“You’re afraid!”
Gaza City, September 25 – A Hamas fighter in a tunnel beneath a residential building in this besieged city called on the Israeli military today to stop striking from a distance with missiles, bombs, and artillery, and to engage him and his comrades face to face on the battlefield as proper soldiers do, and by the way, there might be hostages kept in that tunnel, and you wouldn’t want to shoot them by accident, would you?
Ahmad Hejazi, a Hamas platoon commander in Gaza City, sought in a social media post to mock Israeli soldiers for cowardice, accusing them of refusing to get close and fight like real men. Hejazi made the posts from a position constructed under an apartment block housing more than a hundred noncombatants, in the hopes that Israel will either refrain from downing the structure out of concern for civilian life, or deem the position worth the collateral damage, in which case Hamas and its allies would wield the resulting images of death and destruction as a weapon to delegitimize Israel.
“Fight like men!” he taunted on a Hamas-affiliated Telegram channel. “You’re afraid! That’s why you only shoot from far away! Not like us courageous soldiers of Allah, willing to face combat against you from behind noncombatants and hostages!”
Israel announced months ago that its next objective in the war against Hamas that began in October 2023 will be the city of Gaza itself, the locale that gave the entire territory its name. The IDF has heretofore avoided seizing control of any large concentrations of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, though it does control most of the non-urban space in the territory. Operations began soon after Hamas and Palestinian civilians invaded southern Israel during the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah and slaughtered, rape, pillaged, looted, vandalized, burned, tortured, mutilated, and kidnapped Israelis and whomever else they encountered. Of the 250 hostages taken to the Gaza Strip that day, 48 remain, about twenty of whom are assumed to still live.
Repeated mediation attempts by various third parties have failed to resolve the conflict; the two sides’ non-negotiable terms for a long-term ceasefire are mutually exclusive. Israel aims to secure a Hamas-free Gaza Strip that can never threaten Israel again, while Hamas strives to preserve its rule of the territory so it can build toward another attempt to destroy, or at least hurt, Israel.
Progressives in the West echoed Hejazi’s admonitions, criticizing the IDF for not killing only terrorists while remaining silent on those terrorists’ use of Palestinian and Israeli human shields.
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