No, Israel is not targeting Hamas!
Israel is not targeting Hamas. How do I know this? Because Israel targeted them regularly, and in a manner that limited "collateral damage," when I lived in Gaza (2002-2004) during the second intifada.
Israel’s Typical Military Response to Hamas before 2006
Informants in Gaza would mark the cars, residences, and meeting places of known or suspected Hamas political, militia, or religious leaders. Then, when most politically useful, Israel would send two Apache helicopters to kill one or more of these "high-value targets."
Back then, targetting them up on the road was, I suspect, the most common call because this resulted in much fewer civilian casualties than shooting missiles into a crowded refugee camp or an eight-story apartment building. Opting to take out “high-value targets” on the road meant that only those people unlucky enough to be in the cars directly in front, behind, or to the side of the target would be injured or killed - not an entire city block, hospital, or refugee camp.
Since 2006, however, Israel’s Gaza policy shifted towards killing as many Palestinians and destroying as much civilian infrastructure as they can get away with, in part by calling people in hospitals, schools, bakeries, etc., "human shields." This rhetoric holds victims responsible, half of whom are children, for the war crimes Israel is committing against them with the full support of the United States, the United Kingdom, and EU governments, among others. Talk about adding insult to injury!
Policy Shift
Israel's - illegal as per International Law - military actions in Gaza are clearly no longer about killing Hamas resistance movement leadership or fighters. The obvious objective, to those willing to see it, is to take Gaza - the land - by any means necessary. Means that now include the genocidal bombing of 2.2 million people with zero means to defend or protect themselves against these made-in-the-USA hellfire missiles and J-DAM bombs.
Informants in Gaza
Has Israel’s capacity to cultivate informants in Gaza diminished since 2004? There is little evidence to suggest so. Many informants are blackmailed into it. Some have an axe to grind against Hamas or do it for perks in cash or kind, given the draconian 18-year collective punishment blockade. Fatah still has members or supporters there; it is not like they were allowed to leave en masse after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory.
Political Context
The graphic below (clipped from Wikipedia) shows the results of the last election Israel, thus the US, allowed to be held in the West Bank and Gaza. One could take from this that it benefits Israel and Washington DC to continue to say that Gazans “elected Hamas” as an excuse to slaughter them while cynically not mentioning that the last election was 18 years ago.
If you ask those who have actually worked in military intelligence, who were responsible for determining targets and assessing "proportionality," they will tell you that Israeli officials and US, UK, and EU politicians and media pundits are gaslighting us. Israel is not targeting Hamas. They are targeting Gaza.
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