Annihilating Hamas Is Tantamount to Destroying the Entire Gaza Strip - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Everyone is in favor of destroying Hamas. Who would oppose this? No one would. Extremists want it to happen before the hostages are released, and the moderates say: Let's release the hostages first and then we can annihilate the terror organization.
This is a deception that needs to be unmasked. Annihilating Hamas amounts to annihilating an entire people, or at least killing all of Gaza's men. Destroying Hamas amounts to genocide dressed up in decent attire.
Annihilating Hamas is ostensibly a legitimate objective, especially after October 7, but it is unattainable without destroying all of Gaza. This is why annihilating Hamas is a criminal objective. As long as the occupation continues, it will never be attained.
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Even if the resistance movement is no longer called Hamas, it will continue to rise, in cycle after cycle, and Israel will destroy it.
Under the guise of annihilating Hamas, an ongoing massacre of men is now underway in Gaza, an issue less talked about. A handful of conscientious Israelis and world public opinion are focused on women and children who are being massacred in apocalyptic numbers.
Other than parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Israeli fascists – whose numbers are by no means negligible – no human being can remain indifferent upon seeing the deadchildren in Gaza. But the so-human focus on women and children affords legitimacy to the massacre of Gaza's men. After all, they couldn't possibly be innocent or inculpable.
One cannot destroy Hamas without killing all the men and male youths in the Gaza Strip. Anyone now breathing in Gaza, and certainly anyone still making a living there, is somehow associated with Hamas.
With a tyrannical ruling party in a country that has been under siege for 19 years, every male hospital nurse, every municipal accountant, school bus driver, traffic cop, open-air market warden and even a child in kindergarten, is associated with Hamas.
Displaced Palestinians walk through a makeshift tent camp in the Muwasi area of Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, on Monday.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP
They are definitely fair game and can be killed, just like the organization's militants can.
In order to eliminate them, it is also permissible to kill thousands of people as collateral damage. The fact that the war is being waged not between two armies, but between a huge army and a ragtag group that on a good day could be defined as a barefoot militia, is blurring all boundaries.
Israel doesn't view them as soldiers, and the term terrorist is a very labile one in Israel. In the West Bank, it has long been permissible to kill a small child holding an even smaller stone, with the claim that he was a terrorist.
All the hundreds of thousands of war-orphaned children and other victims of the war, the disabled, the dispossessed, hungry and sick, as well as their future progeny, will grow up and want to join the resistance.
It will be impossible to stop them without killing every last one of them. An entire generation will seek revenge, and with good reason, with Hamas or with any other movement that replaces it.
The new targets to be killed will not read the Hamas charter and it's doubtful that they'll know the laws of Islam – they will just want to join the resistance.
Kill them and you annihilate Hamas. Tens of thousands of bereaved parents in Gaza will also want to join the campaign against those who killed their children in the tens of thousands, and they too will need to be killed.
A Palestinian father plays alongside his son with their toys and belongings he collected at their heavily-damaged house at the al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, May.Credit: Eyad Baba/AFP
The most moral army in the world will call this "mowing the lawn." Every season, another mowing, as long as the occupation continues.
Will the killing of Gaza's men and male youths be less criminal than the killing of women and children? It's highly unlikely. It's true that women and children symbolize innocence and helplessness, but in Gaza, not much innocence remains after this war and everyone there is helpless.
No uninvolved people will remain there either, since no uninvolved person is left. How can one remain uninvolved after 19 months of fear and terror, indiscriminate bombing and no less criminal shelling?
An uprooted person trying to return to the ruins of his house will be deemed an involved person deserving death, just like the refugees of 1948, who tried to do so were called infiltrators, whom it was compulsory to shoot dead.
A mother trying to protect her children will also be considered an involved person, as will a grandmother trying to save her grandson. Killing her and everyone around her – that is the true meaning of annihilating Hamas.
From centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid to extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – everyone in Israel is in favor.