Besieged Palestinian Gaza has counted dozens of dead since Friday and the end of a ceasefire to exchange Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. It counts 21,022 dead between October 7 and December 1, of which 8,312 are children, 4,270 are women and the vast majority are civilians. 76 journalists have also been murdered by the Israeli war machine and 1,780,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes or refugee camps. At the same time, 60,100 buildings have been destroyed, including 262 schools, 1,102 factories, 22 hospitals, 55 clinics and 48 ambulances. These figures are chilling and rightly cause anger, despair and indignation among Palestinians and other peoples of the world alike.
But the numbers are not enough for those who claim that the issue is Hamas and its destruction. For those who feel the need to defend Israel and the war it is waging against the Palestinian people, under the pretext of self-defence and the fight against terrorism. For those who claim that anyone who talks about Palestine and its ongoing drama, especially after 7 October, is in essence supporting Hamas, the murder of Israelis and the ‘jihad’ that will engulf Western… civilisation. Numbers are not enough to make those who are quick to pay their respects to the occupying state of Israel, those who justify the crimes, outrages, genocide and ethnic cleansing that continue in Gaza and the West Bank, step back.
The issue, however, has never been Hamas, which was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood at the start of the first intifada. Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation, not the other way around, no matter how much the narrative is pushed that all Palestinians want to wipe the Jews out of the region. Hamas only took off after the death of Yasser Arafat and reached its heyday after the second intifada and after a series of crimes committed by the Israeli occupying forces between 2000 and 2005: the murder of 3,000 Palestinians, the arrest of 7,500, the occupation of territories and the construction of the wall-layer inside the West Bank and around Gaza.
The issue has never been Hamas, even if some feel sure that Israel is waging war against jihadists who want to destroy Europe and wipe out Christians. Israel is doing no different than it did before the emergence of Hamas: it is intensifying its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, with the ultimate goal of killing as many as it can and driving out the rest. It is intensifying the settlement of the West Bank, arming fundamentalist settlers, in addition to a military presence in every corner of the Palestinian land, constantly provoking tensions, and invading refugee camps in search of alleged terrorists. The issue has never been Hamas. It was and is the imposition of Israeli domination and the gradual disappearance of the Palestinians from what the Israelis consider theirs.
