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This is a battle that Israel won, and Hamas actually won.
Only they lost.
And yet they cheered most gleefully.
Hello everyone, it’s been a long time coming to talk about the Palestinian-Israeli issue today, because these two have a ceasefire.
On the 20th, local time, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the Gaza Strip entered the 11th day, Hamas and Israel finally reached a ceasefire agreement, and it has been officially effective at 2:00 on the 21st.
I read a lot of reports on this matter at home and abroad, and I feel that the reaction from the Israeli side is not that strong, instead, there is a massive celebration in the Gaza area controlled by Hamas this time, making it seem as if Hamas has won a big victory in this conflict.
This is strange, because it is easy for anyone to see that Hamas and Israel have suffered a big loss in this fight: Hamas has fired about 4,000 rockets from Gaza into Israel, killing only 12 Israelis in total. Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, on the other hand, have killed at least 230 Palestinians, including several top Hamas officials.
Israel played the “let the leader go first” decapitation operation in this war, and a number of senior Hamas leaders were set up and “tricked” into seemingly safe air defense tunnels before being caught in the crossfire and targeted by Israeli missiles, something Hamas never expected. This is something that Hamas never expected to happen.
But as much as it hurts, Hamas must promote this conflict as a “big victory” because after this fight with Israel, the organization has another, more critical “civil war” to fight.
Coincidentally, tomorrow, May 22, is the date on which Palestinian legislative council elections are scheduled to take place. As one of the most important Palestinian authorities, the outcome of this election will determine which of Hamas and old foe Fatah (PLO) will control this key institution.
Also according to the original plan, there will be presidential and parliamentary elections throughout the second half of this year, and the final results of the three elections will (at least nominally) shape the Palestinian regime.
This “battle” for Hamas, in fact, is even more crucial, because no matter how Israel fights him, with the international community pulling the strings, it is difficult for the Israeli army to really push the Gaza Strip. But if you lose to Fatah in the domestic elections, the two sides before the accumulation of “bitter hatred” to see, Hamas may be thrown to the bone, so between the two factions, it is really a struggle between you and me.
Yes, Palestine is now divided into two states – Hamas, which actually controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, which actually controls the West Bank.
This is the truth, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, rather than “Chu and Han”, but more like the three states. If this conflict is considered the “Battle of Red Cliff”, it should be followed by “crossing the river in white”, “burning the camp” and “defeat of Guoting “These Sun and Liu internal strife drama.
And over the years, as Hamas has been taking the “war wolf route” against Israel, Fatah, originally the “orthodox representative” of Palestine, has been losing ground and avoiding war.
Originally, the dates for this year’s three general elections had been agreed upon in accordance with a negotiated agreement between the two sides in Egypt in 2019.
But on April 30, Fatah leader Abbas, the current Palestinian president, made a “midnight chicken call”: he suddenly made a televised speech to postpone the elections on May 22, citing the tightening situation between Israel and Palestine. Abbas has seen that the elections are not good for the “moderate” Fatah at a time when Hamas is repeatedly causing trouble against Israel. Abbas tried to give the Palestinians a choice in a more calm and stable environment.
But the statement was immediately met with fierce opposition from Hamas, which effectively controls the Gaza Strip, claiming that Abbas and his Fatah are “staging a coup” and demanding that the elections must go ahead as scheduled or unilateral measures will be taken.
Interestingly, the current round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (actually, it should be called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Fatah, which controls the West Bank, watching almost the entire process) began to polarize rapidly after the two sides had a fight.
Based on the above news facts, I think there is reason to suspect that this conflict is a well-timed “electioneering show” for Hamas, which is trying to establish itself as the mainstay of the “resistance against Israel” by firing more than 4,000 rockets. The Hamas rocket fire has established its image as the mainstay of the “resistance to Israel” and continues to attract radicals in Palestine, especially in Gaza, and to hold this public opinion hostage to complete the “push” against Fatah. This will force them to hold general elections as soon as possible.
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You may find it particularly strange that it is so interesting to represent such a “refugee state” that has less territory and population than a large county in China and where more than half of its citizens are struggling under the absolute poverty line. Is it worth the fierce rivalry between these two groups?
The top brass of Fatah and Hamas will give you a smile that is so profound, representing a group of refugees, that you can’t even imagine the fun.
It goes without saying that Palestine is the poorest and most miserable country in the world today, bar none.
But Fatah and Hamas are also the most lucrative “national liberation organizations” in the world today, again, none of them.
Not to mention Fatah, the old “orthodox representative” of Palestine, which has been criticized for its corruption during Arafat’s lifetime, as a source of financial aid to the international community, especially to Arab countries. Whether Arafat left a private estate of $1 billion or $1.5 billion is still in doubt, but he was certainly a wealthy man.
Hamas, on the other hand, has been making a lot of money over the years.
The other day, Qatar, a small oil-rich country in the Middle East, told the world that Qatar alone has provided $1.8 billion in aid to Hamas since the 2007 coup in Gaza, when it ousted Fatah and set itself up.
And Iran, another country that openly aids Hamas, is giving it up to $30 million a year in earmarked aid.
Think about it, Iran, a country that even its own people have to eat international relief food, but actually tighten the belt every year with such a large amount of money to support Hamas “revolution” …… this is not internationalism?
There are also Turkey and Syria …… These countries do not announce it openly, but secretly they are giving money to the “very spiritual” Hamas ……
There are also NGOs and foundations that are big moneymakers for Hamas, and the German magazine Der Spiegel made an estimate earlier this year that the flow of money from Germany to Hamas alone in 2020 would be more than 10 million euros. Because there are a large number of immigrants of Middle Eastern origin in Germany, all giving money to Hamas for different purposes.
So how much “foreign aid for Israel” does Hamas receive each year?
This is a difficult mystery because the organization lacks the open and transparent accounting structure that a proper government should have.
But what is certain is that the organization should never be as poor as it appears to be.
If the 4,000 rockets fired by Hamas in this conflict are really all they have, then I really have to ask them, on behalf of the global “capital,”
That’s it? That’s it? Where did you spend the money?
After all, given the standard of living of the people of the Gaza Strip, it seems that Hamas is not using the money to improve the livelihood of the people of Gaza.
But once the explosions go off, these questions don’t matter, the Israelis have a “national vendetta” on their hands and you have the heart to ask where Hamas spent its money? Take the explosive packets that are being handed to you and go serve as a glorious human shield for the organization!
So, in this conflict, Hamas seems to have lost but actually won – it posed as an anti-Israeli, diverted domestic conflicts, and prepared for the next fight with Fatah, killing several birds with one stone. Despite the loss on Israel’s side, the fight against Fatah is looking good.
Israel, of course, also won, because Hamas only against civilian facilities, the IDF unharmed, almost at the cost of zero casualties achieved the current results, the battle is too easy to fight.
So who really lost?
It’s the ordinary people of Gaza who are being bombed.
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Gaza is a really bad place, especially in 2007 after Hamas in the local “seizure of power”, because Hamas is bent on “promoting martial virtue”, here since all industries such as agriculture and industry has been in a state of total paralysis.
In order to prevent Hamas from using Gaza as a base for terrorist attacks, Israel has built a lengthy separation wall along the Gaza border since the same period, basically banning the movement of people and goods between Gaza and Israel and completely isolating Gaza from the Israeli economy.
Even Egypt, a neighbor of the same language and race, does not “give a hand to its brother”. After Hamas took power, Egypt closed its own borders to Gaza, not allowing normal trade flows, and not even allowing young Gazans under the age of 40 to work in Egypt, probably because it was afraid of the terrorists mixed in with them to cause trouble for their own families.
So the entire Gaza Strip is now a giant prison, which the UN warned back in 2014 would be unfit for human habitation by 2020.
But today this mere 365 square kilometers of bullet point is actually packed with a whole 2 million Palestinians, with a population density comparable to Tokyo, because these people have nowhere else to go.
The people living here have no education, no health care, no jobs, live on less than a dollar a day per capita, 60% are below the absolute poverty line, 50% are chronically unemployed, 50% have no access to clean drinking water, and 70% need relief food from the UN or international humanitarian organizations to get by. A 2018 WHO survey said that more than half of women and children in Gaza are severely malnourished.
Yet people here remain energized because poverty is the perfect breeding ground for extremism and terrorism. As more and more young people struggling to survive in poverty become dissatisfied with the status quo, the only option is to join the radical Hamas and fight what they see as the cause of Gaza’s plight – Israel.
Thus a deadly cycle is formed.
Hamas, which is “virtuous” and lacks the ability and willingness to develop Gaza’s economy and improve people’s lives, will only and only use the foreign aid it receives to smuggle arms and launch attacks.
Israel’s inevitable retaliation after the attacks and the further tightening of the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The intensification of the blockade has the effect of deepening the poverty of the population, by which Hamas attracts more foreign aid and recruits more fanatical followers.
It’s a deadly cycle, and you can blame any part of it as the culprit, but it doesn’t help.
And with this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the start of the fighting to the ceasefire, we see the cycle in another rotation.
The noose around the necks of the 2 million people in Gaza has been tightened a little bit more.
The same people who have been crucified in Gaza and have had the noose tightened a little are now cheering Hamas’s “victory” in the streets.
Their future is clear: Israel will blockade them more severely, and Hamas will incite and demagogue them more fiercely into the never-ending hatred and struggle between Palestinians and Israelis and intra-Palestinian factions.
But they can’t see that in the vast darkness of the night they are cheering wildly for Hamas.
……
This is a truly magical story.
But it always plays out over and over again in our history.
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