More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in the month since Hamas’ terrorist attacks inside southern Israel, the group’s health ministry in Gaza says.
But Hamas officials say the mounting death toll, believed to include thousands of children, has not caused the group to regret its actions in southern Israel, which Israeli officials said killed 1,400 people.
In fact, Hamas leaders say that their goal was to trigger this very response and that they’re still hoping for a bigger war. It’s all part of a strategy, they say, to derail talks over Israel normalizing relations with regional powers — namely, Saudi Arabia — and draw the world’s attention to the Palestinian cause.
Hamas, these officials say, is more interested in the destruction of Israel than what it sees as the temporary hardships faced by Palestinians under Israeli bombardment.
“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the group’s governing politburo, told The New York Times in an interview.
This is utter fantasy. There was/is a growing movement on the left in the west recognizing the abuses of the Israeli regime but that movement was very marginal and would probably remain so in the near future. The governments and ruling elites in the west still overwhelmingly supported Israel and were willing to turn a blind eye to the abuses, even as they have increased under the new far right government that came to power recently. Even the Arab countries that previously championed the Palestinian cause were defecting.
The trajectory of this conflict before Oct 7th was a slow legalistic ethnic cleansing in the west bank backed unquestioningly by the United States. A few more leftists might protest it in the U.S. but they are fundamentally impotent against the inertia of the current system as a majority of the people don’t know or care about Palestine. Doesn’t matter if a tweet calling Israel an apartheid state gets millions of likes if the U.S. Congress still votes 430 to 5 for aid to Israel every time it comes up.
The Palestinian cause needed something to keep it relevant and shake up the status quo that was slowly killing it. Oct 7th was probably one of the worst ways to do it, but at least more people know about how horrible the system is.