Hamas’ distorted ‘Gaza death toll’ logic

The sickening logic of Israel’s detractors is to ignore context and facts and focus only on the body count.

By: Mati Wagner, World Israel News

For Israel’s critics, what is important to know about the ongoing clashes along Israel’s border with Gaza Strip is not the truth, not the context — just the body count. Tell me how many Palestinians were killed compared to how many Israelis and I will tell you who is right and who is wrong, they say.  All else is irrelevant, a distraction from the real issue, which is Israel’s purported criminality.

Israel’s detractors care little that the organizing principle behind the throngs of Palestinians attempting to rush Israel’s border is deception, not the welfare of the Palestinian people.

Hamas is using the violence on the Israel-Gaza border to shift focus away from its own resounding failures as the de facto rulers of Gaza Strip since 2007, when in a bloody coup it wrested control of Gaza from Fatah two years after Israel had evacuated all Jewish communities and its military forces from the territory.

The ‘right of return’ means the end of Israel

Ostensibly, the unrest is about the Palestinians’ “right of return” or the “right” of millions of Palestinians – the children, or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, of Palestinian Arabs who once lived in what became Israel in 1948 – to “return” to places where they have never been.

But while the “right of return” remains not only a central demand of all Palestinian leaders but an essential component of Palestinian identity, its implementation would mean the end of Israel’s Jewish majority and, as a result, the end of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.

Hamas’ strategy is simple: encourage throngs of Palestinians — including women, children and the elderly together with armed terrorists — to rush the fence separating Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip from Israel and wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. The more deaths, the better.

Hamas knows that no sovereign state can allow its border to be overrun by thousands of potentially violent rioters, particularly when the crowds are probably nothing but cover for terrorists prepared to carry out an attack against Israelis.

And the strategy worked: Israel is being ostracized for killing “innocent” Palestinians.

No one seems to care that under Hamas rule the limited resources available to Gazans are monopolized by Hamas, or that Hamas squanders precious resources not on the welfare of Palestinians, but rather to prepare for the next failed war with Israel.

Both Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade on materials which could be used by Hamas to build weapons or attack tunnels. But only Israel has been singled out for daring to protect itself by refusing to provide Hamas with the means to attack innocent civilians.

Fatah has stopped the transfer of funds provided by Americans, Europeans and other nations to their fellow Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinian infighting

Hamas’s attempts at reconciliation with the Fatah leadership in Judea and Samaria have gone nowhere because both sides care more about their own aggrandizement than about the betterment of the Palestinian people.

Meanwhile, Gazans have no electricity; they lack potable water; the rebuilding of Gaza has been stalled since Hamas initiated yet another failed military confrontation with Israel in 2014; and sewage treatment is non-existent.

All of this is the doing of the Palestinians’ failed political leadership. But Israel is blamed.

When Hamas’ irresponsible leaders, who are driven by their nihilistic Islamist ideology and all-consuming hatred of Israel, risk the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians with nothing to lose by sending them to threaten the border with Israel, and Israel is forced to react to protect itself, Israel’s detractors look only at the final body count.

FatahHamasPalestinian right of return