Hamas’ repeated attacks on Israeli soldiers, its delays in returning the bodies of hostages, its refusal to disarm and its brutal murders and repression against Palestinians in Gaza are no surprise. The “ceasefire” brokered by the U.S. government has changed nothing about the Nazi-like group and its historic plan to kill Jews, destroy Israel and oppress the Palestinian people.
On Oct. 28 a Hamas sniper fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli army vehicle in Rafah, killing a soldier. Just a week before, two Israeli soldiers were killed in a similar anti-tank missile attack there.
Under the agreement Israel had pulled back to a “yellow line” marking its control over 53% of Gaza’s territory. In response to Hamas’ violations of the ceasefire, Israel carried out dozens of attacks on Hamas positions Oct. 28 and says it will take back control of some additional territory.
Tehran-backed Hamas is taking advantage of the ceasefire to threaten, beat, torture, jail and kill political opponents and other Palestinians in Gaza to reassert its dictatorship. It’s already preparing future pogroms against Jews in Israel. Even though growing numbers in Gaza reject Hamas, there is no Palestinian group there capable of standing up to its death squads.
Hamas reiterated Oct. 28 that its “security campaigns are continuing” all across Gaza. It claims it is going after “lawbreakers, thieves and hoarders,” even though Hamas is the paramount gang of thieves. The real purpose is to intimidate anyone who dares challenge its rule.
Hamas has imprisoned in its underground prisons some of those accused of “disloyalty,” denying them food, water and sunlight — just like it did to the hostages seized in their Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom, reports Israel Hayom.
Israel Defense Forces soldiers stationed along the yellow line have seen Hamas thugs shooting at Palestinians, but so far “have been instructed not to intervene,” Haaretz reports.
Hamas was supposed to return all the remaining hostages, including the bodies of those it had killed, within 72 hours of the start of the ceasefire Oct. 10. While all the living hostages and 15 bodies are back in Israel, Hamas keeps stalling on returning the remaining 13.
On Oct. 27 Hamas turned over what it claimed was the body of another deceased hostage. But forensic tests showed it was additional remains of Ofir Tzarfati, whose body was recovered by an Israeli military operation in late 2023.
Israeli drones caught Hamas taking Tzarfati’s remains, burying them, then filming their “discovery” in the presence of the Red Cross.
Gazans denounce Hamas cynicism
Despite its campaign of terror against Palestinians, some in Gaza still speak out.
“We lost more than 70 members of our family [during the war],” Ezzideen Shehab, a young doctor originally from Jabaliya, wrote on his “X” account. “We have no home to return to, no walls to protect us, and no place left to call our own. And then, one of Hamas’ leaders appears on television declaring, ‘The people have not been defeated! Gaza has stood firm and fought a historic war!’”
After graduating from medical school in Iran, Shehab returned to Gaza just five days before Hamas launched its bloody Oct. 7 pogrom against Jews and Israel responded. He has been treating war victims ever since.
“We were only victims of destruction,” he wrote. “A destruction that Hamas began from our homes and the Israeli army completed, while the Hamas leaders disappeared into their tunnels.”
After the ceasefire he came across a Hamas squad beating three men. He later learned the three were executed. “This is not justice,” Shehab wrote.
While hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza share Shehab’s views, Hamas’ repression is aimed at keeping them silent.
U.S. goal: Americanize the region
Vice President JD Vance claims that the ceasefire will “hold.” But Washington’s “plan” leaves the root cause of the conflict — Hamas — intact.
The goal of U.S. imperialism is to impose a “Pax Americana,” stability for advancing its own influence and plunder of the region. It looks to do so by drawing reactionary regimes in the area — Tehran and Ankara — into collaboration. That’s why Washington constantly demands that any Israeli response to Hamas’ violations be done in a way that does not “endanger the ceasefire.”
“We’re not asking permission from our American friends,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Jewish News Service in an Oct. 26 interview. “We just tell them that’s what we’re doing.”
Netanyahu, like every capitalist politician in Israel, wants U.S. imperialism’s support. At the same time he notes that Israel has come under intense international and domestic pressure to end the war on Hamas. But if Israel had “capitulated,” he said, “there would be no Israel.”
Trump’s “peace plan” called for an “International Stabilization Force” to occupy Gaza in the place of Hamas until a new police force is put in place. So far no government has agreed to send troops.
Underscoring the threat to Israel involved in Washington’s efforts to dominate the region, the Trump administration proposed Turkish troops be brought in to police Gaza, despite Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hostility to Israel and links to Hamas.
“Hamas is not a terrorist group,” Erdogan claimed weeks after its Oct. 7 pogrom, “it is a group of liberators.” The Turkish rulers have growing influence in Syria today, where the country’s new leaders have clashed with Druze and their Israeli backers, and are looking to extend their sway elsewhere in the region.
Netanyahu quickly vetoed the proposal.