Comment by WJW
2 years ago
Nobody calls them terrorists because they run soup kitchens. People call them terrorists because they take children hostage and kill civilians. Destroying the Israel and killing its inhabitants is literally in their founding charter, and they act upon it whenever they get the chance. That is why they are terrorists.
No, they got the designation because they used suicide bombings in the nineties. But OK, so you'd call Israel a terrorist state then? And consider Israel the bigger problem due to the scale of their actions?
The Hamas charter is from 2017. Do you have any specific complaints about its contents?
> they got the designation because they used suicide bombings in the nineties
Did you completely miss their actions on October 7th? They didn't stop that kind of thing after the nineties.
Were suicide bombings used on October 7th?
Please answer my questions.
26 replies →
2016 was the last suicide bombing by Hamas. Keep in mind those didn't stop because Hamas changed. They stopped because Israel built walls around the West Bank and Gaza, many other security measures, and joint effort between the PA and Israel to stop these. While suicide bombing attacks were thwarted there have been many attacks against civilians through the years (something around 13 attacks in 2023 preceding Oct 7th) using assault rifles or vehicles e.g.
Hamas are terrorists, yes. But that doesn't mean you destroy them at all costs. It doesn't mean you can "mow the grass" in Gaza at such high civilian cost. And while destroying Israel is Hamas's stated goal, it's about as delusional as thinking the Jan. 6 rioters could have overthrown the US government. 30,000 Hamas fighting with crude weapons against the IDF, one of the most powerful and advanced armed forces in the world? Come on.
Hamas is armed with pretty fine weapons including the latest AKs you can't even get outside Russia, Dragonov sniper rifles, RPGs etc. The attackers on Oct 7th were very well equipped, comparable to most modern military's infantry. This story about how primitive their weapons are is at least partly a lie.
The environment they operate in neutralizes a lot of the IDF's advantages. Dense urban, many civilians, tunnels. You can't bring F-35s to bear if you have battles inside your own towns. It took the IDF about 3 days to recover from the initial attack including scenes like tanks firing into Israeli houses.
There are a lot of Israelis with military background that claim that the Oct 7th attack wasn't far from being an existential threat. Hamas was planning to connect with the west bank and also to proceed much farther into Israel than it managed to. There were some heroics e.g. from the police in stopping that on the roads leading out of the south. In combination with a land attack from Hezbollah in the north that could have been a scenario that has some probability of getting 10's or 100's of thousands of Israelis killed at the very least. It's hard to imagine but then Oct 7th was also hard to imagine.
I haven't seen any sniper rifle besides the al-Ghoul in their combat footage since October 7th. Neither in PIJ:s, PFLP:s, DFLP:s, Mujahideens Brigades, or in Intifada al-Fatahs or the People's Resistance Committees'.
Claiming that IDF infantry and the armed resistance groups in the Gaza strip are pretty much equal in equipment is just insane. It's, you know, not even wrong.
How long would it take to walk to the West Bank? Are you sure they planned to "connect with the West Bank"?