Hamas billionaire Khaled Mashaal says Gaza destruction has been worth it

He’s one of those fanatics who is willing to slaughter real people now for the sake of a dream coming true later.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

In his Marie-Antoinette let-them-eat-cake moment, one of the senior leaders, of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, who both the Israeli and American governments agree has stolen $4 billion from the aid meant for ordinary Gazans, has declared himself well satisfied with the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza during the current war.

He’s living in a luxury hotel in Doha, far from the battlefield. Why should he care that the war he helped to start has meant such misery for people in Gaza?

More on his sublime indifference to their condition can be found in the interview he just gave to Sky News here:

“Hamas’s Mashaal: Gaza is destroyed, but this is part of ‘march toward liberation,’” by Lazar Berman, Times of Israel, June 27, 2024:

Senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal…acknowledges the damage wrought to the territory in the aftermath of the October 7 attack. “Gaza is now destroyed,” he says. “Every fair-minded person sees that this is absolutely true.”

However, he says, this is all part of the “march of our people toward liberation.”

“Gaza is now destroyed,” Mashaal claims. This is not true. Only 17% of the infrastructure in the Strip has been demolished, while a great many other buildings have been severely damaged.

Mashaal doesn’t care about the Gazans whose interests he claims to represent and whose lives his terrorist group, Hamas, has helped to ruin.

He’s one of those fanatics who is willing to slaughter real people now for the sake of a dream coming true later —in his case, the total destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea” and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state.

Others of a similar bent include the demented Marxist Abimael Guzman, head of the Sendero Lubinoso (Shining Path) in Peru, or the even crazier Pol Pot, who as leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia slaughtered millions of his fellow Cambodians, especially the entire intellectual class who it was believed, would be most resistant to the Khmer Rouge’s program to “equalize” society.

It is Hamas that dragged Israel into a war it did not want, with the atrocities — rapes, tortures, murders, mass kidnappings — Hamas carried out on October 7.

The IDF could do no other than respond with a ferocious counterattack after the October 7 atrocities, to make sure that Hamas will never again be a military power capable of repeating those atrocities, despite the Hamas boast that it will repeat them, as soon as it is able,” again and again.”

Now the Gaza campaign is winding down.

The Israelis have killed at least half of the Hamas combatants holed up in Gaza, and are in the process of dismantling what remains of all four of the Hamas battalions that were believed to still be intact in that city just a month ago.

Meanwhile, the IDF is also dealing with Hamas remnants operating in northern Gaza, attempting but so far failing, to regroup.

Given Khaled Mashaal’s huge theft of Gazan aid money, and his cloudless life in a luxury hotel in Gaxa, one might have expected him to at least express fellow feeling for those Palestinians whose homes have been destroyed or damaged in Gaza,or who have had family members wounded or killed.

No such luck. He’s delighted with such destruction. He doesn’t care about those civilian deaths.

After all, the misery of the Palestinians in Gaza — for which Hamas alone, with its embedding of both men and weapons in civilian areas and buildings (schools, apartments, mosques) — is responsible, allows Hamas to score propaganda points with its depiction of the “cruel” IDF.

When will the people in Gaza dare to hold mass demonstrations denouncing not just Khaled Mashaal, but his fellow Hamas billionaires Moussa abu Marzouk and Ismael Haniyeh, who, like Mashaal, stole their money — $4 billion by Marzouk, $3 billion by Haniyeh — from the aid sent to support the people of Gaza?

When will someone at the UN, or in Congress, or among the Bidenites stand up and demand that every effort must be made to claw back those $11 billion, which will go a long way to help rebuild Gaza?