Hamas official: No one could have anticipated Israel’s ‘reaction’ to October 7 attack

Mousa Abu Marzouk charged that a “world war” was being waged against Hamas, “in violation of international law.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A senior Hamas official said Thursday that “nobody” could have anticipated Israel’s response to his organization’s invasion of Israel and massacre of 1,200 people, including infants and the elderly, on October 7.

In an interview Mousa Abu Marzouk gave to Egypt’s Alghad TV that was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the deputy chairman of Hamas’ political bureau was asked if anyone had “any expectations regarding the consequences of that attack.”

“Nobody in the whole world” expected such a “barbaric” response by Israel, Marzouk answered, “and in such violation of all the international laws, treaties and norms.”

Israel declared war on the terror organization and vowed to destroy its ability to ever attack Israel again, including with actions that are globally considered war crimes. These include launching rockets indiscriminately over the border at civilians, which Hamas has fired in the thousands since October 7th.

On October 7 alone, Hamas launched some 3,000 rockets while they and other terrorists committed such crimes as burning whole families alive, beheading infants, and systematically raping and sexually mutilating men, women and girls before murdering them.

The IDF says it has focused on killing or capturing Hamas combatants, strictly adhering to all international laws of war, including by ordering and helping Gazan civilians to flee upcoming battle zones, giving up the element of surprise in order to protect non-combatants’ lives.

Hamas also charges that Israel has killed some 30,000 Gazans, but doesn’t differentiate between combatants and civilians.

The IDF has calculated that some 10,000 of the casualties in Gaza are combatants, meaning that the ratio of civilian to military deaths is two to one, a ratio of what is known as “collateral damage” that is exceptionally low and acceptable to every army in the world during war.

Abu Marzouk claimed that the Hamas “resistance” is only “fighting soldiers,” ignoring the fact that his terror group and others took 253 people hostage back to the Gaza Strip, the vast majority of them civilians.

A hostage deal in late November freed over a hundred women, children, and Thai agricultural workers, but 134 are still in captivity, with Israel having declared just under a quarter of them already dead.

When asked what Hamas would have done if they had expected these consequences, Marzouk ducked the question, saying instead that “Nobody expected that all the Western powers, the U.S., and Britain, would wage a world war against civilians… in the sense that America, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, all of them would gather their armies, and the U.S. would send its two largest aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean Sea, all in order to fight a movement.”

The U.S. sent its ships in a display of support for Israel, and to deter Iran and its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon from joining the fight.

While Hezbollah has engaged in rocket, missile, and drone attacks on northern Israel and made several infiltration attempts, the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border has not escalated into a full-scale war.

Other Western countries have confined their anti-terror activities to assisting the U.S., some in very restrained fashion, in patrolling international shipping lanes off the coast of Yemen endangered by Houthi terrorists who control a large part of the country.

The Americans and British have hit Houthi command centers and launching sites there, and have downed dozens of missiles that the Iran-backed group has launched at cargo vessels in their own show of support for Hamas.