Hamas’ international propaganda machine — promoted by middle-class leftists worldwide — keeps churning out lies that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, that people there are on the verge of starvation, that no women were raped by Hamas Oct. 7 and even that there was no massacre of civilians that day.
They are aided by the liberal bourgeois media’s war coverage. The New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, rarely mention that Israel is at war in Gaza to dismantle Hamas — financed, trained and backed by the reactionary bourgeois regime in Iran — so that it cannot make good on its threats to keep murdering Jews and to destroy Israel. They don’t report that Hamas forces there seize food for themselves and continue using civilians as human shields.
For its part the administration of President Joseph Biden is trying to prevent Israel from securing a decisive victory by taking Hamas out in Rafah. At every step, the Biden administration advances the U.S. rulers’ own interests in the region, as opposed to those of Jews in Israel.
Liberal media never call Oct. 7 a pogrom. But that’s what it was, just like the anti-Jewish pogroms that took place in Russia, Eastern Europe and Germany in the 1900s leading up to and during World War II.
More than 1,200 people were killed by the Hamas death squads Oct. 7, over 5,000 injured and more than 240 taken hostage. It was the largest single massacre of Jews since the Nazis’ annihilation of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust in World War II.
The scope of Hamas’ barbarity is laid out in a powerful new documentary film, “Screams Before Silence,” by Sheryl Sandberg. It includes interviews with survivors of the assault on the Nova music festival who describe the systematic rapes and murders carried out by Hamas thugs they witnessed Oct. 7. Two former hostages describe how they or fellow hostages were sexually abused while in captivity.
Others interviewed were among the first on the scene at the kibbutzim that were assaulted or at the music festival and who saw the mutilated bodies. Rami Davidian, a local farmer who helped extricate survivors, describes coming across the bodies of women, tied to trees, legs apart, with objects rammed into their vaginas.
These accounts “depict a pattern that could not have been unless it was premeditated and preconceived by Hamas,” says Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former United Nations commissioner.
Sandberg’s film is available for free on YouTube.
More Hamas lies
The latest anti-Israel smear — the charge by Hamas officials that Israeli soldiers killed civilians and buried them in mass graves near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis — has been widely reported in the press.
But the New York Times had to admit that satellite photos proved that the graves had been dug before the Israeli forces that cleared Hamas thugs out from the hospital were even there. The Israel Defense Forces also refuted the lies, noting that they dug up some of the graves looking for murdered hostages and then reburied the bodies they found.
Meanwhile, the United Nations released a report April 22 to answer charges by the Israeli government that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees is complicit with Hamas and its Jew-hating course. The agency runs 40% of the schools and almost all the health facilities in Gaza.
The report boasted that the agency, which has thousands of employees in Gaza, has “a more developed approach to neutrality” than any other U.N. agency and that while it could do more, the problems are minimal.
The books used in Gaza schools are provided by UNRWA. They include maps that show “Palestine,” but no state of Israel. They extol wearing explosive suicide belts and encourage jihad with a goal of “terrorizing the enemy” and “achieving martyrdom.”
Gazans speak out against Hamas
As Israeli forces progress in degrading Hamas’ military capacity, more Palestinians in Gaza are speaking out against the reactionary group’s dictatorial rule.
We want leaders “who won’t drag people into a war like this,” freelance journalist Salma El-Qadami told the Washington Post from Gaza. “Almost everyone around me shares the same thoughts. We want this waterfall of blood to stop. Seventeen years of destruction and wars are enough.” She’s referring to the repeated assaults on Israel carried out by Hamas since it took power in 2006 aimed at provoking Israeli counterattacks and creating more Palestinian martyrs.
“Hamas listen to us! We’re not spies, nor cowards, nor mercenaries,” dentist Rami Haroon wrote on Facebook from Gaza April 20. “We’re the unemployed and the working people, and the owner of the poor kiosk. We have been suffocated by you for a long time. Enough! Let us breathe! We’ve tried to express that more than once and every time you confront us with violence and cruelty.”
Hamas is the main obstacle working people face in Gaza. Its defeat will open space for workers to begin to organize in their own class interests, including to secure Palestinian national rights and to join together with fellow working people in Israel and across the region to advance their common class interests.