Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Aug. 23, 2024
“The commentariat’s reluctance to hold Hamas responsible for anything, even its own wicked deeds, is getting scary now.”
A bizarre debate has blown up. All over social media, people want to know: who’s responsible for the deaths of the six Israeli hostages whose bodies were discovered by the IDF in a tunnel in Khan Younis this week? Initial reports suggest the men might have died from suffocation after the IDF bombed a nearby Hamas position, causing carbon dioxide to flood the dank lair in which they were chained up. So it’s on Israel? They did this? CNN reports that the IDF was asked if it ‘killed the hostages’ at a recent press conference. Others are more brutal: those six poor souls were ‘butchered by the Israeli military onslaught’, says Owen Jones of the Guardian.
Let’s save these people some time. Let’s nip in the bud their moral deflection dolled up as critical analysis. The sole responsibility for the deaths of these six men lies with the gang of fascists who dragged them from their homes on 7 October. It lies with the Jew-haters who spirited these Jews from the safety of Southern Israel into the inevitable warzone of Gaza. It lies with the army of anti-Semites who treated the men like animals, violently robbing them of their liberty and hauling them into the dark heart of a deadly war. These men would be alive today were it not for the fascist actions of Hamas, and that’s all there is to it.
No sooner were the men’s bodies discovered than the cry went up: they died ‘as a result of [an] IDF bombing’. It seems so red is Israel’s bloodlust it even kills its own. If it was true they died as a result of a leak unleashed by the IDF’s pounding of Hamas, that would make their grim fate doubly tragic, we’re told. Here we had six Israeli civilians, four of them in their seventies or eighties, whose lives were first turned upside down by violent Islamists on 7 October, and then brought to an end as a consequence of the actions of their own army. Their deaths are proof, said Muhammad Shehada of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, that Israel’s ‘war of extermination on Gaza’ is ‘the biggest threat to the hostages’ lives.’ … [To read the full article, click here]
