While some hail Hamas for apparently being the most merciful and humanitarian hostage-taker in the world, let that sink in: you've got adult men and women who take 4 years old kids as hostages...
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There is no excuse for this and no one should be praising hamas.
Just as there was no excuse when the IDF used children of a similar age as human shields and got called to international court on war crimes for it (And refused to show)..
In the end anyone taking **either** side as the good guy is morally corrupt. The hammas are evil, the IDF is evil, full stop.
I mean even when the "war" wasnt on like it is now they had power and water turned off inpalestinian territories as punishment... Them commiting war crimes, along with palestine, has always been par for the course
Yea the occupation of Israel as a whole is a war crime. But a country commiting a war crime does not justify violence against non-combatants.
The taking of hostages could be said to be a taking or prisoners, and I think it is fair that if a foreign non-combatant is on your land then you do have a right to arrest them.
The issue with the attack is the abuse and violence executed against them. While you may be justified in arresting a non-citizen on your land you do not have the right to massacre 100s of them. A country commiting a war crime does NOT mean you can mass murder non violent people regardless of if what they are doing is legal or not.
The explanation is one Hamas gave.. they said every israeli is a combatant.. which makes no sense unless we consider they all were in the IDF at some point... but thats mental gymnastics.
They murdered civilians, if we are being fair to ourselves even if you support palestine, it was wrong.
They are a hard group to pin down because they act in ways that are self defeating to the groups they claim to be a part.
I suspect hamas was encourage to start this phase of the war by russia (perhaps indirectly) as a means to take the focus off the Ukrainian invasion.
#1 im not sure if russia directly encourages them. More likely it would have been indirect through Iran, a mutual ally.
1. I don't know that Hamas and Russia get along. Remember that the point of Hamas being supported by Israel and the US was to unseat the PLO which was aligned with the Soviet Union.
2. The west would prefer people didn't pay attention to Ukraine because Ukraine is losing pretty badly and it looks like it's only going to get much worse for winter. It's actually to Russia's benefit that the collective west's failure is on full display.
3. The assistance the US is sending Israel is in the form of carrier groups which aren't the sort of land based vehicles that Russia would want to peel off the battlefield.
4. The eastern Mediterranean is close to the black sea which means America are much closer to directly intervening in Ukraine. Not to mention that they're right next to Syria where Russia has it's airbases and friendly ports.
This doesn't really help Russia at all.
I did have an idea who might stand to benefit though. And it pains me to say it... but... China may have had an incentive to provoke this conflict. The reason being that during the G20 summit, Israel unveiled their plans for an economic corridor going from India across the sea to UAE to Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Israel through to Mediterranean and then to Europe. This would be in direct competition with China's Belt and Road Initiative. When Netanyahu showed the IMEC corridor, I thought to myself... "Now China HAS to do something about Israel."
I'd have liked it that China had found a way to destroy Israel. But... this October 7th incident has gone and provoked a predictable brutal overreaction from Israel that has made it that they will probably not be able to normalize relations with their middle-eastern neighbours. Even if the leaders of these middle-eastern countries were willing to overlook the genocide of the Palestinians for a chance to line their pockets, their people would never accept it and they'd likely be violently deposed. Added to that, you have the Houthis in Yemen attacking commercial tankers which casts doubt on the IMEC corridor being a safe trade route. I think it's safe to say that that plan of Israel's is going to have to stay on ice for quite a while.
The only other possibility I can entertain is that Hamas is the real deal and they did this themselves for a good reason. After the IMEC corridor was unveiled, it seemed like they were going to speed up the Abraham Accords so that people could start making money right away. The Abraham Accords would see to it that Israel could get away with grinding down the Palestinians while still enjoying trade and normalized relations with it's neighbours. The Palestinians knew that this would spell their slow death. So instead of dying slowly and quietly, they went out with a bang. They created an amazing kino spectacle with their paragliders and they made it all as messy as possible to provoke an even messier reaction from Israel in such a way that would forever destroy Israel's integration in the region.
It was a last stand worthy of the Spartans at Therompylae. In the same way Leonidas united the Greeks against the Persian empire, Hamas is uniting the Muslim world against Israel. And we've already seen talks between leaders like Assad, MBS and Raisi taking place.