Despite strong opposition from the Joseph Biden administration, the Israel Defense Forces are expanding their operations in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, and in Jabaliya and Zeitoun in northern Gaza. They have been destroying Hamas tunnels, weapons stores, rocket launchers and command posts.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad death squads — financed and trained by Tehran — killed 1,200 people in Israel Oct. 7, mostly civilians, wounded more than 5,000, took over 250 hostages and raped and mutilated women. It was the largest anti-Jewish pogrom since World War II.
The Israeli government aims to dismantle Hamas’ terror battalions, free the remaining hostages and prevent the Islamist group from implementing its vow to repeat Oct. 7 “again and again,” until it destroys Israel and expels or kills all the Jews.
Biden has drawn a “red line” against Israel’s offensive in Rafah, feigning concern for civilians there. But Rafah is where the bulk of Hamas’ remaining forces have been based and where Hamas’ control of the border crossing with Egypt has allowed it to continue to get funds, arms and supplies for more anti-Jewish attacks.
Washington has maintained pressure on Israel to end the war — including withholding some weapons shipments — emboldening Hamas and its backers in Tehran to keep using the hostages as bargaining chips in a push for an extended cease-fire, hoping to preserve Hamas’ military capacity for future attacks. Hamas is one of the proxy groups the Iranian rulers arm across the region as part of their expansionist foreign policy that includes the destruction of Israel.
The U.S. capitalist rulers don’t care about Jews or Palestinians. Washington’s concern is advancing the economic and political interests of U.S. imperialism, including its relations with regimes from Egypt and Iraq to Saudi Arabia, as it tries to shore up its dominant position worldwide. It also hopes to reach an “understanding” with Tehran. The Biden administration sees the war in Gaza as an obstacle to advancing those goals as well as the stability it seeks for business and profit-making.
Blinken told CBS News May 12 that Israel has no “credible plan to protect civilians,” including what at its peak was 1.3 million in Rafah. But after Israeli forces dropped leaflets, texted Gazans and informed humanitarian aid groups of its plans, some 450,000 have already left Rafah and headed to tent cities away from the combat zones.
Hamas’ false death figures
Hamas apologists around the world charge that Israel is deliberately killing civilians and that most of those killed in Gaza are innocent women and children.
As of May 8, the United Nations — repeating Hamas’ Gaza health ministry figures — claimed that more than 34,000 Gazans have been killed by Israeli forces. But the U.N. also admitted for the first time that at least 10,000 of those in that figure are based on Hamas press reports without any proof. Even the Hamas health ministry has cut in half its estimate of the number of women and children killed, now saying that 40% of the dead are men.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said May 11 that Israel has killed some 14,000 combatants along with 16,000 civilians caught in the fighting. Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields is responsible for those deaths.
The Israel Defense Forces gives advance warning to get civilians out of combat zones, even though that means losing the element of surprise.
“Every civilian death is a tragedy,” Netanyahu has said, while for Hamas causing civilian deaths “is a strategy.”
“We are proud to sacrifice martyrs,” Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese TV Oct. 24, 2023.
The overwhelming majority of people in Gaza don’t agree. They are heeding Israeli orders to evacuate. Hundreds gathered outside Hamas government offices in Rafah May 8 demanding tents and aid so they can get out of the line of fire.
76 years of Israel’s independence
On May 14 Israelis marked the 76th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of Independence.
Prior to World War II, most Jews were not supporters of creating a majority Jewish state in Palestine, then under British colonial rule. But that changed in the wake of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, 40% of the Jews in the world. There are still fewer Jews in the world today, than at the start of that war.
Washington and other imperialist powers turned away Jews fleeing the Nazis and sent them back to Europe, many to their deaths. After the war, hundreds of thousands languished in “displaced person” camps, still largely denied entry to the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and beyond. Jews fought to create Israel and make it a refuge from Jew-hatred. The Jewish population of Palestine grew from 56,000 in 1919 to 680,000 by May 1948.
Zionist leaders had agreed to a United Nations proposed partition of Palestine into two states: one with a Jewish majority and one with an Arab majority.
But the semifeudal and capitalist Arab leadership in Palestine and neighboring countries rejected the plan. Instead, they launched a war to destroy the new Jewish state and expel the Jews. Notorious Jew-hater Amin al-Husseini, the scion of a land-owning family and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, played a prominent role in that war. Husseini organized anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine as far back as 1920 and then collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
Israel defeated the Arab armies and consolidated a capitalist state with all the contradictions that entails. Competing bourgeois regimes in neighboring Egypt, Jordan and Syria blocked any moves toward an independent Palestinian state in the areas they controlled.
Hamas — and its backers in Tehran — are the continuators of Husseini and other Islamist forces that want to complete the Nazis’ “Final Solution” of exterminating the Jews.
Defense of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews is based on that history and the reality of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch.
Hamas a threat to Jews and Arabs
Hamas is not only a threat to Jews and Israel, it is the biggest obstacle Palestinian working people face in defending their own interests. After seizing power in Gaza in 2006 Hamas broke strikes by workers and persecuted political opponents. Hamas thugs threw activists from rival Fatah off building roofs and shot others in their kneecaps.
With the aid of Tehran, Hamas used its control of the 140-square-mile territory to build more than 350 miles of zig-zagging tunnels, including living quarters, command centers and jail cells. That’s more than the 248 miles of tunnels in the subway system in New York City, spread over 304 square miles. But Hamas didn’t build a single bomb shelter for civilians.
Israeli advances in Gaza are having a broader impact, including making it easier for working people there to speak out.
Residents in the encampments set up to avoid the latest combat “can be heard cursing Yahya Sinwar [the main Hamas leader still in Gaza] as the one who brought disaster on them,” one Gaza resident told TPS news service.
The defeat of Hamas will create better conditions for common struggles by working people of all religions and nationalities, in Israel and across the region.