AOC’s Crocodile Tears for Hamas’s Captive Population

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 13, 2023

 

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has devoted much of her attention in the days that followed the worst massacre of Jews in nearly 80 years to the plight of Hamas’s captive population in the Gaza Strip. Beyond the Israelis and Western citizens who are now the explicit hostages of Hamas, the civilians who are implicitly hostage to its brutal rule have suffered the unfortunate consequences of their regime’s attack on civilization. Today, with mere hours remaining before Israel invades the Strip with the likely intention of defanging Hamas once and for all, Ocasio-Cortez demanded that Israel refrain from defending itself and its citizens:

Ocasio-Cortez’s sympathies are misplaced. Israel has not put Gaza’s civilian population in the line of fire. Hamas has. It has done so for decades, primarily to elicit exactly this naïve response from Western observers who know or care little about the bestial tactics this terrorist organization employs.

 

“We have evidence that Hamas is stopping people from leaving buildings when they’ve been warned about an upcoming airstrike,” Fox News journalist Trey Yingst reported from the ground in Israel. Despite the United Nations’ concerns about the logistical hurdles associated with a mass civilian evacuation, however, Yingst found no evidence the terror group is capable of preventing evacuations to Gaza’s south through an Israeli Defense Forces–identified safety corridor.

 

Yingst cited a “diplomatic source” for these claims, but Hamas’s strategic effort to imperil as many Gazans as possible isn’t exactly a secret. “Hold on to your homes. Hold on to your land,” the message broadcast from Gaza’s mosques on Friday morning blared. “We tell the people of northern Gaza and from Gaza City, stay put in your homes, and your places,” Hamas spokesman Eyad Al-Bozom assured locals.

 

From the moment Israel engaged in retaliatory strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza following the slaughter of innocents on October 7, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad implored the citizens of the Strip to avoid the IDF-designated green corridors intended to be exempt from airstrikes and artillery fire.

 

“We repeat our call on the residents to ignore the voice messages being sent randomly by the occupation to their phones demanding that they leave their homes,” an Arabic-language statement produced by Hamas’s interior ministry read. “Their goal is to arouse panic and fear as part of a psychological warfare [campaign] accompanying the occupation’s aggression against us.”

 

Hamas coupled this demand on civilians to remain in their homes with a familiar call for civilians to amass along Gaza’s borders with Israel and create a bulwark of bodies in the path of Israeli forces. It’s a tactic that has been employed in several of the wars Hamas has waged against Israel since the terrorist group became the governing authority in Gaza in 2006–2007. It’s hardly the only tactic Hamas employs with the design of maximizing civilian casualties.

 

Hamas hides weapons caches in and around civilian infrastructure, and it stages missile-launch sites as close to civilian facilities as possible — not to dissuade Israeli retaliation but to magnify the potential for collateral damage when it does. Hamas puts rocket depots in hospitals and foreign-owned manufacturing facilities in the Strip. Its terrorists use mosques as staging areas. It uses United Nations–operated schools as cover for its arms and personnel. It has done this for over a decade. Only if you’ve avoided paying any attention to this region and the conflicts that typify it could you be unaware of Hamas’s deliberately inhumane tactics.

 

Ocasio-Cortez is similarly incensed by Israel’s decision to cut off the water and electricity it supplies to the regime in the Gaza Strip it is preparing to topple. “This is collective punishment and a violation of international law,” she insisted. It is not, at least insofar as blockades are a banal feature of all wars between states and quasi-state entities and do not violate the laws of armed conflict. If the congresswoman were genuinely concerned for the humanitarian situation in Gaza, she might have devoted a moment’s condemnation to the Hamas terrorists who promote high-production-value videos of themselves tearing up Gaza’s water infrastructure so that it could be turned into rockets and fired at Israeli civilians.

 

The terror group’s representatives make no effort to disguise their plans. Indeed, they brag about the ease with which their Western sympathizers are fooled. “We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza,” senior Hamas official Ali Baraka said on camera this week, taking full credit for the operation in which 1,300 Israelis were slaughtered. He appeared to swell with pride over the extent to which Hamas tricked the world into believing it had “abandoned the resistance altogether.” But “all the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”

 

If Ocasio-Cortez is aware of any of this, she doesn’t appear to care. If she is not aware of these dynamics, she should spend more time reading about them and listening to those who do rather than reveling in her profound ignorance. Gnashing displays of emotion are no substitute for having the barest familiarity with the subject matter about which she opines with great authority. Her callous displays of indifference toward the Israelis who were killed in this attack and will die in the coming days ensuring that it never happens again is not a victimless act. The congresswoman’s illiteracy on a matter of such grave importance has consequences.