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Source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-163014811
Hamas's Human Shield Strategy
(Substack) Maj. (ret.) Andrew Fox - For 18 months, the global media, the UN, and the NGO industry have covered the war in Gaza with a grotesque, almost deliberate omission: Hamas, the terror group that started it, is treated as if it doesn't exist. Every day, the headlines howl about Israeli airstrikes, civilian casualties, and the destruction of Gaza. At the same time, Hamas, the group that has spent 20 years building its army under Gaza's hospitals, schools, and apartment blocks, vanishes from the narrative. Hamas, the group firing rockets from playgrounds and bedrooms, filming itself fighting the IDF in civilian clothes, and boasting about using human shields, is somehow never blamed for the carnage it has engineered. My new Henry Jackson Society report is a forensic demolition of the comfortable lie that Gaza's destruction is merely the outcome of Israeli aggression. It illustrates, in brutal detail, how Hamas intentionally transformed Gaza into a death trap: rigging civilian infrastructure with weapons, tunnels, explosives, and fighters, fully aware that every dead civilian would constitute a propaganda victory. This was always the plan. Hamas leaders have proudly declared that they "desire death" and that civilian blood is a "necessary sacrifice" to advance their cause. They have openly admitted to using hospitals and UN schools as bases, booby-trapping children's bedrooms, and preventing civilians from fleeing combat zones. Hamas, not Israel, bears primary responsibility for much of Gaza's suffering. Civilian casualties are not solely a tragic outcome of Israel's actions, but a deliberate result of Hamas's grotesque military doctrine: to hide behind its own people and dare Israel to respond. This report is the missing chapter in every UN report, every NGO indictment, every dishonest editorial. It shows that Hamas's entire battlefield is Gaza's civilian population, and it exposes the cowardice of those who refuse to acknowledge it. The writer, who served in the British Army in 2005-21, is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.