Hamas invites Elon Musk to Gaza Strip

The move comes after the billionaire X owner was taken by Prime Minister Netanyahu to see the remnants of the terrorists’ October 7 destruction in Israel.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Hamas invited Elon Musk to visit the Gaza Strip Tuesday in the wake of the personal tour Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the billionaire X owner the previous day of the destruction the terrorist organization had caused in Israel’s southern communities on October 7.

“We invite him to visit Gaza to see the extent of the massacres and destruction committed against the people of Gaza, in compliance with the standards of objectivity and credibility,” senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said at a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon.

“Within 50 days, Israel dropped more than 40,000 tons of explosives on the homes of defenseless Gazans,” Hamdam added, calling on the U.S. to stop supplying Israel with weapons.

The IDF stopped announcing how much ordinance it has used after the first week of the war, when it said its UAVs and manned jets had dropped 6,000 bombs on Hamas military targets.

Through its government’s health ministry, Hamas has claimed that over 16,000 civilians have died to date as a result of Israel’s military actions in the Strip, a large minority of them children. The ministry provides no evidence to back its numbers, which Israeli officials say is wildly inflated.

It also includes active Hamas fighters as part of its civilian death count, with the terror group only admitting to dozens of dead while Israel estimates that it has eliminated at least 4,000 combatants so far.

Hamas has already been proven to lie, saying that failed rocket launches aimed at Israel that hit its own population, killing hundreds, were IDF airstrikes. Its proven use of civilians as human shields also lays the blame for any deaths among them on Hamas, and not on Israel, which still makes every effort not to hit noncombatants, even calling off airstrikes due to their presence at the military target site.

Musk had toured Kfar Aza, one of the worst-hit in the invasion, and was briefed on the details of the massacre that the terrorists had carried out in the kibbutz during its surprise invasion, in which fighters in uniform as well as ordinary Gazans murdered 1,200 people overall. After a meeting with the prime minister, he was also shown the 47-minute video the IDF had compiled of Hamas atrocities, taken from the invaders’ own GoPro cameras, content they had put online, and security cameras in the communities.

He also met with President Isaac Herzog to discuss the war and the sharp global spike in antisemitism, which he stands accused of spreading through the lax policies against hate speech on his hugely popular X social media platform. Musk has also come under fire for seeming to back certain anti-Jewish tropes in his own posts as well.

“The platforms you lead, unfortunately, have a huge reservoir of hatred, hatred of Jews and antisemitism,” Herzog told the billionaire. “Hatred of the Jews affects the behavior of people in many places around the world, and you have a huge role to play in this.”

The founder of SpaceX and Tesla had appeared to take Israel’s side afterwards, saying, “Those that are intent on murder must be neutralized,” he said. “The propaganda must stop that is training people to be murderers in the future.”

“It’s amazing,” he noted, “what humans can do if they’re fed lies since they were children. They will think that murdering innocents is a good thing, which shows how much propaganda can affect people’s minds.”

It had been “jarring,” he noted, “to see the scene of the massacre.”

While many in Israel appreciated Musk’s visit, others were more cynical, saying that he had come in order to help restore tens of millions of dollars in revenue that X had recently lost due to major advertisers like Disney, Apple and IBM pulling out after they found that their ads had appeared alongside antisemitic and pro-Nazi posts.