Slaughtering women, kids for storming of a mosque? Hamas brutes are terrorists using humans as shield

The effluvium of piled-up decaying corpses pervaded the air while other bodies were buried in shallow graves as horrified families mourned the loss of their loved ones amid the rubble of concrete structures. The scene was the systematic slaughter of around 300 Iraqi civilians by the monstrous Islamic State (IS) while retreating from the Iraqi town of Hamam al-Alil in November 2016. Similarly, IS savages murdered 233-262 civilians in and around the Syrian city of Kobani in June 2015. “By all accounts, this was a planned attack on the civilian population of this area,” Letta Tayler, senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher, had told Human Rights Watch. Around eight years later, a similar bloodbath occurred on 7 October.

Around 5,000 rockets fired. More than 1,200 dead and around 3,400 injured. Bodies were scattered in cities and towns, at kibbutzim and the Tribe of Nova music festival (an all-night dance party to mark the Jewish holiday Sukkot which turned into a dance of death), and 150 people were taken hostage, including women and children.

The perpetrators were Hamas terrorists of its military wing Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, who butchered men, women, children, toddlers and the elderly raiding kibbutzim, cities and towns after firing a fusillade of rockets supplied by Iran and the Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah. The number of horrifying pictures and videos showing Hamas dragging Israeli soldiers and civilians through the streets of Gaza was gut-wrenching. Videos show  three men being captured and injured Israeli soldiers and civilians with their hands tied being dragged to vehicles as terrorists on bikes, boats and paragliders stormed kibbutzim like Kfar Aza, Beeri, Urim and others, cities and towns in the multipronged ambush. “Hamas is worse than ISIS [IS],” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted while sharing a picture of Hamas’s brutality. At least, 260 revellers at the music festival were shot dead at point-blank range by Hamas , their belongings were stolen and their bodies piled up in tents. Around 100 people were shot dead at Kibbutz Be’eri , a self-sustaining farming community of 1,000 residents. An 18-year-old girl was executed in front of her sobbing siblings and parents in their home.

Shani Louk, a 23-year-old woman, was kidnapped at the festival, stripped naked and paraded through the streets of Gaza in a flatbed truck.

Noa Argamani, a 25-year-old woman, was hoisted onto a motorcycle by terrorists from the Nova festival as she pleaded for life.

Sharing pictures on X, the IDF tweeted: “This is incriminating evidence of the war crimes committed by the Hamas terrorist organisation.”

What is the difference between the IS and Hamas? None. Both groups are demonic wolves preying on innocent civilians to satisfy their bloodlust knowing well the futility of their objectives. “They are killing women and children in a very cold way,” Israeli Major General Amos Yadlin (retired), the former head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman), said while comparing Hamas with the IS . Major General Itai Veruv (retired) never saw “ anything like this ” in his 40 years of service with the IDF. “I have heard during my childhood about the pogroms in Europe—the Holocaust, of course. All my family came from Europe. They are survivors. But I never thought I would see … things like that,” he told CNN about the Kfar Aza massacre. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox News that October 4 was Israel’s 11 September. “This is our 9/11. Babies, women, and the elderly were dragged outside of their homes and were taken hostage.” Well-organised political, terrorist organisation Hamas’s barbarianism, on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, is the bloodiest terror attack on Israel. The level of intelligence, calculation, planning and coordination was unprecedented even compared to Al-Qaeda and the LTTE, which both could attack from air, land or sea but were unable to execute such a simultaneous assault. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the coordinated land-sea-air Hamas blitzkrieg, in collusion with another Gaza terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) , and the butchery of Israeli civilians on October 7 should shatter any remaining delusion about the terrorist outfit being an Islamic resistance against Israel.

Hamas—the acronym for Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamiyya (Arabic for Islamic Resistance Movement)—like the PIJ, is an offshoot of the Sunni Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood founded by quadriplegic Palestinian cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1987. Designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Israel, Canada, Japan and Australia, Hamas is not a ragtag group of terrorists. Hamas is an extremely well-organised and funded Islamist political and terrorist organisation which governs Gaza and is opposed to Fatah—the Palestinian party governing the West Bank—and its head Mahmoud Abbas, who is also the president of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. After winning the Palestinian Legislative Council election in 2006, Hamas controlled several important significant ministries in Gaza and expelled the PNA and Fatah from Gaza in a violent battle the next year. In 2017, Ismail Haniyeh, who now operates from Doha, replaced Khaled Meshaal as Hamas’s political chief. Issam al-Da’alis is Gaza’s de facto prime minister with day-to-day affairs managed by Yahya Sinwar, a former Al-Qassam Brigades head. Founded in 1991, the Al-Qassam Brigades —the Hamas military wing—has a huge arsenal of missiles, rockets and weapons. It is also active in the West Bank in cooperation with  Fatah’s  Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades  and PIJ’s Al-Quds Brigades  under the umbrella organisation called the Jenin Battalion. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is Hamas’s main funding source and supplies weapons and rocket technology to the group. “Iran also provides up to $100 million annually in combined support to Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command,” a 2020 US State Department report said. Hamas always uses human shield When Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant ordered the unjustified “ complete siege” of Gaza while “fighting barbarians”, Al-Qassam Brigades spokesperson Abu Obaida threatened that Hamas would start executing the “civilian hostages” and “broadcast it” if the IDF targets Gazans without warning. “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of one of the civilian hostages,” he said. The hostages include Israeli children, parents, IDF personnel and foreigners (from Canada, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico and many other nations). Al Qassam Brigades claimed to have captured “dozens” of Israeli soldiers on Saturday. “We bring good news to our (Palestinian) prisoners and our people that the Al-Qassam Brigades have dozens of captured (Israeli) officers and soldiers in their hands,” Obaida said on Telegram. Hamas political bureau deputy chief Mousa Abu Marzouk claimed on Arabic news outlet al-Ghad TV that the hostages include “high-ranking” IDF officers. The most ironic part of Obaida’s statement was that Israel “doesn’t understand the language of humanity and ethics”. When fiends that massacre women, children, toddlers and old people offer the excuse of humanity and ethics to hold hostages to use them as human shield, it is reprehensible and can trigger only disgust and rage. Voice of America journalist Linda Gradstein too fears that Hamas will the hostages to prevent Israeli air raids . “The biggest concern is the dozens of Israelis kidnapped and hidden in Gaza will be used as human shield to prevent an Israeli attack. This is completely unprecedented,” she said. Hamas’s brutal ‘human shield’ tactics might be unprecedented for Israel but not for Gazans. The terrorist group uses the enclave’s residents as human shield in almost every war with Israel and stores weapons in civilian buildings to prevent detection and targeting. In May 2021, Hamas fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israelis from Gaza’s densely populated urban areas while using its civilians as human shield, NGO United Nations Watch said in a report submitted to the secretary general . Terming the Hamas action as a “double war crime”, the report read: “Hamas not only deliberately attacks Israeli civilians, but intentionally exposes its own civilians to the deadly consequences of the hostilities it provokes itself.” During the July-August 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge, the IDF found a Hamas combat manual on urban warfare belonging to the Shuja’iya Brigade of the Al-Qassam Brigades explaining the benefits of human shield. As per the manual, Hamas knows that the IDF will do its best to limit civilian casualties and the terror group will exploit such situations by using civilians as human shield.

In a portion titled ‘Limiting the Use of Weapons’, the manual explains that the IDF “must limit its use of weapons and tactics that lead to the harm and unnecessary loss of people and [destruction of] civilian facilities. It is difficult for them to get the most use out of their firearms, especially of supporting fire [e.g., artillery].

According to Hamas, the “presence of civilians are pockets of resistance” that cause three major problems for advancing troops: (1) Problems with opening fire (2) Problems in controlling the civilian population during operations and afterward (3) Assurance of supplying medical care to civilians who need it. The manual also discusses the benefits of the destruction of civilian homes. “This increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers [the IDF] and increases their gathering [support] around the city defenders (resistance forces.” Only 365 sq km in size, Gaza is 41 km long and 6-12 km wide but is home to 2.3 million people. When Hamas fires rockets from the third most densely populated area in the world, it becomes extremely difficult to locate attackers who can disappear into its civilian population or the labyrinth of tunnels used to attack the IDF or store rockets. In a May 2021 report , The Washington Post quoted Israeli officials as saying that Hamas had spent $1.25 billion to build more than 1,300 tunnels between 2007 and 2014. In July 2014, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency found Hamas rockets secretly stored in one of its vacant schools. “As soon as the rockets were discovered, UNRWA staff were withdrawn from the premises, and so we are unable to confirm the precise number of rockets. The school is situated between two other UNRWA schools that each can accommodate 1,500 internally displaced persons,” the report read. Clearly, Hamas takes advantage of UNRWA’s humanitarian assistance and shelter during clashes with Israel by using civilians and such buildings as shield. “We develop anti-missile systems to protect. We use anti-missile systems to protect our civilians. They [Hamas] use their civilians to protect their missiles. That’s the difference,” Netanyahu had told CNN. In the ongoing conflict, Hamas has flagrantly violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1998 International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute by using captive Israelis as bait. According to Article 23 of Geneva Convention III: “No prisoner of war may at any time be sent to or detained in areas where he may be exposed to the fire of the combat zone nor may his presence be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.” Article 28 also bars using a protected person [civilian] “to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.” International humanitarian law explicitly prohibits the use of civilian population or an individual in war to shield military targets from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. Article 51(7) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions states: “The presence or movement of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular, in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.” Therefore, Hamas’s threat of executing the hostages if Israel attacks without warning violates IHL on civilians. Even if Israel warns civilians before bombing a building or house, Hamas can always claim otherwise—warnings, claims and counterclaims are a grey area in conflict zones. Article 51 (2) specifically bars actions that “spread terror among the civilian population”, which shall not be the object of attack. Indiscriminate attacks to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction are also prohibited. Hamas has also committed war crimes in the conflict by violating Article 8(2)(b)(xxiii) of the ICC Statute, which prohibits using the “presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations”. Terming Hamas as a mere Islamic resistance movement against Israeli occupation while not uttering or writing a word on the IS-like monstrosity is supporting the carnage and terrorism. It is the worst form of hypocrisy. Should the storming of a mosque [Al-Aqsa] trigger such barbarity that women, children and toddlers are shot in cold blood? The writer is a freelance journalist with two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._ Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .