entirely unfettered in governing themselves. Israel supplied them with electricity, oil, and potable water, financed by wealthy Arab states and other sources. In addition, Israel issued thousands of visas to Gazans that enabled them to obtain employment or access to Israeli hospitals on a daily basis.
By 2007, Hamas violently seized total control of Gaza, with the objective of conquering Israel and eliminating its Jewish population, as a necessary pre-condition for ensuring that Islam would become the world’s singular religion.
As the late Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Zahar put it, ‘Israel is only the first target. The entire planet will be under our law.’
In preparing the groundwork for invading Israel, Hamas constructed a maze of underground tunnels to shelter its forces when at war. Needless to say, no allowance was made to provide shelters for the rest of the Gazan population.
Finally, on October 7, 2023, in a well-prepared surprise attack, Hamas poured 3,000 of its forces into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people while taking another 250 as hostages. In the process, it committed a series of horrific atrocities involving burning people alive, raping, beheading, and mutilating them.
In a grotesque perversion of reality, even before Israel had completed the mobilisation of its army, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, declared that the Hamas massacre had to be understood as being ‘a reaction to Israel’s oppression’.
Similarly, Antonia Guterres, the UN General Secretary, in a speech to the United Nations Security Council, claimed that ‘the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum’, for ‘the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of a suffocating occupation.’
Such statements are blatantly false.
Since 2005, there had been no Israeli occupying forces in Gaza, nor had Gaza been subject to ‘Israeli aggression’.
In planning its massacre, Hamas would surely have taken into account the fact that Israel would be left with no alternative, other than to embark on a large-scale military response. The Hamas leadership fully appreciated the fact that given the high urban population density of Gaza, its inhabitants would invariably be put in harm’s way.
Nonetheless, Hamas looked upon the Gazan masses as human shields that would deter Israel from firing at them.
On its part, Israel sought to minimise Palestinian civilian casualties by notifying Gazans of the imminence of specific ground battles or aerial bombardments. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no other army in the world has ever provides similar pre battle warnings to enemy civilians.
Unfortunately, a large number of Gazan civilians have been killed or wounded, either as a result of Hamas preventing them from leaving a specific site, from not taking Israel’s warnings seriously, or, given that Hamas forces seldom wear uniforms, on account of Israeli errors.
The Hamas Ministry of Health daily issues the latest Gazan mortality figures but it does not distinguish between civilians and fighters. There is certainly no reason whatsoever to accept the Hamas figures at face value, considering that it is very much in the interest of Hamas to inflate them in order to obtain the world’s sympathy. In that respect, they have very well succeeded, for within the majority of Western countries, there has been a significant effusion of anti-Israel sentiment. To a large extent, this has emanated from an abundance of anti-Israel propaganda issued by UN bodies, pro-Hamas non-government organisations, and by both newspapers and television stations hostile to Israel. Their traducing of Israel has been both unyielding and deceitful.
For example, the Human Rights Watch organisation maintained that there was ‘no plausible military reason’ to justify Israel’s efforts to persuade Gazans to vacate areas likely to become engulfed in battle. Furthermore, since Israel’s evacuation orders ostensibly caused the Gazans ‘great harm’, far from assisting the evacuees, Israel imperilled them. Consequently, Israel was reputed to have been ‘responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity’. Human Rights Watch seems to be totally incapable of coming to terms with the fact that Hamas freely resorts to the employment of human shields whether they be in hospitals, schools, mosques or residential buildings. With regard to the latter, Israeli troops on securing control of a particular building, frequently come across large caches of ammunition and at times, entrances to underground tunnels, of which some have even been situated under children’s cots. The point is that Hamas makes no distinction between a building being used to meet civilian needs and one being used for military purposes.
Similarly, the UN Human Rights Committee has accused Israel of ‘undertaking a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system’. As it happens, Hamas operatives have been present in a number of hospitals in Gaza, where they have assumed commanding executive positions. As to the medical staff, the majority have been appointed by Hamas and fully support it. Immediately upon being kidnapped from Kibbutz Nachal Oz, Judith Raanan and her daughter Natalie, were taken to the Al Shifa Hospital, where on their arrival in a terrified and distraught state, they met with a horde of nurses ululating as a means of celebrating the supposed victory of Hamas. At least Judith and her daughter survived and were eventually released. By contrast, 19-year-old Noa Marciano, when brought to the same hospital, was murdered.
If Gazan hospitals refrain from sheltering Hamas fighters, Israel generally leaves them to their own devices. Yet two hospitals in particular, Al Shifa and the European Hospital, went a step too far. On March 18, 2024, on gathering conclusive evidence that over 500 armed Hamas fighters had assembled at Al Shfa Hospital, Israeli forces entered the Al Shifa Hospital complex to confront them in exchanges of fire that lasted two full weeks. In the process, 200 of the enemy intruders were killed while Israel lost three men and thanks to its soldiers’ concern and diligence, all of the 300 patients then present, emerged unscathed. Then on May 13, 2025, Israel, after acquiring knowledge of an eight-meter deep tunnel situated both adjacent to and under the European Hospital, duly bombed it. As a result, 16 senior Hamas officials were killed, including Mahammad Sinwar, the then Hamas leader. Of all things, that tunnel served as a command post for the October 7 attack on Israel. If anyone was posing a threat to Gaza’s health care system, it was surely Hamas by employing hospitals for military purposes.
The examples of anti-Israel propaganda cited above, are rather mild compared with the daily fare issued by a large core of Israel opponents. Such sources subscribe to the view that Israel is guilty of committing the genocide of Palestinians. Whenever it is brought to the attention of such accusers that the Palestinian population has been steadily rising, they generally retort that a genocide could occur merely by dint of intentions. While there is absolutely no reason to assume that the Israelis seeks to kill all or most of the Palestinians, Hamas, has in its charter, expressed in writing that it intends to kill all Jewish Israelis. Yet, one seldom, if ever, hears any critic of Israel expressing his or her abhorrence of such an aspiration. The supposed genocide of Palestinians is the very bedrock of the anti-Israel movement. It facilitates the false depiction of Israel as being to a Nazi racist state that is currently starving Gazans to death. Yet if anything, it is Hamas that shoots at both Gazans attempting to reach food distribution points and the staff manning them.
In general, Hamas has no qualms in turning against its own people. As Amnesty International reported, in 2014 when in conflict with Israel, ‘Hamas forces carried out a brutal campaign of abductions, torture, and unlawful killings against Palestinians accused of ‘collaborating’ with Israel.’
With regard to the current war between Hamas and Israel, on October 26, 2023, a day before Israel launched its retaliation, the late Ismail Haniyeh, in his capacity as head of Hamas, addressed the Palestinians in Gaza, as follows: ‘As I have said repeatedly, the blood of children, women, and the elderly should not make you cry out. Rather we need this blood to awaken the revolution, to awaken stubbornness, to awaken and move forward.’
It is inconceivable that any Western leader on the eve of confronting an enemy, would suggest to his or her countrymen that the spilling of their blood would be desirable. Herein lies the difference between Hamas and most of us in the West, for we uphold life as an end in itself and not as a means of furthering other objectives. Moreover, we are at odds with Hamas on a number of other issues. We cherish democracies, free speech, equal rights for all men and women, freedom to pursue one’s own lifestyle and inter-religious tolerance.
Finally, most of us still believe in rationality, that is, questioning issues on the basis of objective facts and not on the basis of unverified assumptions.
Yet, many in the West and fortunately not the majority, lend their support to Hamas, either because they have been influenced by the radical left, or because as Muslims, they have succumbed to the views of local Islamists. In both cases they unquestioningly accept the Palestine narrative that Israel is nothing more than a colonial settler state that came into existence by depriving the Palestinians of their land.
However, while such a conviction has periodically been articulated through the medium of anti-Israel street protests, they have been nothing like the numerous and anger-ridden ones that have been continuously appearing since October 7, 2023 and which have been accompanied by the burning of synagogues and an acute eruption of anti-Semitism.
Clearly, a new strain of Western anti-Israel activists, almost certainly fueled by Hamas affiliates, has emerged, demanding nothing less than Israel’s demise. This in turn has somewhat diminished the moral fabric of our society.
Leslie Stein is an author of a trilogy on the history of Israel
