Captured fighters reveal the true agenda of Hamas on October 7
Interviews with captured Hamas soldiers reveal that years of brainwashing in Gaza have turned them into heartless killers.
The world is weary of the depraved savagery of guerrilla foot soldiers. They have stalked innocents forever. And the breakouts of vicious barbarism are seldom moments of reactive psychosis; they are mostly organised with merciless calculation.
These are the credentials of Hamas, under the direction of Iran and armed and funded by order of its spiteful, manipulative ayatollahs. But the strategy behind the October 7 attacks in Israel set Gaza’s Islamists apart.
During the Vietnam war, the Viet Cong – an organised insurgent army but with a large number of lone-wolf operatives – launched attacks of ambush and sabotage against the South Vietnamese Army and the Americans and Australians. They would then blend back unseen into their community.
The talkative young Vietnamese who cut your hair at midday could be out to cut your throat that night. Most people remember the shocking Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of the streetside execution of Viet Cong captain Nguyen Van Lem during 1968’s Tet offensive; fewer recall that he had just beheaded a South Vietnamese colonel and then machinegunned the man’s wife, six children and 80-year-old mother.
Kenya’s fearsome Mau Mau fighters acted much the same during the bloody uprising against British colonialism the decade before. Most of their victims were other Kenyans whom they tortured and murdered before disappearing back into the population. In 1953, in a scaled-up act of primitive cruelty, the Mau Mau herded 74 men, women and children into huts they then set on fire. Anyone who tried to escape was disabled with machete blows and thrown back into the blaze.
The Hamas attack on Israel was of another dimension and of unmatched cruelty and sexual sadism. It was at least two years in the planning and the Israel Defence Forces now believe videos posted online last year were of Hezbollah war-gaming the attacks in southern Lebanon, from where the Gaza attacks were planned and directed.
The videos show dozens of young men in pairs on motorbikes riding around in loose formation and firing at human-height targets.
On October 7, Hamas claimed it dispatched 1200 men across 30 breach points in the Gaza fence after bombing Israel’s watchtowers with drones. Other Hamas fighters arrived on fan-powered gliders. Other than those who returned with the 240 kidnap victims, almost all of these fighters were killed.
But a few were captured and Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, has released video of interrogations with these Hamas recruits, who reveal Hamas’s true agenda that day.
Hamas said its armed wing of al-Qassam Brigades had “a religious and moral commitment” not to harm civilians. But the revelations of the captured fighters give the lie to that.
One of them, Omar Abu Rusha, states matter-of-factly that “the mission was simply to kill … kill every single one you see”. He then described using his Kalashnikov to murder children heard crying in a safe room.
Another, Abu Hamid, said his squad leader, Mohammad Nahad Albatsh, told them “to kill and kidnap the ones we can”. He admits to killing innocents and burning down their houses. Others late on the scene shoot at the dead bodies.
Two things set the October 7 attacks apart from “traditional” guerrilla tactics.
First is the decades-long brainwashing – much of it in UN-sponsored schools – of Gaza’s children into believing that Jews are the subhuman descendants of apes and pigs. The children are taught that all the Arabs’ misfortunes are the fault of the Jews and that they must kill them (as is clearly set out in the Hamas charter – no wonder Israel finds it hard to have peace talks with a government whose raison d’etre is their extermination). In Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian authorities lionise those who kill Jews. The more Jewish victims, the greater your celebrity.
The attackers from Gaza were almost all young men whose fanaticism has been infused with learned hate, a combustible mix. Nothing else can explain the manner in which children were murdered in front of their parents, some of whom were then burned alive. Little else can explain the sexual violence against, and mutilation of, so many girls and women.
Some were attacked with such force that post-mortem examinations found their pelvises were broken. One young woman who angrily resisted being stripped was decapitated with a shovel. Another nearby was gang-raped, mutilated and shot in the head while her last attacker was raping her. Girls’ bodies were sexually defiled after their deaths. Much of what these young Arab fighters did is unpublishable.
The celebrating insurgents filmed it all, sometimes posting this on their victims’ social media.
They were instructed to kill as many as they were able with non-Jews also considered fair targets – more than 70 foreigners were murdered that day. They also were directed to return to Gaza with as many hostages as they could; Gazans understand that Israelis place a very high price on hostages.
Ironically, the man directing Hamas operations in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was himself part of the swap of 1027 prisoners – 280 of them serving life sentences – for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. Sinwar, now 61, had served 22 years of four life sentences for the kidnap and murder of six people. It is believed, and a released hostage appears to have confirmed, that the last surviving kidnap victims are in a tunnel with Sinwar.
His release 13 years ago is a subject of bitter debate in Israel, which plans to kill him and will not consider operations in Gaza a success until it does. It was Sinwar who revealed the second, unique strategy that sets Hamas apart from other guerrilla forces.
Addressing a large group of Gazan youth in 2018, he said: “We would rather die as martyrs than die out of oppression and humiliation. We are ready to die, and tens of thousands will die with us.” He was not talking about thousands of their enemies dying; he meant Gazans, not that this was fully understood at that time. But it became crystal clear after October 7.
Sinwar and his soldiers, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (who resists martyrdom by hiding out with his wife and children in luxury in the Qatari capital, Doha, 1800km from “his” people), knew well that Israel’s response to the murder of 1163 people would be swift and comprehensive. And they were keenly aware that non-combatant deaths in Gaza would become the story – as it has.
As Sinwar promised: “Tens of thousands will die with us”, and they have. As planned.
The Hamas terror infrastructure has been purposely embedded under the territory’s hospitals, schools, mosques, private homes and even the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. UNRWA claims to have been oblivious to this, apparently not noticing on its power bill the electricity it was paying to illuminate and aircondition the vast warren beneath it – but then it also claimed to be unaware 10 per cent of its staff had Gazan terror connections.
A dozen of them presumably failed to turn up for work on October 7 – they were busy elsewhere employed in mass murder as foot-soldiers in Gaza’s invasion force. UNRWA has become the enemy.
Across 16 years, Haniyeh and Sinwar played the West and Israel off a break using the massive donations of humanitarian aid to Gaza to arm its men and illegally import enough cement to build more than 500km of tunnels up to 70m below ground. Had they built up instead of down, the concrete in the tunnels could have built New York’s toppled World Trade Centre towers – an event excitedly celebrated by Palestinians – twice over.
During the conflict Hamas created it has prevented Gazan civilians from leaving combat zones to seek safety, and when these poor people did manage to find refuge further south Hamas soldiers, dressed as civilians, joined them to launch more attacks on the IDF.
In doing all this, they turned Gaza into a giant human shield. No army ever before has viewed vast numbers of deaths of its own people – including children – as a strategic victory.
So who makes up the Hamas fighting force?
The release of Shin Bet’s filmed interrogations with captured Hamas recruits, conducted in Arabic but now translated, offer insights. Their matter-of-fact recollections of their orders and the euphemisms they use for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust are convincing proof that the systematic brainwashing of Palestinian youth has been depressingly effective.
There are interviews with seven fighters, most of whom appear to be in their mid-20s. All but one talk directly to the interviewer, never faltering at the abhorrent details they reveal.
Jihad Hamayda, describing himself as a department commander for Hamas, said his orders were to “infiltrate the military outpost (at) Sufa”, a small kibbutz in southern Israel perilously close to the fence with Gaza. “The order regarding the civilians was killing the men, capturing the women and the elderly and the children … kill all the young men.”
Asked did that include civilians, he responded: “It doesn’t matter, military men, civilian men.”
Asked by his interrogator if the Koran permitted this, he said: “The religion prohibits it. The prophet said: ‘Don’t kill a woman, don’t kill a child.’ ”
Mahnad Abu Razin said he was sent to Sufa “to conquer … to settle there, control them, kill them”.
An accomplice, Yahya Suidan, said he’d been told to “cleanse the houses and kidnap as many as possible”. Cleanse turns out to be a euphemism for killing all those deemed unfit for kidnap.
His gang killed some villagers and grabbed a girl “about 15 of 16” with whom they took selfies while debating whether to shoot her or kidnap her: “They put her on a motorcycle.” Suidan adds that they had been promised “an apartment and $US10,000” for a captured Israeli. “That’s how it works in the al-Qassam Brigade.”
Ahmad Hamid was one of 70 men who attacked the Kfar Aza kibbutz further north where they beheaded victims, burned others alive and dismembered some.
Anyone standing on the Anzac memorial in the village, built in 1967 as a thank you to Australasian soldiers, would have seen it all unfold. He admits he knew they would be civilians, but that his orders were: “We need to kill, and kidnap the ones we can.”
Hamzeh Elzarka said his mission was to infiltrate the village. “To cleanse and conquer the kibbutz.” He is asked what does he mean by cleanse. To kill? “To empty it. All the people. To empty all the houses.” Elzarka is the only prisoner to show emotion. He twists his face in angst, perhaps realising what he has done, or to put on a show for his captor, to suggest he has a scintilla of humanity left.
“I shot an old woman. I shot her in the shoulder.” His mate shot an old man watering his garden. “She fell. We set two houses on fire.”
Suidan talks of smoking a Jewish family from their safe room. He knows about the safe rooms in Israeli houses, rooms that are unnecessary in Gazan homes. Two young women, their mother and father “and a little dog” emerge, frightened. The terrorists shot them with “two or three” bullets each and killed the dog.
When Suidan had entered that house there was already a body on the floor: “There were bullets in the head. The head exploded. There was a bullet in the chest. I shot her in the back.” Later he shoots another body in the leg and is castigated by his commander for “wasting bullets”.
Abu Rusha was nonchalant and he explained that his role in Israel was to kill every person he saw – “we weren’t supposed to kidnap”. After murdering some adults on the kibbutz and setting fire to their homes, he entered a house, poured himself a glass of water, ate some dates, then heard the sound of children crying in the safe room. He and another fighter shot repeatedly at the door “until we didn’t hear noise any more”.
All the captives are asked if their actions accorded with their religion and all admit they did not. They all agreed they acted like Islamic State. Interestingly, none admits to sexual offences. At least one fighter called his parents from Israel to boast of the number of Jews he had killed. But none would admit to rape. Sex outside marriage is taboo.
Suidan complained that the Hamas leadership abandoned them. “All of Hamas, the heads of Hamas – Sinwar, Haniyeh.”
The interrogator asked if those men had destroyed Gaza: “Yes. In everything. Gaza exists? No. They did (destroy it) and with their own hands, and with our own hands. We destroyed Gaza.”
