Don’t help Hamas create martyrs

Say one thing for Hamas: they’re honest. Brutally honest, you might say.

For them, thousands of dead Palestinians aren’t a tragic byproduct of their war against Israel, a war waged against civilians every bit as much as soldiers, as we saw in grisly detail this week through that POV footage of the Oct. 7 massacres.

No, dead Palestinians are the point. Hamas doesn’t just admit this, they positively boast about it. In the past week its leaders have been out with statements that amount to splashing about in the blood of their own people.

Take Ali Baraka, a “senior Hamas official” interviewed by Russia Today. “The Israelis are known to love life,” he said. “We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs. The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred … defending his land.”

Another Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, told a Saudi journalist that Hamas is just doing what the Russians did to defeat the Nazis (sacrifice 30 million of their own people) or the Algerians to win their independence from France (sacrifice six million). “No nation is liberated without sacrifices,” he said.

Ghazi Hamad, a third Hamas leader, promised more attacks along the lines of Oct. 7. “We are called a nation of martyrs,” he told Lebanese television, “and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

By this cruel calculus the horror we’re now seeing in Gaza is precisely what Hamas was aiming at. Overwhelming retaliation by Israel was inevitable, expected and, more to the point, desired. It reformulates the entire political situation in the region.

According to the New York Times, which spoke to a top Hamas leader this week to understand its strategy, the group sees the Oct. 7 massacre as “a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.”

It’s true. Before Oct. 7 the Palestinian cause was at a low ebb. Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank was on the rise. It looked like Saudi Arabia was close to normalizing relations with Israel, sidelining the Palestinians even more.

After Oct. 7, all that has changed. The price is the broken bodies of thousands of civilians in Gaza — a price Hamas is all too happy to pay while its top leaders cower in their secure retreats and live in luxury.

Still, the fact that Hamas is willing to feed its own people into the fire doesn’t let us off the hook. Israel is responding exactly as you’d expect a country whose people were attacked in such a brutal manner to respond, and exactly the way Hamas counted on.

For some people, that’s all they need to know. Hamas is responsible, full stop. To them, I say watch the interview that CNN’s Anderson Cooper did this week with Emily Callahan, an American nurse who had just left Gaza after working there with Doctors Without Borders. There’s a reason it’s gone viral.

Callahan describes children with “massive burns down their faces, down their necks, down their limbs,” sent after minimal treatment into camps with no running water. She says one camp has 50,000 people and four toilets. People, she says, are walking around with “fresh, open burns and wounds and partial amputations.”

It’s a vision of hell, and it’s just a glimpse. The international media can’t get into Gaza now so secondhand accounts like that of Emily Callahan must serve, and it’s bad enough. The up-close reality must be so much worse. At some point, like right now, it’s beside the point to argue about who is ultimately to blame.

Which is why the world, Canada included, must press Israel even harder to allow medical help, food and water to reach civilians in Gaza. The diplomats can argue about a ceasefire versus a pause, but abandoning mutilated civilians to wander through blasted hellscapes until they collapse and die cannot be an alternative.

Hamas greedily embraces death. Surely we must continue to refuse it.