Hamas's Martyrcide of Gaza

It's Time to Name Hamas's Unthinkable War Strategy

The Golden Pill 

 

 

 

In the days before Donald Trump unveiled the 20-point plan proposal to end the war in Gaza, Hamas senior official Ghazi Hamad sat down for an interview with CNN’s Jeremy Diamond to once again toe the line of transparency on the jihadist group’s war strategy of the last two years.

In the interview, Hamad reaffirmed Hamas’s legitimacy and denied that it is a terrorist group — despite the group’s ongoing torturing and execution of its own civilians in Gaza. He denied the group’s use of the 48 hostages remaining in Gaza as human shields in the current Gaza City operations. He accused Israel of targeting civilian homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches in Gaza without admitting that Hamas has operated militarily from within civilian infrastructure throughout this war. And he equivocated about how Hamas’s envisions its role in Gaza after this war finally ends.

Then Diamond pivoted, asking Hamad if the group accepts any responsibility for the outcome of the war since Hamas waged it’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the what Hamad called Palestine’s “policy on its own sacrifice in this Israeli Palestinian conflict.”

“What gives you the right to decide that Palestinian women and children should be sacrificed on the alter of your resistance?” asked Diamond.

“All the time we are sacrificing,” responded Hamad.

“What gives you the right to decide it’s a price worth paying, that child can die, it’s okay because it’s in order to fulfill our resistance?”

“As Hamas we are fighting for the interests of our people,” responded Hamad again, describing a global shift in views on the Israeli Palestinian conflict since Hamas’s October 7 attack and ensuing war in Gaza. “I think this is a golden moment for the world to change the history.”

“I’m asking you whether the price Palestinian people have paid so far was worth it,” countered Diamond.

“I know the price so high,” replied Hamad, then dismissing Diamond as he handed Hamd an iPad playing footage of Gazans placing responsibility on Hamas for their suffering and calling on the group to end the war and their rule over Gaza.

ASYMMETRIC LAWFARE

There are norms in modern warfare that today we take for granted as given, in part due to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, which have been in place for decades as cornerstone to International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Overarching is the protection of civilians and civilian buildings such as homes, schools, hospitals, and places of worship, which under IHL have protected status barring their attack.

Per IHL, civilian buildings can lose protected status if they are misused for an “act harmful to the enemy.” So, for example, a hospital can lose its protected status if it is used as a base to launch attacks, a military observation post, for the storage of weapons or ammunition inside the hospital, or to shield military objectives or able-bodied combatants from attack. The understanding written into IHL here is that military operations should be carried out away from civilians so as to protect them, and that military operations carried out from within civilian buildings and areas risk putting civilians in harms way.

Since Hamas’s election in Gaza and its ensuing seizure of control of the strip in 2007, the group’s use of hospitals, mosques, schools, homes, and other civilian buildings for both official and military purposes has been well documented. Al-Shifa hospital was a site where Hamas carried out torture and executions of Gazan opponents and “traitors” in 2014. Schools, playgrounds, refugee camps and other civilian infrastructure have been rocket launch sites for Hamas.

In the group’s nearly two decades in power, Hamas built the crown jewel of its reign: a 500-kilometer network of tunnels running throughout Gaza, in construction projects which themselves proved to rely on deadly child labor.

Documents found in Gaza dating back to 2019 detail the long-premeditated military tunnel strategy designed to help the group withstand prolonged a conflict and draw Israel into quagmire in Gaza. In addition, other records show that members of Hamas employed by UNRWA as educators in U.N.-run schools have been able to use those positions to establish military operations in schools in Gaza as “the best obstacles to protect the resistance.”

Due to both Hamas’s documented military use of civilian infrastructure and its tunnel system, the group has been found to use a strategy of “human shields,” a method of warfare prohibited by IHL where the presence of civilians or the movement of the civilian population, whether voluntary or involuntary, is used in order to shield military objectives from attack, or to shield, favor or impede military operations. The International Criminal Court (ICC) states that the use of human shields — including utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations — is a war crime. Despite clear IHL and ICC violations, Hamas has pursued this strategy for years as lawfare, turning the legal system against Israel by forcing repeated conflicts to be fought among Gaza’s civilians, thereby damaging Israel’s reputation and turning tragedy into public relations victories for Hamas.

In short, turning civilian hospitals and other buildings into a conflict zone is forbidden as war crimes in IHL, as is using civilian populations, the sick or the injured as human shields. These have been the cornerstones of Hamas’s military operations throughout their rule in Gaza, and they kept doing it because they found it to be incredibly effective.

HAMAS’S HUMAN SHIELDS STRATEGY: THE EARLY YEARS

In the past, the scale to which Hamas was willing to use the human shields strategy against Israel resulted in weeks-long wars with fewer casualties. The 2014 conflict that lasted about six weeks saw an estimated 2,200 deaths in Gaza. According to UNRWA, 1,462 were believed to be civilians and 83 schools and 10 health centers run by UNRWA were damaged. That conflict began after a series of rocket attacks launched by Hamas from Gaza into Israel, including rockets fired from Al-Wafa hospital. In the IDF’s three-week operation in Gaza, they destroyed 32 terror tunnels, including 14 which were built into Israeli territory.

The UN’s “Report of the detailed findings of the Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict,” identifying what it called “war crimes by both sides” and included in these findings details of Hamas’s human shield strategy:

However, the commission is concerned that in the days prior to the start of the IDF ground operations, different representatives of the authorities in Gaza made several public declarations requesting Gaza residents not to heed the warnings issued by the IDF instructing residents of different neighbourhoods and towns to evacuate. For instance on 16 July, Hamas spokesperson Mushir al-Masri stated, “Palestinian civilians are standing up to the enemy with their steadfastness, resilience and belief that Allah will reward them, […] Rest assured, stay put at home as you’ve always done, do not respond to rumours and this psychological war being waged by the Zionist enemy. It’s their desperate and wretched attempt to fragment the Palestinian domestic front. We are sure of our people’s steadfastness.” On 13 July 2014, a journalist from Al Aqsa TV reported that “..the interior ministry also urged citizens not to obey the Occupation’s warnings contained in leaflets calling on people of the Gaza border area to evacuate their homes. The interior ministry called upon people to ignore these warnings and to stay put.”

In one case of the bombing of a residential building examined by the commission, information gathered indicates that following a specific warning by the IDF that the house was to be targeted, several people went to the roof of the house in order to “protect” the house. Should they have been directed to do so by members of Palestinian armed groups, this would amount to the use of the presence of civilians in an attempt to shield a military objective from attack, in violation of the customary law prohibition to use human shields. With regard to this incident, the commission is disturbed by the reported call by the spokesperson of Hamas to the people in Gaza to adopt the practice of shielding their homes from attack by going up on their roofs. Although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.

In 2021, a subsequent smaller 11-day outbreak of fighting between Hamas and Israeli forces saw Hamas using a century-old claim of a Jewish threat on the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem as a pretext for another round of conflict, following a prolonged legal battle over land deeds in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem resulting in the eviction of several Palestinian families. Soon after, Hamas launched hundreds of rockets into Israel, sparking another round of conflict which resulted in 256 deaths in Gaza, about half of which were believed to be fighters.

Moreover, these earlier rounds of conflict saw Hamas achieving public relations victories, with both media coverage and human rights groups primarily condemning Israeli military aggression. A report by a Committee of Investigation convened by the UN Human Rights Council charged Israel with the deliberate targeting of civilians, despite the finding that both rocket fire and the use of human shields by Hamas constituted war crimes, and the conclusion of civilian targeting was later renounced.

As journalist Matti Friedman detailed in a 2025 interview, in the years since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, media coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict increasingly became outsized in proportion to other world news and strayed from journalistic standards of fair and fact-based journalism. Hamas was able to pressure Gazan journalists and their editors within outlets such as the Associated Press to omit certain details from publication. This included the deliberate omission from coverage that Hamas members in Gaza were fighting in civilian clothing rather that wearing the uniforms that combatants are obligated to wear under IHL to distinguish themselves from the civilian population.

HAMAS’S HUMAN SHIELDS STRATEGY: AT SCALE

Today, those earlier points in the decades-long conflict present as proving grounds in Hamas’s human shields strategy, and opportunities for pressure testing guerrilla tactics and gauging public reaction to resulting hostilities. With each round of conflict, the dynamic was honed. Regardless of Hamas initiating and escalating hostilities with rocket fire, and employing human shields with the use of civilian buildings and its tunnel strategy to withstand the subsequent Israeli response, the world increasingly came down on Israel as primarily responsible for any resulting death and destruction.

With this, the October 7 attack can be understood as the culmination of 15 years of Hamas’s strategic and premeditated escalation of conflict with Israel. By that date, Hamas’s military embedding throughout Gaza was complete, as was its extensive tunnel network and its framework for its largest scale attack yet. A 2022 memo found in Gaza and believed to be authored by October 7 mastermind and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, called for the targeting of Israeli soldiers and civilian communities, as well as the broadcasting of the violent acts so as to evoke fear and destabilization in Israel.

An interactive map details the mapped segments of Hamas’s tunnel system, believed to run 350 to 450 total miles in length, which in the group’s years in power have served as military command centers, weapons depots, and routes for smuggling and hostage transport, with more than 5,700 entrance shafts found in homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals.

Throughout the war in Gaza beginning in 2023, Hamas has continued to operate out of and from under civilian buildings, using hospitals and the tunnels under them as bases. In response to Hamas’s strategy, the IDF has used text messages, leaflets, phone calls, roof knocking, and evacuation orders to remove civilians from areas where Hamas operates militarily and relocate them to humanitarian zones away from immediate fighting. Through efforts at precision fighting in ground combat, there have been more than 900 Israeli military casualties since the October 7 attack, and nearly 6,300 soldiers wounded according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib noted, with footage of tunnels under the Qatari-built Hamad City in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, “Hamas gave itself the right to use every inch of the Strip as a theater for its horrendous terrorism, placing its operatives and infrastructure under homes, hospitals, schools, and every imaginable space. This isn’t just Israeli propaganda - this is the absolute, shitty, unpleasant, and brutal truth that all Gazans know and understand, but is somehow refuted by “activists” and “journalists” who run cover for Hamas.”

THE BIG LIE OF GENOCIDE

Since the first days of the war following the October 7 attack, which saw 1,200 people killed and more than 250 in Israel taken hostage into Gaza, Hamas and its aligned voices in the pro-Palestinian camp have accused Israel of committing genocide. Within days of Hamas’s attack, Al Jazeera published a piece accusing Israel of using the massacre as a pretense for “manufacturing a case for genocide” and a week to the day after the attack stated plainly, “This is genocide.”

The term “genocide” was coined by Polish lawyer Raphaël Lemkin in 1944 to describe the Nazi’s systematic murder of Jews during the Holocaust, and is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part.” Central to the definition of genocide is this element of intent, of one group onto another. Prior to the intentional, unprecedented, and industrial-scale efforts of the Nazis to eradicate two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust, no such term existed.

The accusation of genocide has loomed large over a war in which the opening act was a mass breach of thousands of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters along with Gazan civilians, in a sneak attack across a border at the time barely guarded by Israeli military presence. This accusation became widely echoed in street protests around the world just days after the massacre, which itself meets the definition of “genocide” and parts of which were recorded and live streamed by Hamas, and despite the fact that Hamas leadership vowed to carry out more October 7-style attacks.

The assumption here is that the level of death and destruction in the Gaza war requires intent, and that any such intent would fall squarely on one side — Israel’s. Never mind that the rubble of Gaza mirrors post-war images of Berlin, Mosul, Syria, and eastern-Ukraine, none of which have ever been classified as Genocides despite much higher civilian casualty rates. Never mind that per the UN, 90% civilian casualty rates are the tragic norm in war, and Gaza’s has been much lower.

In his 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote about the “big lie” strategy in propaganda. This technique, he argued, relied on a belief that people are more likely to believe a colossal untruth rather than a small one because people cannot fathom that someone could have the “impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” With that, the “big lie” strategy must wield a lie of such magnitude that people do not suspect it is a fabrication. “The great masses of the people…will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one,” wrote Hitler. From there, the “big lie” must be repeated incessantly until the masses accept it as fact.

Following the October 7 attack, the almost immediate public circulation of the “big lie” of genocide began to serve a dual purpose: to place utmost scrutiny on Israel’s war against Hamas while obfuscating Hamas’s own actions and any public examination of Hamas’s strategy and its intent.

A growing body of war observers though have described how Hamas’s tunnel warfare, military use of civilian buildings, forfeiture of military uniforms in combat, and blocking of civilians from evacuating combat zones amounts to an application of the human shields strategy at an unprecedented scale.

Urban warfare researcher John Spencer described his observations in Gaza in a recent interview. “I’ve seen the turning of every infrastructure — the hospital, mosque, schools — into military purpose,” said Spencer.

“I’ve never studied a military force whose goal is to get its own population killed as a strategy,” said Spencer, pointing out that Hamas could have protected Gazan civilians in its extensive tunnel system, but would not allow them in. “Hamas has a human sacrifice strategy, where it’s trying to get its population killed, if not killing its population itself, to achieve its political goals.”

That this seems unthinkable to distant observers who dismiss the term “human shields” without examining the evidence speaks to a fundamental lack of understanding on:

1. The role of martydrom in Hamas’s ideology

2. The purpose and scale of the Hamas’s tunnel system

3. Hamas’s premeditated war aims

HAMAS AND MARTYRDOM

It is impossible to understand everything that has transpired in the war in Gaza without understanding concept of martyrdom in radical Islamism and it’s centrality to the jihadist belief system of Hamas, and thus much of Gazan society ruled by them for nearly two decades.

In a video message made public on October 26, 2023, Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh called upon Gaza’s civilians to take part in the war, even the children. “The blood of the women, children, and elderly… we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge, and pushes us to move forward.”

Openly calling for the blood of women, children, and elderly in war may seem so unthinkable to most, but in Palestinian Islamic society self-sacrifice is elevated and the role of the martyr, or shaheed, is cornerstone. In Islam, martyrdom is the sacrifice of life for a righteous cause, earning the highest station in Paradise. One dies a martyr, or shaheed, by sacrificing themselves selflessly when a noble cause demands it. This includes through death in combat, defending others, and in the noble defense of their faith, family, or property, and martyrs are promised a place in Jannah, paradise. When you view death in war as martyrdom, believe life begins at death, and that this is true even for children, then fighting a war that maximizes the loss and suffering of civilians is rationalized as “necessary sacrifices” that ultimately serve the jihadists’ end goal of ending the existence of Israel and dhimmi independence.

HAMAS’S TUNNEL SYSTEM

As for Hamas’s extensive tunnel system, and why none of it was reserved for civilian shelter, in an interview after the October 7 attack, Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk explained that the tunnels were built exclusively to protect fighters, that the group did not intend for them to be used for civilian protection, and that no bomb shelter infrastructure had been built for civilians because Hamas did not see the protection of civilians as their job. “These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels,” said Marzouk.

By operating from under and within civilian areas in their “city under a city”, Hamas aims to create the illusion that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians and not the Hamas militants fighting from among, near, and under them. The strategy relies on having enough of both a radicalized population raised to glorify even child martyrdom as holy, and a global population of non Muslims ignorant to martyrdom ideology and how thoroughly ingrained it is to Palestinian culture.

HAMAS’S WAR AIMS

What was Hamas’s intent when instigating war with Israel with the October 7 attack? Following the massacre, Hamas leadership was explicit that the barbarity of the attack had been not a miscalculation but intentionally brutal. In correspondence discovered with Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, high Gazan death tolls were called a “necessary cost” and “necessary sacrifices” to achieve political objectives. Sinwar believed that prolonging the war and therefore allowing for the rise in casualties would ultimately benefit Hamas by generating international fury and pressure on Israel to stop the war. This human cost would create the blood fuel to power Hamas’s information war strategy, turning public opinion against Israel into “pariah state” status and handing the group a win in an asymmetric conflict of their own inception. For Sinwar, past bloody conflicts like that in Algeria justified this deliberate sacrifice of Gaza for a greater cause.

MARTYRCIDE: AN UNPRECEDENTED STRATEGY

When understood together, martyrdom ideology, Hamas’s tunnel system, and its strategy of deliberately sacrificing Gaza and its people as “necessary costs,” brings into focus a true picture of Hamas’s intent in the war in Gaza which is unparalleled in modern warfare. Because the notion of deliberately exposing even children to the ravages of war runs so counter to Western perceptions of the value of life, the idea that any leaders could turn this into war strategy has made much of the public perceive the term “human shields” as itself a big lie.

While a universal term now exists for when one group intends the destruction of another, what the war in Gaza now begs is to ask what seems unthinkable: what do we call it when one group intends for the destruction of its own people? Now, more than two years after Hamas’s October 7 attack and the start of the war in Gaza, it is time to finally truly examine and give name to Hamas’s ideology-infused war strategy.

Democide is the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command. Indeed, Hamas is guilty of openly torturing and executing civilians in Gaza throughout the war, posting countless videos of public brutalities to their Telegram channels as an ongoing show of control over the strip. But while “democide” is adequate to apply to the isolated if widespread executions Hamas has carried out in Gaza, this term still does not capture the group’s overall war strategy.

Deliberately creating the preconditions for the destruction one’s own national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, now needs to be understood as a novel strategy in warfare — Martyrcide. In the case of Hamas, this strategy was in part justified using Islamic martyrdom ideology and designed to intentionally place and keep civilians in harm’s way during a war premeditated and instigated by the group in order to sacrifice Gazans as martyrs in Hamas’s holy war against Israel.

Martyrcide is ultimately deeply Machiavellian — a manipulative, deceitful, and cynical strategy that is rooted in a belief that the ends justify the ruthless and unethical means. Here, that the goal of destroying Israel justified violating the rules and norms of law and the intentional mass sacrifice and suffering of Gaza and its civilians.

In describing how Hamas was able to execute this strategy with such little scrutiny by so much of the Western world, war and Middle East analyst Andrew Fox said, “Hamas understands the West better than the West understands itself. Its strategy is not primarily military. It knows it cannot defeat the IDF head-on. Its approach is psychological and driven by storytelling: exploiting Palestinian suffering as a weapon, flooding the media with images, and distorting reality until Israel is portrayed as the aggressor and Hamas as the victim.”

To those who want to dispute the reality of Hamas’s strategy, a few questions can be posed: If Hamas wanted to protect Gazans, why did it not build civilian bomb shelters during its years in power and why did Hamas not protect women, children, and elderly in the extensive tunnel system? Why did Hamas wage war on Israel on October 7 without first notifying the people of Gaza so they could prepare or evacuate the strip? If Israel’s response to the attack was bigger and more deadly than Hamas had pre-calculated, why did Hamas not unconditionally surrender all of the Israeli hostages much sooner to stop Israel’s military campaign? And if Hamas leadership was not aware of what their attack would instigate, why did Yahya Sinwar smuggle his own family to safety in the hours before Hamas began its October 7 attack?

There are many questions to be asked. Ultimately, how much complicity can we place on the shoulders of those in the Muslim world who share Hamas’s martyrdom ideology, who understand that Hamas intentionally placed Gaza on the alter of destroying Israel, and yet did not step forward to condemn the group and its Martyrcide of Gaza? After all, what does it mean when even an Imam in Canada praises Gaza’s child martyrs?

THE UNLITIGATED INFORMATION WAR AHEAD

Of the condemnations Israel has absorbed from adversaries over the last two years, almost as unyielding have been Israel’s supporters in critiquing the small country’s failure to combat Hamas’s information war.

Offhand accusations that Hamas used “human shields” not only downplayed the reality and scale of Hamas’s strategy, but surrendered the information war to the militant group while allowing their “big lie” to snowball in the minds of distant onlookers uninitiated in the realities of jihadism.

Israel has failed at naming, explaining, showing the evidence of, and ultimately litigating Hamas’s strategy. Those who simply say “human shields” assume that people understand the twisted ideology and rationale of jihadism and martyrdom.

What we know is that people can struggle to grasp unnamed and undefined concepts. There was a time before we had the word and definition of “genocide,” a time when the world could not conceive of the unprecedented industrial-scale killing the Nazi’s carried out against Europe’s Jews. What Hamas has done in Gaza is so unprecedented, and runs so counter to people’s assumptions that leaders naturally default to protecting their own civilians that the existence of an opposite in which leaders default to intentionally placing their own people in harm’s way is truly unthinkable. The notion that leaders could deliberately intend for their own to be exposed to war, all with Machiavellian motivations that the ends justify the means, just does not compute.

This is why it is now time to name Martyrcide, and define and litigate this sadistic strategy before the world. It’s the biggest psyop in history and jihadists will run it over and over again as long as it’s effective.