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Why Does Hamas Sacrifice the Good of the Palestinian People for Its Genocidal Aims?

Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of WithinOurLifetime (WOL), leading a pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City on August 14, 2024. Photo: Michael Nigro via Reuters Connect
Hamas defined the war it started on October 7, 2023, as a divine victory. Iran and Hezbollah were privy to the planning and scope of the planned attack. Hamas was well aware of the sacrifice that would be required to pull it off, but in all the Hamas protocols seized by the IDF in the ensuing war, the heavy Israeli price tag was hardly mentioned. Palestinian sacrifice, especially the deaths of many Palestinians, was seen as a necessary evil in order to gain independence.
In the official document explaining Operation Tufan Al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Flood) that Hamas published on all its websites, several justifications for war with Israel are described, but the immediate reason for the October 7 assault is not mentioned. The reasons cited in the Hamas document include Jewish ascension to the Temple Mount, an ongoing event that has taken place on and off since 1967 under various restrictions; the presence of seven million Palestinian refugees in refugee camps throughout the Middle East; the continuation of the Palestinian problem for about 75 years, the settlements in the West Bank; and the detention by Israel of Palestinian prisoners. None of these reasons is new. No world-changing event obliged Hamas to launch an all-out war on Israel with the support of the entire Iranian resistance axis. So why did it proceed?
An analysis of articles published on Hamas websites shows that the main goal of Tufan al-Aqsa was to prevent a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This aim was also revealed in the secret seized protocols of Hamas. This goal is a distinct Iranian interest.
Yahya Sinwar was the person most associated with the planning and execution of Operation Tufan al-Aqsa. By virtue of his position as head of the Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip, and as one of the group’s founders and part of its military arm, Sinwar held power on a level unequaled by anyone before him. After the death of Ismail Haniyeh, Sinwar was officially appointed head of the political bureau. He was the first Hamas chief to emerge from the military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, to head the organization’s political bureau as well (he is the fourth leader of the political bureau after Musa Abu Marzouk, Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh).
Sinwar, as claimed in Al-Sharq Al-Awast, represented the connection between Hamas and Iran. This connection led to the training by Iran of Hamas’s military arm; the supply of armaments, including precision armaments; and tremendous financial support from Iran.
Sinwar’s assassination was described by sources in Hamas as “aqsa dharba,” or an extremely severe blow. Sinwar had charisma and was able to sway people to follow him. His survival, as the man who symbolized the October 7 war for Hamas, was in itself an image of victory over Israel. His elimination constitutes a counter-image of Israeli victory, regardless of how the war ends.
The candidates to replace Sinwar at the head of Hamas are Khalil al-Hayya, Sinwar’s deputy head of the political bureau (al-Hayya is considered less charismatic and pragmatic); Muhammad al-Sinwar, Yahya’s brother, who currently heads the military wing of Hamas in the Gaza Strip (after replacing Mohammed Deif); and Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, head of the North Gaza Brigade and the only senior military commander to have survived thus far. It is likely that Khaled Meshaal will return to lead Hamas as the main leader of the political arm – at least temporarily, until a permanent appointment is made by the Shura Council.
The war Hamas started on October 7 has destroyed the Gaza Strip, killed over 50,000 Palestinians (according to Hamas sources, which do not differentiate between civilians and militants), and wounded over 100,000. Faced with such grim results, Hamas is now trying to explain why it embarked on Operation Tufan al-Aqsa in the first place. The organization is well aware that its support among the Gazan population is at an unprecedented low. The majority of the Palestinian population in the Strip currently believes Hamas’s decision to launch the invasion on October 7, 2023, was based on incorrect assumptions and a strategic mistake. This is despite the degree of Islamization that Palestinian society has undergone since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.
In an article entitled, “Was Sinwar’s decision [to start the war] correct? “published on the Hamas website on October 10, 2024, the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of Sinwar’s war in Gaza, the war is presented as a “victory of the resistance, steadfastness, faith, patience and sacrifice of the people of Gaza. This is an epic historical resistance that will lead to the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” The author, Monir Shafiq, a Lebanese writer of Christian-Palestinian origin, was active in Fatah, converted to Islam, and over the years came closer to the concept of Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The publication of the article in October 2024 indicates a striking disconnect between the organization’s leadership and the suffering Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip. The article describes Hamas’s indiscriminate murder, torture, rape, and abduction of Jewish men, women and children in the Gaza Envelope as heroic actions justified by the “takeover” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the other reasons mentioned above. Israel is described as the “representative of Western civilization (the white race) against the barbarians (the peoples of the world).”
According to this logic, the barbaric attack by Hamas is justified according to international law while Israel’s attempts to protect and defend the lives of its citizens are violations of those laws. According to Hamas, Israel has no right to exist as a state and a sovereign entity in any borders whatsoever (not the 1967 borders, the 1947 borders, or any others). A year after October 7, Hamas is still refusing to take responsibility for the vast destruction it has brought down upon its people, the Gaza Strip, and the peoples of the region. Hamas has expressed no desire to reach a historical reconciliation that will end hostilities between the nations. After Sinwar’s departure, will Hamas realize that the time has come to end the war they started and lost with a settlement that restores the Gaza Strip and establishes regional peace? Or does Hamas prefer to continue serving Iran, even if doing so is directly at odds with the national interest of the Palestinian people?
Dr. (Lt. Col.) Shaul Bartal is a senior researcher at the BESA Center and a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Lisbon. During his military service, he served in various roles in the West Bank. He has also taught in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Political Science. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post Why Does Hamas Sacrifice the Good of the Palestinian People for Its Genocidal Aims? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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In Gaza, Hamas Is Medea

Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
In Greek mythology, Medea does the unthinkable. Pursued by her father, Aeetes, and his fleet, she turns on the person closest to her — her own brother, Absyrtus. She drives a sword into his side, then tears apart a body “made of her own flesh.” She places his head and hands in sight of her father’s ship; the rest she scatters across the shore. Aeetes, shattered by grief, must stop to gather the remains while Medea escapes.
The Romanian writer Vintila Horia, in his novel God Was Born in Exile, lingers on this moment. Medea, he writes, was “a plaything of the gods, who drive men to commit these hateful acts so that they can then punish them more effectively.”
Myths survive because they illuminate universal human behaviors. They are metaphors dressed as stories — allegories of devices we see repeated again and again. And in this case, the echoes are uncomfortably clear.
Today, Palestinian leaders, whether from Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, or the PFLP, play Medea’s role. They sacrifice their own people for survival, for wealth, for ideology. Absyrtus is the Palestinian people themselves: torn apart, scattered, turned into propaganda fragments. And the West becomes Aeetes, chasing after the wreckage, desperate to collect the consequences, always behind.
The “gods” are not divine. They are the powers who exploit Palestinians as pawns: Syria, Iran, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others. Wrapped in the cloak of a politicized Palestinian identity that seems to grant immunity, leaders and patrons have stolen aid, enriched themselves, and justified repression: homophobia, misogyny, fanaticism, antisemitism, corruption, and endless violence. The cloak also serves to extract concessions abroad — political, diplomatic, and economic.
Meanwhile, Aeetes, the West, pursues the trail. Responsibilities, negotiations, and concessions pile up. Security and rights recede. Appeasement, apologies, and money flow in, offered up as if tolerance alone could undo the crime.
Medea, in this story, is embodied by the Palestinian leaders and their minions. They are directly responsible for the theft, for the indoctrination, and for the tactic Khaled Meshal himself described: sacrificing their own people to wound, however briefly, the image of the Jewish State. Each “martyrdom,” each “jihad,” is sold as a step toward eliminating Israel.
Absyrtus is the people — trapped in a machinery of violence, indoctrination, victimization, and offering, for which UNRWA bears immense responsibility. Reduced to faces on campaign posters, to slogans shouted in Paris, Madrid, or American universities, their deaths are paraded before the world as bait. The West does not insist that Hamas be removed from power — so that the war will end; hospitals, schools, and mosques won’t be turned into fighting locations; and Palestinian civilians won’t be used by their government as human shields. Instead, the West, like Aeetes, dutifully chases after the violent repercussions of Hamas’ tactics, convinced that appeasement, tolerance, and aid can somehow reassemble what their leaders have destroyed.
This ritual has a lineage. From the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, down to Hamas today, the line runs long and unbroken. Death and hostage releases become theater, staged to desensitize their own people and foreign spectators alike.
Above all, Palestinians are sacrificed for a radical Islamist project of religious totalitarianism that seeks to advance westward, unopposed and unquestioned. This is what Hamas represents, and that is the true tragedy: not simply that people die, but that their deaths are wielded as weapons, as theater, and as excuses for hatred.
So long as the West keeps gathering the carnage that has been left behind, it will remain trapped in the tragedy. The only way out is to name the crime and hold the true Medeas to account.
Marcelo Wio is a Senior Analyst at CAMERA’s Spanish Department.
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Exposed: AP Freelancer in Gaza Praised Palestinian Terrorist Who Killed 37 Jews

Students at the Dalal Mughrabi Elementary Mixed School, which was built with funds from the Belgian government. (Photo: Facebook)
If the Associated Press (AP), one of the world’s largest news agencies, had done its due diligence before hiring Palestinian photojournalist Ismael Abu Dayyah, it would have seen him praising terrorists and posting anti-Israel content online.
Instead, Abu Dayyah was employed to report on the war in Gaza for the AP in 2024, and the agency still sells his images.
His social media activity, however, casts a shadow over his objectivity and the AP’s hiring practices, which comes at a time when global media outlets are promoting an ongoing campaign on behalf of Gazan journalists.
Abu Dayyah used the social media platform X to glorify Palestinian terrorist Dalal al Mughrabi, who was responsible for the deadliest attack against Israeli Jews before the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
Abu Dayyah also praised the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a proscribed terror group responsible for dozens of attacks against Israelis over the decades, including suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings, and in 2014, the barbaric murder of five Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in Jerusalem. He also celebrated its member Laila Khaled, who hijacked an airplane en route to Tel Aviv in 1969.
Abu Dayyah also posted content showing his profile picture on a map of Israel with a caption calling for the liberation of Jerusalem. Other posts by him called Hamas hostages “prisoners,” and labeled the establishment of a Jewish state as “Zionist Colonialism.”
Praise for Terrorists
In a post from March 2021, Abu Dayyah wrote:
And “Dalal Mughrabi” remains the bride of Palestine who chose resistance as her path and the homeland as her beloved, the legend who surpassed all military ranks. – Anniversary of martyrdom 11_March_1978.
Dalal Al Mughrabi was a Fatah terrorist responsible for the horrific 1978 massacre of 37 Jews, among them 12 children, in what was the deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history — until Hamas’ October 7 massacre.
Al Mughrabi led the “Coastal Road Massacre,” as it became known, when she and a group of terrorists infiltrated Israel from Lebanon, hijacked a passenger bus, and detonated it with explosives near Tel Aviv.
But for the AP’s Abu Dayyah, she is an icon. And he has been consistent in celebrating the anniversary of her “heroic” death not only in 2021, but also in previous years.
In 2022, Abu Dayyah also posted praise for Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled and the PFLP:
Leila Khaled, who is still a PFLP member and regularly calls for violence against Israel, took part in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. A year later, she was part of a two-person team that attempted to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City.
By celebrating her “achievements” online, Abu Dayyah actively promoted and supported terrorism. He also included hashtags delegitimizing a Jewish presence in Israel, such as “Jerusalem is Arab” and “our land wants freedom.”
Abu Dayyah has a documented history of praising, supporting, and promoting violent terrorism, and should therefore have no place in any Western media outlets, where his photos — that only show destruction and casualties in Gaza but not terrorists — promote Hamas’ narrative and serve as an outlet for his bias.
Anti-Israeli Bias
How can Abu Dayyah be expected to cover the Israel-Palestinian conflict professionally and objectively if he is also posting images that express his deep anti-Israeli bias?
In 2021, for example, as Hamas launched rockets at Israel from Gaza, he posted a picture of himself covering Israel’s map, and called for the liberation of Jerusalem.
Another propaganda post Abu Dayyah published that week showed a masked Palestinian youth protecting Jerusalem’s al Aqsa compound — located on Judaism’s holiest site — from Israeli soldiers.
And last February, Al Dayyah called Israeli hostages who were held and tortured by Hamas “prisoners” — a bias so deeply ingrained that it unsurprisingly aligns with his view that the establishment of the Jewish state was “Zionist colonialism.”
Media Hypocrisy
The AP cannot feign ignorance. HonestReporting had already exposed numerous Gaza journalists for their anti-Israel bias, at best, or Hamas membership, at worst, by the time the AP hired Abu Dayyah in 2024.
At the outset of the Israel-Hamas war, we even exposed the antisemitic social media history of the agency’s Gaza correspondent — which led to his dismissal.
So why did the AP not bother checking Abu Dayyah’s background before he was hired? Do AP bosses not believe in due diligence — which should be a given in any respectable organization?
And what do the AP and other media outlets have to say about Abu Dayyah in light of their loud campaign on behalf of Gaza journalists — many of whom share his views or work side by side with Hamas?
“When will AP acknowledge a consistent and serious problem with too many of Gaza’s media workers?” said HonestReporting’s editorial director, Simon Plosker. “Ismael Abu Dayyah didn’t even attempt to hide his extremism from his employers, and it’s clear they didn’t even bother looking. Instead of launching campaigns that ignore journalists’ links to or sympathies for Hamas, it’s high time the media addressed the elephant in the room. Neither AP nor any credible Western media should employ Abu Dayyah again, and we call on AP to publicly state that the news agency will sever ties with him.”
If a global news organization has no problem relying on biased journalists who praise the murderers of Jews, it cannot simultaneously decry their “professional” plight.
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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French Dishonor in New York: A Palestinian State as a Reward for Oct. 7

French President Emmanuel Macron is seen at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Photo: Reuters/Martial Trezzini
In late September 1938, faced with yet one more territorial demand from Adolf Hitler and gripped with fear at the prospect of another European war just after the end of the Great War, British and French leaders decided to meet with Hitler in Munich,
Although wary of Hitler and his repeated threats, Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Edouard Daladier, Prime Minister of France, chose to agree to Hitler’s demand to integrate part of newly-formed Czechoslovakia — known as the Sudetenland — into his Third Reich. The Czechs had no choice but to agree to the partition, which was being imposed on them by outsiders.
Chamberlain seemed persuaded that by giving in to Hitler’s demands and having the Nazi Chancellor sign a treaty whereby he announced that he had no further territorial demands, he had brought the risk of war to an end. He would even announce that this capitulation meant, as he put it, “Peace in our time.”
Daladier had no such illusion. Although he agreed to the treaty with Hitler, he was profoundly ashamed of the concessions he and Chamberlain had made. In fact, he was so ashamed of his behavior at Munich, that he was afraid to return to Paris. As his plane prepared to land at Le Bourget just outside of Paris, Daladier could see a very large crowd waiting for him. Fearful that the crowd might cause him harm in light of the Munich agreement, he ordered the pilot to circle the airfield and defer landing. Finally, he had no choice but to land, and he prepared to face the crowd’s hostility.
To his amazement, as he exited his plane, he was greeted by shouts of approval. He could barely believe his eyes and ears. He had feared being attacked and, instead, he was being acclaimed. His reaction was to mutter, “Ah, the fools [using a profanity]. If they only understood.” Daladier, the seasoned politician and intelligent student of history, knew very well that signing a treaty with a murderous thug like Hitler was an exercise in futility, or worse.
The experience of Prime Minister Daladier is well worth remembering as we witness the humiliating groveling of French President Emmanuel Macron in New York, as Macron — seemingly seeking to pacify a segment of France’s population — announces France’s recognition of a non-existent Palestinian State. That Macron has chosen to do this in the wake of the brutal massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, a massacre committed in the name of and with the seeming approval of many Palestinians, as well as at a time when Israeli hostages remain imprisoned in the tunnels of Gaza, is truly galling.
If Macron believes that by recognizing a Palestinian state at this time he is promoting peace in the Middle East, he needs to reread the history of the Munich conference.
Just as it was obvious that Hitler was lying when he promised that, if he was given the Sudetenland he would not have any further territorial demands, so Palestinian leaders are obviously lying as they suggest that recognition of a Palestinian state might bring an end to their desire to destroy Israel.
It is very likely that, having recognized Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, Macron will be given a hero’s welcome in Paris. But that welcome will be a hollow welcome. Just as Daladier was cheered on his return from Munich, Macron will be cheered by fools. The motley crew of fools will be made up of unassimilated immigrants, radical leftists, and indoctrinated students.
Sadly, Macron, the brilliant and articulate young man who seemed so promising when he first assumed office — quite unlike Daladier, the experienced and cynical politician — may not even be able to appreciate the error of his ways. In spite of his intelligence, Macron appears unable to understand that recognition of a Palestinian state now can only appear as a reward to Hamas for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
That is especially the case since Hamas terrorists continue their intransigence in holding hostages and refusing to lay down their arms, in spite of their evident military defeat. Macron, through his appeasement of terrorists, will simply have prolonged the agony of the very people of the region he purports to be helping and he will have made ultimate peace in the Middle East even more elusive.
Just as Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s negotiation with Hitler merely postponed the inevitable and assuredly encouraged Hitler to believe that intransigence could work, Macron’s false encouragement to the Palestinians will certainly prompt yet more violence and cost yet more lives. It will make France seem naïve and cynical.
Instead of adding luster to the history of France, Macron will have added another disappointing chapter to the roller coaster ride that is French history. In this case, as in 1938, there are plenty of fools, but potentially the greatest fool of them all may be the shameless and feckless French president himself.
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of a national law firm. He is the author of Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution, published by HUC Press.