The footage showed selected clips from six separate interrogations • all said that "Islam does not permit the killing of women and children."
www.jpost.com
Taking that at face value, it is terrible, but things like that are also somewhat inevitable when there is an occupying force making life hell for refugees it has concentrated in a big camp for decades. Like a riot, this too is the language of the unheard. If there are no 'legitimate' means of addressing an injustice, and the injustice is serious enough, and especially if those who have been treated unjustly have little power at their disposal, then injustices tend to be perpetrated in response. Palestinians in Gaza have been denied peaceful means of change; the Great March of Return was met with bullets. Because the world, when Palestinians are merely dying and not killing, seem to forget that Palestinians exist, or at least don't seem to care very much about their suffering, there is a powerful incentive for them to do something that might shock the conscience. They want attention: as they should, given that they are the party that has obviously been wronged. That attention has so far not been enough should shake anyone's faith in humanity.
The admonition not to negotiate with terrorists makes logical sense to discourage terrorism, but only under this condition: that those who are wronged but do not employ terrorism have peaceful means to effect change. If you're not negotiating at all, then it is of little consequence that you're not negotiating with terrorists. Israel has given Palestinians a choice between dying quietly and trying violence. It is arrogant to judge the decisions of those that are faced with such a choice without having faced it yourself; if you give people nothing but injury when they choose non-violence, then you may as well be choosing violence for them-- it is a duty of onlookers to recognize when this is the case.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that Israel is inflicting its own terrorism on the Gaza strip. And also the West Bank. It has intensified since Oct 7. Israel's atrocities dwarf the atrocities inflicted by Hamas. If Hamas follows the admonition never to negotiate with terrorists, then it would have to see Israel utterly defeated before stopping its own violence. Obviously, this way lies a bloodbath. And given that Israel has all (or nearly all) the power in this situation, the results are its fault.
mondoweiss.net
