Nick Freitas: I would beg people to understand something here.
Part of the reason why the combat operations in Gaza look the way they do is because Hamas benefits from civilian casualties. Hamas has deliberately made their strategy the maximization of their own casualties in order to play on Western sensibilities.
Why? Because they can't beat the IDF in a conventional fight.
We talk about hospitals and mosques and schools and things like that. Do you guys want to know why, when we look at the Geneva Convention, when we look at the rules of land warfare, why do we take those things off limits? Why are you not permitted to conduct military operations either in those building or to target those buildings for artillery and airstrikes? Because of the propensity of civilian casualties. They're not supposed to be military targets.
What happens when your enemy makes it a military target? Am I not allowed to respond now? Wait a second. Am I not allowed to respond now? Am I not allowed to do anything?
What happens when I have to conduct urban military operations? It's a casualty-heavy environment. And the IDF was still going into some of these places, announcing that they were coming in to do combat operations. You know they're not required to do that by the rules of land warfare or the Geneva Convention, right? And yet they did it anyways. Why? They wanted to minimize civilian casualties.
So why did Hamas insist that they be there? Because they wanted to maximize civilian casualties. Why? Because every time a civilian dies in Gaza, the UN and Doctors Without Borders and CNN and MSNBC and every college campus in America goes, "I can't believe what the Jews did to these poor Palestinian civilians." They're creating an impossible thing.
We are rewarding Hamas for killing their own people. And Hamas doesn't care. The senior leadership could not care less. They're billionaires.
The moment we start letting Hamas get away with what they were intentionally doing to create additional casualties so that they could beat the IDF the only way know how, and that's by applying external pressure, then all we do is encourage that sort of behavior, not just from Hamas, but every terrorist organization.
I'm sorry, for me, and everything I look at and all of my knowledge on this and all of my experience with this tells me that Hamas is the one that bears the vast majority of the blame on this one.
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That people didn't understand this right from the beginning, and more than two years later, still don't understand this, goes to the level of propaganda, gaslighting and indoctrination that preceded Hamas' attack.
