More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in the month since Hamas’ terrorist attacks inside southern Israel, the group’s health ministry in Gaza says.

But Hamas officials say the mounting death toll, believed to include thousands of children, has not caused the group to regret its actions in southern Israel, which Israeli officials said killed 1,400 people.

In fact, Hamas leaders say that their goal was to trigger this very response and that they’re still hoping for a bigger war. It’s all part of a strategy, they say, to derail talks over Israel normalizing relations with regional powers — namely, Saudi Arabia — and draw the world’s attention to the Palestinian cause.

Hamas, these officials say, is more interested in the destruction of Israel than what it sees as the temporary hardships faced by Palestinians under Israeli bombardment.

“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the group’s governing politburo, told The New York Times in an interview.

  • dx1@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The concern is exactly the opposite. Israel has been procedurally annexing Palestinian land for decades - the concern, if anything, is that a one state solution would abrogate the rights of Palestinians, because that’s precisely what Israel has done with annexations repeatedly in the past. It’s in fact a requirement to abolish the religious/ethnic supremacism inherent in the Israeli state, in which political parties are even banned from even opposing a Jewish nationalist identity (the 2018 “nation-state” law), and start from scratch with a constitution that actually guarantees equal rights across ethnic groups, in order to achieve equal rights in the region, barring something like the bottom half of Israel being given up to allow a contiguous, fully independent state between Gaza and the West Bank.

    The problem most of you aren’t dealing with is that Israel was founded fairly recently (75 years) on the ethnic cleansing/expulsion of the Palestinian population. These endless repeated claims about “Israel’s right to exist”, “Israel’s right to defense”, “Israel’s right to sovereignty” - many of them aren’t even true under international law in the first place, and they ignore the problem that the land they currently claim was unlawfully obtained, and that the people it was stolen who still live under Israeli rule have been oppressed, starved, murdered, poisoned, etc. for decades, under a dehumanizing system of apartheid. There is no just solution attainable in this conflict without concessions from Israel.

    • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      so you are saying the only solution is for Israel to not exist. sounds like you want peace as much as hamas does

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Differentiate the state of Israel - a religious and ethnic supremacist state from its beginning, by definition - and the inhabitants of the state. Getting tired of that little rhetorical trick where disagreeing with a state actively committing a genocide is supposed to make you sound “antisemitic”.