Hamas has shown us for more than a year what a government of terrorists would look like. Now we have even more clear a picture:
Hamas, officials said, made a strategic decision to conquer the entire Gaza Strip and to wipe out the entire Fatah senior brass.
Hamas operatives man roadblocks throughout Gaza with laptops that contain lists of Fatah officials, supporters and families. Anyone found on the list is either executed or severely beaten.
Hamas’s brutality was demonstrated on Wednesday when it raided the Shati refugee camp in central Gaza and rounded up female members of the Baker clan, known Fatah supporters. The women surrendered, were ordered outside their homes, and Hamas gunmen executed three of them, aged 13, 19 and 75.
On the other hand, some IDF officials think this means they can take off the gloves:
From a military perspective, some defense officials actually said there was reason to be thankful for Hamas’s takeover of the Strip. Before the recent round of intra-Palestinian violence, Israel had to distinguish between Fatah and Hamas gunmen in Gaza and make sure that that the former, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s loyalists, were not targeted. Now, according to this view, there is no longer any need to draw such distinctions, since all gunmen are Hamas and therefore fair game.
“The bank of targets has grown tremendously with Hamas’s takeover,” explained one official involved in monitoring events in Gaza and planning policy. “Hamas is a clear and defined enemy, and that means that when we decide to respond it will be easier than before, since all their buildings are now targets, as is anyone walking around with a weapon.”
We shall see. Hamas will hide its weapons among civilians, and call on human shields to gather round to protect its fighters. They’ve done so in the past, and it worked. Any way you look at this, it’s bad news for Israel, the region, and the world.
Hamas makes no secret of the fact that it now receives most of its financial and military support from Iran. The Iranian government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hamas leadership in June last year, in which it agreed to fund the militant group to the tune of £400 million.
[…] In addition to financial support, Iran provides training to members of the military wing of Hamas by sending them to camps in Lebanon and Iran run by the elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards.
Past Iranian attempts to supply the Palestinians with military hardware have been less successful, with the Israeli navy intercepting a ship laden with explosives destined for Gaza in early 2002. But earlier this year, the Iranians sought to establish new supply lines to Gaza.
On February 24, Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’s supreme leader, travelled to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where he met senior Quds Force officials and Sudanese politicians who are broadly sympathetic to Hamas’s political objectives.
The main topic of conversation was setting up a supply route that would enable Iran to smuggle rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles, guns and explosives through the porous border between Gaza and Egypt.
And surprisingly, the Con Coughlin points out that the emperor has no clothes:
Pro-Palestinian campaigners frequently claim that the main reason Gaza is in crisis is that the economic blockade imposed by America and Israel following Hamas’s election victory has reduced the civilian population to penury. This was the essence of the argument advanced by Alvaro de Soto, until recently the UN’s special co-ordinator for the Middle East, who seems happy to blame anyone for the Palestinians’ plight except the Palestinians themselves.
Ordinary Palestinians, it is true, in both Gaza and the West Bank, are suffering hardship. But this is not because of a lack of funds entering the Palestinian territories: it is because successive Palestinian administrations have made no effort to distribute the resources available equably among the population.
Hamas, on the other hand, sees economic deprivation as a form of political oppression. The World Bank reported that donors contributed about £375 million to the Palestinian territories in 2006, twice the amount they received in 2005. But since taking power, Hamas ensures any funds are spent on Islamic causes and its 6,000-strong militia, leaving the majority to fend for themselves.
The bonus for Hamas is that, by forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, it succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place.
Not that that will stop anyone from insisting they have to contribute money to Hamas to “ease conditions” in Gaza, which should now be called Gazastan.
This summer’s war is going to be a bad one.
If an Israeli soldier executed a 13 year old Arab girl, most of the world press would be in an uproar, you would never hear the end of it from bleeding heart Israeli liberals like Gideon Levy and Amira Huss.
But when a Hamass member does something like that no one makes a peep about it. Of course, most of the liberal so called “peaceniks” like Jimmy Carter and others would claim it has nothing to do with antisemitism.