For years, there has been a belief that ISIS (Daesh) is in a league of its own – a brutal Islamist group that not only murders innocent civilians but does so in the most horrific ways possible. However, the gruesome images of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) butchering civilians and taking hostages dispelled this notion.
In heartbreaking images captured on surveillance cameras and testimonies of the survivors, how civilians died was made clear.
The terrorists from the elite Hamas unit Nukhba Force and the PIJ had killed with expert sadism. In one kibbutz, Kfar Aza, more than 40 infants and toddlers were killed: Some were found decapitated. Some families were locked in and their homes were set on fire. They threw hand grenades into crowded shelters. They raped women.
They took hostages ranging from babies to Holocaust survivors in wheelchairs. Hamas announced that the hostages would be executed one by one in response to the attacks of the Israel Air Force. Adding insult to injury, the terrorists who looted the homes used their victims’ credit cards to make purchases in Gaza. The atrocities were carried out on top of the unrelenting salvos of rockets and missiles on Israeli towns and villages.
International reaction reflected the shock and the anguish felt by the Israelis.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described it as “depravity in the most imaginable way… A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive.”
US President Joe Biden condemned the attack as “act of sheer evil: Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage…women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.” Rear Admiral (ret.) John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, struggled to hold back tears in a TV interview when asked about the atrocities, kidnappings, and the rape of women.
Worse than ISIS
Defense Secretary Loyd Austin insisted that Hamas was worse than ISIS.
Commentators echoed President Biden, who said that not since the Holocaust have so many Jews died in such horrific ways.
The massacre raised questions about the timing of the event and the use of ISIS-like methods. The timing is easier to understand: Ever since the Abraham Accords, the panicked Iranian regime used venomous rhetoric to denounce the agreement publicly while secretly looking to deploy violence to scuttle it. The Revolutionary Guards devised the “unity of fronts,” also known as the “united front of resistance,” whereby some or all their proxies, including Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah, could be mobilized to create violence.
The Quds Force, the foreign operation division of the Guards, started preparing for the plan in 2021. As part of the “unity of fronts” project, Iran shipped high-powered assault weapons to Hamas for them to massacre large crowds and thermobaric bombs, used with great lethality during the assault.
News of a possible deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia rang alarm bells in Tehran. The regime and its chief policy adviser on Israel, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, thought that Israel, weakened by months of bitter protest against the hardline government, would be an easy target. Esmail Qaani, the IRGC-QF commander, traveled to Beirut several times and held secret meetings with the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PIJ at the Iranian embassy in Beirut to discuss a possible coordinated attack on Israel. Qaani urged the terror groups to act quickly and said Iran would provide the necessary tools to carry out the attacks against Israel.
Using barbaric methods is more difficult to explain, especially as, over the years, Hamas was considered a “fairly rational” organization amenable to negotiation and deals. Observers tended to ignore its foundation manifesto, which rejected the right of Israel to exist, generating the slogan “Palestine from the river to the sea.” Indeed, even the Israeli intelligence services believed Hamas was ready to curb its militancy in exchange for material incentives. The so-called “too much to lose” theory – a reference to Israeli plans to bolster the economy of Gaza, including building a seaport- became popular.
In reality, manipulating reasonableness, Hamas and PIJ nursed a hard-core Islamist ideology inspired by Jordanian-based Palestinian theologian and Al Qaeda co-founder Abdullah Azzam and his violent disciple, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS. Azzam preached that the global struggle between Islam and Israel, part of the Western enemy, is approaching.
Al Zarqawi took this notion a step further by developing a jihadist strategy based on two popular jihadist books: One, Issues in the Jurisprudence of Jihad (Masail fi Figh al-Dima), also known as Jurisprudence of Blood, or the “jihadist bible,” provided theological justification for inflicting extreme violence on enemies, as well as a list of tactics such as beheading, torturing, or burning prisoners alive.
The second book, Management of Savagery, urged to commit “attention-grabbing” atrocities to attract recruits and sow fear in the enemy’s hearts. Hamas and PIJ admired al Zarqawi. When the terror chief was assassinated in 2006, Sami Abu Zohri, a spokesman for Hamas, praised him as “the martyr of the umma” (the Islamic community). Hamas and PIJ training programs used his tactics and the jihadist literature.
As of this writing, the war is ongoing, and its outcome is uncertain. One thing, however, should be clear. Hamas and the PIJ are not partners for peace.
Hamas runs a brutal regime which, like its mentor, Hezbollah, has embedded among the civilian population, turning it into a collective human shield. It has siphoned billions of dollars in foreign aid to create a state of the art military machine. The rest was spent to support the lavish lifestyle of the leaders. The upscale neighborhood of Rimal, where they reside, has often been compared to Beverly Hills. Total eradication of the terrorists is critical.
In the short term, it would release the Palestinians from serving as human shields; in the long run, it may help the peace process.
Ofira Seliktar is a professor emerita, Gratz College. Farhad Rezaei is a senior fellow at the Philos Project.