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.

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    The choice was really simple. Not opposing a two state solution would have been a great start. All their actions have been to subvert peace or compromise using violence at every turn.

    Now you can twist that however you like, but will you really deny that having an independent internationally-recognized Palestinin state is better than endless war, thousands of civilians dead, etc? Albeit perhaps less than they want or think they deserve? It would be a start.

    Face it, their “all or nothing” approach is exactly responsible for the current state of affairs. They don’t deny that, they are proud of it. Read their own words.

    • @dx1
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      1 year ago

      Hamas or Israel? Hamas actually announced support for a two state solution back in like 2006, and also in 2017:

      The 2017 Hamas charter presented the Palestinian state being based on the 1967 borders. The text says “Hamas considers the establishment of a Palestinian state, sovereign and complete, on the basis of the June 4, 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital and the provision for all the refugees to return to their homeland.” This is in contrast to Hamas’ 1988 charter, which previously called for a Palestinian state on all of Mandatory Palestine. Nevertheless, even in the 2017 charter, Hamas did not recognize Israel.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution

      Israel, on the other hand, has never granted Palestinian statehood on terms they could possibly accept. Look at the Oslo Accords - all kinds of concessions for Palestine, this insane military framework going through the West Bank - but no statehood. Basically every time there’s a “peace process” they pose these decreasingly compelling terms.

      One state solution is making more and more sense to me these days. It sounds like a radical solution given the polarization and history, but there’s a lot more opportunity for a workable solution that way that actually allows reparations.

      • @[email protected]
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        01 year ago

        that’s advocating for a single state (theirs) and Israel to cease to exist. how very reasonable of them

        • @dx1
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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.

          • @[email protected]
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            -11 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
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              21 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”.