There is a video making the rounds today that shows members of a Gaza clan executing a member of Hamas they accuse of shooting and killing one of their relatives. That this video exists is further confirmation that Hamas has been significantly weakened.
Yet taking full advantage of this weakness requires more than acknowledging the fact of Hamas’s totalitarian brutality. It requires confronting how Hamas has built the machinery of persecution so we in the West can avoid contributing to it any further.
Take the courageous op-ed in the Washington Post by Gaza City lawyer Moumen Al-Natour.
Natour knows the risks and has “the scars to prove it, having been arrested and tortured multiple times” in the wake of the 2019 anti-Hamas protests. Unfortunately, Hamas survived that civil challenge to its rule. Which is why Western leaders must pay more attention to how it was able to hold on.
Natour writes, for example: “Hamas has, throughout this war, systematically stolen and resold humanitarian aid, profiting from our hunger. Networks run by people like me have had to find ways around Hamas, distributing supplies to those most in need of them.”
During the course of the war, Israel facilitated the delivery into Gaza of enough aid to provide 3,000 calories a day per Gazan. During the two-month cease-fire from January to March, 4,200 aid trucks entered Gaza. Less than two weeks ago, even the BBC admitted that “there is no immediate danger to the civilian population.”
Yet once Hamas declined Israel’s offers to extend the cease-fire and renewed the war, Hamas itself became that immediate threat. Hamas’s wartime policy has always, without exception, been one of hoarding supplies and pricing many Gazans out of certain foodstuffs while also openly killing non-Hamas members who try to collect or distribute food aid. The process is simple: Israel lets in humanitarian aid and Hamas locks it down. The cease-fire periods are hibernation periods in reverse: Instead of stocking up for the lull, Hamas uses the lull to stock up.
Hamas’s grip on power has weakened, so aid agencies were able to get more food to the people who actually needed it. But the renewal of active conflict, which Hamas has initiated as easily as flipping a light switch, gives the terror masters their advantage back. Negotiating cease-fires in which Israeli troops move out of the Netzarim Corridor, which divided the enclave during the war and enabled parts of Gaza to return to some semblance of normal life, allows Hamas to hit the reset button.
That doesn’t mean cease-fire agreements should be off the table, because the fate of the hostages must remain on the minds of negotiators. It just means that the needs of ordinary Gazans must be factored into the deals as well. A war stoppage ostensibly for their benefit brings them short-term relief but medium- and long-term misery. That is not a sustainable model for anything but perpetual Hamas control.
Moreover, without keeping the pressure on Hamas leadership, recruitment will be easier and the Gazans standing up to Hamas will be sitting ducks. Any opportunity for Hamas to regroup after this past week’s astounding protests will be far more damaging because there’s no guarantee the demonstrations and defiance will reemerge.
Plus, the method of Hamas’s regrouping should chill us all.
The Free Press interviewed the family of Uday Nasser Saadi al-Rabbay, a 22-year-old Gazan from Tel al-Hawa murdered by Hamas for the crime of protesting its rule. This is their account of what happened after Uday attended a protest and then denounced Hamas in a coffee shop:
“According to his family, a few hours later, around 30 armed men from the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, stormed his home and dragged him away. His family says they tortured him for hours, until he was dead. When they were done—after they had broken his fingers, stabbed him repeatedly, and smashed his head with a rifle butt—they dropped his body off a rooftop. A note was pinned to his clothes: ‘This is the price for all who criticize Hamas.’”
Presumably this is what would be taking place all over the enclave should Hamas be let up off the mat. The end of Hamas has always been a crucial war goal, and it must remain so.
