The level of logistical detail and coordination involved in Hamas’s Oct. 7th invasion, enabling thousands of fighters to cross into southern Israel to engage in a massacre that the terror leader thought would prompt a broader war involving Hezbollah and Iran, and lead to Israel’s destruction, was meticulous, and took several years of planning.
What’s also clear is that the war planning avoided even the rudimentary contingencies for the protection of Gaza’s civilians. No space within the estimated 350 miles of Gaza military tunnels, constructed by a diversion of cement and other dual-use items meant for humanitarian projects in the Strip, was set aside for its citizens to use in what Yahya Sinwar surely knew would be a fierce counterattack by Jerusalem.
There was also clearly no effort to stockpile fuel, medicine and – most crucially – food supplies for the population. In other words, the welfare of over two-million people was of absolutely no concern to Sinwar and his chief lieutenants.
In fact, early in the war, a major Hamas leader stated explicitly that they were not responsible for protecting the Strip’s civilians, and that it was Israel’s obligation to provide the needs of its citizens – an astonishing abdication of moral responsibility by a regime initiating an unprovoked war of aggression, one that likely has few parallels.
For a historic comparison, even a regime as fanatical Nazi Germany built extensive air raid shelters for its civilians in anticipation of Allied bombing, and stockpiled thousands of tons of food.
Though Hamas’s complete abandonment of its citizens shouldn’t come as a surprise given the group’s broader human shield and human sacrifice policy, it is almost universally ignored by British media outlets when addressing food insecurity in Gaza – particularly in light of the IPC report alleging famine in parts of the territory which has been criticised by serious researchers for reaching a conclusion not supported by the data.
A Telegraph opinion piece by Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International, (“Seven common tropes used to deny Gaza’s famine, debunked by an expert“, Aug. 26), in typical fashion for such ‘humanitarian activists’, not only ignores Hamas’s role in Gaza’s food insecurity and broader Palestinian suffering, but, in his only mention of Hamas in the op-ed, actually comes to the defense of the terror group against ‘charges’ that it steals aid.
Konyndyk, it should be noted, though being quite active on X, didn’t post anything condemning the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7th or 8th of 2023. He only weighed in Oct. 9th – two days after the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, while medical teams were searching for the mutilated, charred and, sometimes, microscopic remains of what were once living, breathing, fully intact human beings. He wrote, in one post that day, that his organisation is “horrified and heartbroken by the attacks and loss of life in Israel and Gaza“. In another post that day, he was already lecturing the traumatised Jewish state that “two wrongs don’t make a right“.
Tellingly, in his debate with a straw man critic of the IPC report, Konyndyk’s Telegraph op-ed attacks those who putatively say that “that starving person has a pre-existing condition, so it’s not real starvation”.
However, none of the IPC critiques linked to in this post made that argument.
Many, prior to the IPC report last week, have been correctly noting dishonest media reports about hunger in Gaza which used photos of emaciated children while omitting the pre-existing conditions which helps explain their horrifying appearance. The fact that photos of children with cerebral palsy, for instance, sometimes show healthy-looking siblings would suggest that such co-morbidities are an important element in understanding their condition.
In contrast, Konyndyk’s “seven tropes” op-ed avoids steelmanning the arguments of critics of the IPC famine determination, thus failing to address the IPC’s most egregious flaws related to hunger and death.
For instance, Dr Mark Zlochin, an independent researcher and data analyst, noted the IPC’s quiet admission that the reported mortality rate in Gaza City was wildly below the famine threshold, forcing the study’s authors to speculate – without evidence – that the “actual death rate” was over two dozen times higher than what even the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health claimed.
An honest rebuttal to the IPC’s critics would have addressed that intrinsic flaw.
Another problem with the IPC’s famine determination ignored by Konyndyk relates to the fact that the report “discarded half of the available data and misrepresented what the remainder actually showed”, according to Zlochin’s analysis. The IPC’s key claim that the level of severe child malnutrition surged to 16 per cent in July, supposedly crossing the famine line, ignores that the “full dataset of more than 15,000 children showed rates closer to 12 per cent”, significantly below the threshold from famine. By failing to use the complete data, Zlochin argued, “the IPC created the illusion of both a breach and a surge that never occurred”
Konyndyk, as we noted, also rebuts the ‘claim’ that much of the aid crossing into Gaza is stolen by Hamas. However, data from the United Nations itself showed that between May 19 and August 5, only around 10 percent of the aid trucks reached their intended destinations in Gaza, with the rest being intercepted and looted along their delivery routes by Hamas and other armed actors.
Further, as our colleague David Litman showed, in contrast with Israel’s facilitation of nearly two million tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza since the war began, most of it food, there has been a concerted campaign by Hamas to intimidate Gazans into refusing aid over which the terror organisation has no control and can’t profit from – such as from the GHF and other private aid initiatives.
Moreover, the debate over the accuracy of the IPC report, in some crucial ways, mirrors the broader debate about the nearly twenty-three month war. After Hamas’s pogromists engaged in the mass murder, rape, torture, mutilation and hostage taking in southern Gaza, they continued fighting, while largely shedding their military uniforms and retreating to elaborate tunnel system, hidden from plain sight.
However, most news consumers could be forgiven for believing that the Islamist extremist group literally disappeared. In most of the media’s framing, it’s as if Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad ceased fighting shortly after Oct. 7, and stopped making decisions that impact both Israelis and Gazans – a denial of Palestinian agency that compromises the vast majority of news coverage of the war.
In addition to the terror group’s fanatical decision to attack Israel on Oct. 7th, knowing full well the harm to ordinary Gazans that would result from the inevitable Israeli counter-attack, as well as their related failure to do even the bare minimum to provide sustenance for its citizenry during the war, they’ve refused to surrender – thus ensuring continued misery in the territory they’ve ruled with an iron fist for the past eighteen years.
