On October 13, Israeli military commanders told Palestinians living in Gaza to evacuate to the south. The northern half of the strip is full of Hamas assets—from rockets to rifles, communications gear to personnel—that Israel plans to destroy in the coming days of the war. But Hamas leaders demanded that the people stay in place. Why?
While some of Hamas’s most brutal tactics, like systematic rape and beheading captives, are long-practiced atrocities for which the armies of Stalin, Hitler, and Genghis Khan are infamous, it is unprecedented for a party to adopt a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side. This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.
Since its birth in 1987, Hamas has declared its aim to destroy Israel. Its strategy is asymmetric—that is, because Hamas is smaller and weaker than the Israeli army, it relies on a strategy designed to undermine Israel politically. In hopes (presumably) that it can induce Saudi leaders to drop their plans to normalize relations with Israel, Hamas launched this war with two goals. First, to provoke uprisings among Arabs and Muslims, both within and outside Israel. Second, to cause the rest of the world to view Israel with disgust and hatred.
To achieve these aims, Hamas is ensuring that its war will harm and kill large numbers of Palestinians in Gaza. To bring this about, it has strategized and laid groundwork for years. Its aim is to propagandize a gullible world—to put the blood of Palestinian victims on Israel’s hands.
Defense officials in numerous countries, for operational reasons and to comply with international laws of war, take pains to locate their military assets away from their civilians and to maximize protection for the latter. Hamas officials do the opposite. As United Nations officials and others have disapprovingly noted, Hamas stores ammunition in schools, puts missile launchers adjacent to mosques, sets up command centers in hospitals, and generally bases its operations in densely populated civilian neighborhoods.
This is not simply a human-shield strategy, where the aim is to deter an attack by using innocent lives as a barrier. Hamas is doing something far more insidious: it’s ensuring the mass death of Palestinians. Here is Hamas official Ali Baraka summing up the difference between the two worldviews: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”
When Hamas fires rockets at Israel and kills, captures, and rapes civilians there, they know Israel will retaliate. Hamas leaders put their assets in civilian buildings not in hopes that Israel will hold fire, but in a cold calculation that the retaliation will do terrible harm to Palestinian civilians—despite the extraordinary efforts Israel’s army makes to avoid it. Hamas is working to maximize, not minimize, that harm. This is to generate international pressure on Israel to end its retaliation—and to strengthen Israel’s enemies in their depiction of the Jewish state as a villain.
Israel has moral and practical reasons for avoiding harm to Palestinian civilians. Israelis pride themselves on acting humanely, even in war. Their military officers—like those in the U.S. military—distinguish between civilian and military sites and never purposefully target the former. Even when attacking senior terrorist leaders, Israel tries to avoid harming their family members, let alone unrelated civilians. To avert collateral damage, Israel routinely provides warnings of attacks, even though they increase risk to Israelis and decrease an attack’s chances of success. In the current war, Israel has notified Gazans in various neighborhoods that there would soon be attacks there and they should hasten to designated safe areas.
Hamas’s strategy is innovative in the worst way. For everyone who aspires to strengthen moral constraints on warfare, it is a huge step backward. It is savage, cynical, and unnatural—but what’s worse, it’s effective. That is why it’s being used.
Innocent Palestinians deserve sympathy. But when Americans, Europeans, and others misdirect their outrage at Israel, failing to grasp Hamas’s responsibility, they are encouraging the very cruelty they intend to condemn.
Blame for the purposeful sacrificing of innocent Palestinians goes first and foremost to Hamas, to be sure, but also to those of us in the outside world duped by this strategy.
Schools, hospitals, and mosques will be bombed in the coming days. This is what Hamas wants, what it has made sure will happen. Those, however well-intentioned, who blame Israel are complicit in Hamas’s war crimes.
It’s time to place the blame rightly and stop incentivizing Hamas’s crimes against the Palestinians (let alone against the Israelis). For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, and to honor basic decency and law, it is the least we can do.
Douglas J. Feith, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George W. Bush administration.
The reason Hamas is able to use this strategy is the nature of the religious beliefs held by most of the population of Gaza. When a group of people believe that suicidal behavior in the name of fighting their god's enemies means a guaranteed trip to heaven, they are not going to object to being used as human shields.
An enemy that is not afraid to die--an enemy that will not hesitate to put women and children in the path of things that will cause their "glorious martyrdom"--is a very dangerous enemy indeed. It cannot be evaluated in the same way that other enemies are. Nothing known about the rationality shared by most of mankind can predict what such an enemy will do.
Pretending that these are "ordinary people" is a ruse that Hamas is counting on the West falling for. Ordinary people don't send their children to harass soldiers in hopes that the child will be injured or killed. Ordinary people don't refuse to leave buildings they have been warned will be targeted. Ordinary people are afraid of dying.
There is a basic moral tenant that under specific circumstances allows for doing what otherwise would be considered evil: It is called the principle of double effect. A good old fashioned moral concept. If you have a cancerous tumor and the only way to save your life is to cut off part of your body to save you then the doctor will cut off that part of your body. The intent is not to cut off your foot but to save your life. It is unavoidable. But if you decide to do something horrible to bring about what you think is good, say sacrificing your own children and murdering the children of others this is not ever justified. This instead is the most depraved sort of behavior. It is always immoral to use people as if they were merely objects. Israel is not like Hamas in any way at all. Israel wants to save the lives of its own people AND the lives of Palestinians. Israel has made and continues to make every effort to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas on the other hand uses people, any people, all people even its own terrorists, like sand bags and dung heaps to hide behind. Israel targets Hamas terrorists. Hamas targets civilians to protect their terrorists. Only an intentional fool would ignore this difference.