The morality of the Palestinian resistance
How not to rescue hostages.
The leaders of the “civilised” West are appalled that six Israeli prisoners of war taken by the Palestinian resistance during their Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of October 7 died in Gaza last week. They have issued statements expressing their indignation at the loss of those Israeli lives. Reading the comments of these Western leaders in isolation one would be forgiven for thinking that their deaths wasn’t on the same territory on which an estimated 200,000 people have been slaughtered by the regime that these same grieving leaders have backed financially and militarily, and protected diplomatically at international forums. One would also be forgiven for thinking that those six Israelis were killed by “terrorists” while the World’s Most Moral Army™ attempted to protect and evacuate them to safety.
That’s the upside down world we inhabit, where daily multiple massacres of Palestinians are treated as weather report: it’s there somewhere in the paper or at the end of a broadcast, go look it up if you are really interested. The six Israelis are BREAKING NEWS. Or more accurately, the only news.
But even in their fawning, what those Western leaders and the mainstream media, however, won’t tell you is that four of those six dead Israelis were set to be released in a deal that the Palestinian resistance agreed to back in July. Their names appeared in that ceasefire agreement from July 27.
Israeli outlet Yedioth Ahronoth published a section of the appendix from the agreement, listing names of three of the six now dead Israelis.
“The names of four of them are listed in the appendix at the end of the document,” the Yedioth Ahronoth report quoted an unnamed senior security official as saying. “If it weren’t for the deliberate sabotage contained in the document to prevent a deal - there is a good chance that they would have been released already a month ago and are here with us alive.”
Hamas had agreed to the Israeli proposal much to the chagrin of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sabotaged ceasefire talks at every opportunity for months. In a bid to foil any possibility of peace, Netanyahu then, as has been his wont, sent a “clarification document” through the Israeli mediators. The new document changed the terms of the deal accepted by Hamas. It contained a huge sticking point for the Palestinian resistance: indefinite Israeli occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor on Gaza’s border with Egypt. Just as Netanyahu would have expected and known full well, it derailed the deal, jeopardising the release of the Israeli prisoners in Gaza.
The official quoted in the Yedioth Ahronoth article terms it a “blood document.” He says: “At the top of the document, it says that it is a ‘clarification document’, but in my opinion the most appropriate nickname for it is the ‘blood document’ because its pages are stained with the blood of the six abductees who were murdered in a tunnel in Rafah.”
The circumstances surrounding their deaths aren’t clear yet. But a September 2 statement by Al Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida is being interpreted to mean that they were killed by their Palestinian guards.
Here’s what Abu Obeida said:
Netanyahu and the occupation army alone bear full responsibility for the deaths of the captives, as they deliberately obstructed any prisoner exchange deals for narrow interests, in addition to intentionally killing dozens of them through direct airstrikes.
We say to everyone, clearly, that after the Nusseirat incident, new instructions were issued to the fighters assigned to guard the captives regarding how to deal with them in the event the occupation army approaches their detention location.
Netanyahu’s insistence on freeing the captives through military pressure instead of making a deal will mean their return to their families in coffins. Their families must choose: either dead or alive.
The Nusseirat incident is a reference to the rescue of four Israeli captives on June 8. In that bloody rescue mission, which the Israelis coordinated with the United States, nearly 300 Palestinians were killed.
Abu Obeida in his missive insinuates that the guards in charge of the captives have now been told to kill them if Israeli troops approach.
A poster released by Al Qassam that same day further cements the belief that the captives fell to Palestinian bullets. The very layered poster shows an Israeli captive in a T-shirt with the logo of the Israeli occupation forces sitting in front of a pistol-bearing Palestinian guard. The pistol bears the logo of Al Qassam’s “shadow unit” which is responsible for guarding enemy captives. The wall in front shows a tally of 39 — which presumably represents the number of Israeli prisoners killed in captivity either by Israeli airstrikes (which was the case with six other long-dead captives whose bodies were recently retrieved by the Israeli occupation forces) or by the Palestinian guards.
The poster has a clear equation at the bottom:
Military pressure = Death and failure
Exchange deal = Freedom and life
The Nusseirat incident appears to have drastically hardened the Palestinian resistance’s stance. It’s quiet clear that the guards in charge of the Israeli captives in Nusseirat protected them at the expense of their own lives, as instructed back then, which enabled the captives to make it out alive. But the cost for the Palestinians was humongous. Nearly 300 of them were killed in the indiscriminate bombings and shootings that accompanied the Israelis’ rescue.
Hamas isn’t willing to go through the same lopsided equation again, as Abu Obeida’s latest missive makes clear.
On September 2, Hamas released a video of one of the now dead captives who was scheduled for release in the July 27 deal, Eden Yerushalmi, excoriating Netanyahu for dragging his feet on their release.
“You freed 1,000 prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, now they are asking for less than a quarter of that number for each of us ... am I worth less?” Yerushalmi asks.
Shalit, an Israeli soldier, was exchanged by Hamas for 1,027 of their prisoners in 2011 after five years in captivity.
She goes on to add: “I am an Israeli citizen who had fulfilled and continues to fulfil my obligations to my country, why I am still here until now?”
Yerushalmi should have known that the social contract in Israel isn’t worth much; after all it’s a country that through its Hannibal Directive explicitly tells its soldiers to kill fellow citizens if there is a possibility of abduction. In every other country the army exists to protect its civilians, not to kill them as a matter of policy. Israel is different.
A day later, Hamas released a video of another dead soldier, Ori Danino, who directs a message at Netanyahu and his war cabinet: “You are trying to kill us one after another in failed rescue attempts and bombing from the air.”
He ends with a request: “People of Israel: Do not neglect us.” As an Israeli, Danino probably would have known that genocide of the Palestinians and gang raping them are the agendas foremost on the majority of his compatriots’ bucket lists, as recent surveys have revealed. Freedom of the captives can wait.
Hamas released similar videos from other dead captives on September 4. All of the videos end with a ticking clocks and a uniform message: “Time is running out…”
However, Netanyahu has made his decision. He has explicitly said that he prefers the Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor over the safe return of his countrymen from captivity in Gaza.
Despite dealing with an utterly depraved enemy that has shown zero regard for the rules of engagement and has deliberately killed children, women, and the elderly alike, the Palestinian resistance groups have carried themselves with morality and displayed great discipline when dealing with their captives. The released Israeli prisoners have attested to their conduct.
Last month, Hamas issued an uncharacteristic statement when one of its prison guards ended up killing an Israeli captive he was in charge of after hearing news of the murder of two his children in an Israeli air strike.
Hamas certainly was under no obligation to make those details public. No one would have known had it not revealed it. Many captives have been killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombings and shootings. (The IDF shot three Israelis dead whilst they were waving white flags!) This captive could also have been classified as an Israeli killing, but the Palestinian resistance hold themselves to a much higher standard than the World’s Most Moral Army™, depraved Israeli leadership, and their “civilised” Western backers.
Israelis are probably under the impression that the dwindling number of their alive captives in Gaza will help them keep the number of Palestinian prisoners in any future exchange deal to a small number. Hamas, however, doesn’t look at the matter with the same lens.
In a March 1 announcement, in which Abu Obeida revealed the names of three Israeli captives killed by an Israeli air strike, he went on to add: “At the same time, we affirm that the price we will take for five living prisoners or ten is the same price we would have taken for all prisoners had they not been killed by the enemy’s bombing operations.”
Hamas’s calculations appear to be simple. It will just raise the number of its prisoners in exchange for the Israelis the resistance holds.
But before we get there, it remains to be seen at what grotesque Palestinian body count does the Israeli blood lust gets satiated so they seriously sit down for a deal.
Before you go
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Excellent summary of the situation. And I'm sure you've also heard of Zionists saying "there's no equivalence between Israeli and Hamas military" whereby that statement of theirs alone serves as a self-refutation on their part -- there absolutely is indeed no equivalence between Judeo-Nazi anal desecration league (ADL) savagery and anti-imperialist resistance.
It's difficult to even finds words to describe these horrors and the meaning in them. Your work is important.