Hamas leaders make it clear they have no intention of disarming, nor of giving up their brutal stranglehold on Gaza or abandoning their goal of destroying Israel and eliminating the Jews. As the weeks go by with no moves to disarm Hamas, the pro-Nazi thugs are growing emboldened.
If Israel is to survive as a refuge for Jews, sooner or later it will have to go on the offensive to destroy Hamas and incorporate more of Gaza into Israel. No other force is capable of doing this.
With Israel controlling 53% of Gaza and Hamas the rest, the “yellow line” that separates the two has become “a new border line,” Israel Defense Force Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said Dec. 8. This puts Israel in a better position to prevent Hamas’ attacks, but does not eliminate the key cause of the wars there — Hamas’ use of the territory it controls to prepare anti-Jewish pogroms.
Despite the fact that Israel controls a majority of the territory, Hamas maintains near-dictatorial control over the large majority of Gaza’s population.
A central part of Hamas’ strategy has always been to use the deaths of Palestinians to convince bourgeois public opinion worldwide that Israel is at fault. In fact these deaths are a result of Hamas deliberately putting civilians at risk from Israeli retaliation to its attacks on Jews.
“The end of the war was declared two months ago, but the battle is not over,” Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal told the Covenant for Jerusalem conference in Istanbul Dec. 6. He boasted that the Al-Aqsa Flood — Hamas’ name for the bloody Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom it carried out in Israel — has “prepared the international arena” to treat Israel as a “pariah.”
“The resistance and its weapons are the honor and glory of the Islamic nation,” Mashaal said. He rejected “all forms of guardianship” of Gaza, the West Bank and “all of Palestine,” a rejection of President Donald Trump’s plan for an international force to occupy Gaza.
The next day Hamas leader Bassem Naim told The Associated Press Hamas is “open” to talking about “freezing or storing” its weapons — but only temporarily. Naim said Hamas would welcome a U.N. force, but only along the border as a buffer to block the Israel Defense Forces.
Hamas rebuilding its death squads
Hamas is taking advantage of the Washington-imposed ceasefire to rebuild its badly battered army of death squads, intimidate Palestinians in Gaza who resist its brutal rule, and build up stores of weapons for future use against Jews and Israel.
Every week brings new reports of Palestinians executed, tortured or beaten by Hamas thugs or of business owners kidnapped and held for ransom.
Alaa Al Zarabi was one of the latest victims. The young man got into a dispute with a Hamas member while waiting in line for aid. Members of Hamas’ infamous “Arrow” unit beat him, then shot him to death.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is still trying to convince Muslim governments to agree to send troops to make up the “International Stabilization Force” envisioned in the Trump “peace” plan for Gaza.
The Turkish government insists it be allowed to send thousands of its troops as part of the new force. The Israeli government has vetoed that. And with good reason.
The Turkish government has been a vehement opponent of Israel’s war to defend itself against Hamas and hosts Hamas leaders. A Turkish official told the Jerusalem Post, “The Americans also very much want us there” and have been putting pressure on Israel to allow this.
“Israel, every day is violating the ceasefire,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan claimed, without providing any evidence. He made clear that Hamas should be left intact. “Disarmament cannot be the first stage in this process,” he said, adding that the role of the stabilization force should be “peace monitoring not peace enforcement.”
The U.S. rulers want an end to the war in Gaza. They see it as an obstacle to advancing their own economic, political and military interests in the Middle East. Defending Jews in Israel — or the rights of Palestinians — is not their concern.
Arab minorities join Israeli army
The Oct. 7 pogrom and Israel’s blows to Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to the rulers in Iran who helped orchestrate the massacre have strengthened the resolve of working people in Israel to stand up to Hamas and defend Israel’s existence. With all the contradictions inherent in a capitalist country, the Israeli government is the only one in the world that provides Jews with an unconditional refuge and defends that refuge arms in hand. Without this, a new Holocaust could take place.
Within Israel, the determination to defend the country’s existence extends more and more to Arabic-speaking minorities, which make up some 20% of the population. When Hamas’ death squads killed 1,200 people in their Oct. 7 pogrom, 24 Israeli Arabs and more than 50 immigrant workers were among those murdered.
“IDF sees sharp rise in enlistment from Druze, Bedouins, and Arab Christians,” was the headline of a Dec. 6 article in the Jerusalem Post.
“The most surprising change has emerged in the Golan Heights, home to more than 20,000 Druze,” the Post said. Since Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, most Druze living there had not taken Israeli citizenship and unlike Druze in other parts of Israel are not subject to the military draft.
At least 300 Druze from the Golan have voluntarily enlisted in the IDF since the start of the war in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes helped defend Druze in Syria this summer, after they were attacked by various forces, including troops from the new regime of President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
While Palestinian Arabs in Israel are not subject to the draft, a small but increasing number of Muslim Palestinians have volunteered to serve in army combat units, said Safi Ibrahim, a Druze who is a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces.
“No matter what minority group you come from, everyone saw the cruelty of Oct. 7 and realized that the enemy didn’t care if it was a Bedouin woman with a headscarf or a Jew from a kibbutz,” Ibrahim told the Post.