If the Rafah offensive is launched, as war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu keeps saying, and if the remaining Hamas fighters are cornered into a die-or-die situation, they will have no choice but to kill the remaining hostages and die with them. The infamous "Samson option".
That is the premise on which the entire concept of seizing hostages is based: Hostages are taken in order to exchange them with something worthwhile that your enemy has to concede, and that something begins with the hostage-taker's own life, followed by other demands like a ceasefire or release of Palestinian hostages held by Israel. Yes, Israel regularly (daily) "harvests" innocent folks from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and holds them for indefinite periods of time without any due process: These are not prisoners caught in a battle; they are bona fide hostages snatched from their homes in the dead of night for the sole purpose of terrorizing the Palestinians and eventually exchange them for something valuable.
To the Israeli families of the Hamas-held hostages: Unless you convince the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon his plans to invade Rafah and to withdraw all his troops from Gaza, rest assured that you will never see your loved ones.... alive.
The Palestinians took a long time to understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to resisting a foreign barbaric occupation: '
1- They themselves have to do the fighting. Not the Arab countries who lost every war. Not Lebanon's Hezbollah. Not Syria's coward Assad. Not distant Iran. No one. Only themselves, the Palestinian people, must do the fighting.
2- They must fight from inside occupied Palestine itself. Not from Yemen. Not from Lebanon (where Yasser Arafat tried in the 1970s and 1980s to liberate Palestine by plundering Lebanon and killing hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people). Not from Syria.
3- They must fight a reciprocal fight with the Israeli enemy. If Israel fights "clean", then the Palestinians must fight clean. The Hamas fight of October 7 was not clean: killing and raping innocent civilians is not right, but when dealing with a barbaric hypermilitarized colonial militia - the Israeli army - that occupies their country, kills their families and children every day, abuses and rapes prisoners in its prisons, dehumanizes the Palestinians and makes life unbearable for them, steals their lands, deports Palestinians into refugee camps where they become stateless.... All of this for one objective: To depopulate Palestine from its rightful owners and drive out those who are stubborn, then all bets are off. Violence is violence. War is war. Occupation and resistance go hand in hand. If Israel doesn't want another October 7 to happen, it better make up its mind:
- Either conquer all of Palestine, massacre a third of the Palestinians, expel another third, and keep a third as cheap labor for menial jobs. This way, you'll have your pure Jewish supremacist banana republic resort on the Mediterranean,
or
- Make peace and give the Palestinians their freedom and a state of their own.
The on-off game of a little war, a little peace, a little occupation, a little barbarity.... in the hope that over time Jews can suppress any demands by Palestinians for freedom... is unsustainable. It is unethical, and it is now exposed for all to see. The October 7 attacks have changed the rules: Hamas has won even if it is ultimately destroyed. Palestine is no longer a bunch of refugees who blow themselves up once in a while. Palestine is now center stage: It is a nation that deserves what was taken from it some 75 years ago: its land, freedom, independence, and self-determination. There is no going back. The Zionist hubris of the 1940s that defied the most basic human decency to build a Jewish colony in Palestine by erasing historic Palestine is now dead. The fucked up state of Israel is a resort colony for Jews and a penal colony for Palestinians. You can no longer erase the Palestinian people from the world's conscience. You can no longer pretend that Zionists are some kind of cool modern pseudo-western people while Palestinians are en masse Muslim terrorists: The world is discovering that Zionists are as barbaric and death-loving in their Bronze Age religious claims as the next ISIS, Daesh or Al-Qaeda. The Zionist jig is up.
What Hamas did on october 7 is commensurate with the suffering of the Palestinian people ever since the 1930s and 1940s, the creation of the colony of Israel at the expense of the entire Palestinian nation, and the massacres and rapes carried out by foreign Jewish terrorist organizations. October 7, as UN's Guterres said, did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a crucible of war, racism, hatred, colonialism, suffering, displacement, dispossession, dehumanization, daily casual violence, denial of identity....
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose ancestral house is suddenly invaded by wealthy foreigners backed by powerful friends and claiming that the house is theirs because some trashy desert parchment claimed it to be so 3,000 years ago. Then this person's family members are evicted from the house to live in a tent somewhere far, other family members are killed and raped, the land around the house is confiscated, and a new building is erected on it housing mean and violent foreign people, etc. In other words, that person's life is turned upside down.... and this trauma has been going on for more than 75 years. What would you expect the owner of the house to do? What would you do if this was your house, your family, your life?
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