Gaza is a war machine

 

A Hamas jihadist in a tunnel under Gaza. “Hamas” is an acronym for the Arabic words Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya which in English mean Islamic Resistance Movement. Gaza is 25 miles long and its width varies from about 4 to 8 miles, yet the length of the military-grade tunnel network under Gaza has been estimated to be between 350 and 450 miles. (Photo credit: Ashraf Amra, a pro-Hamas Gazan.)

 

Gaza is a war machine

By Hendrik van der Breggen

 

Gaza is tiny, but it’s dangerous. From my personal research over the past year and a half (as I’ve been following the Israel-Gaza war during my retirement), I have come to the conclusion that Gaza is, for lack of a better description, a war machine.

Gaza is 25 miles long and its width varies from about 4 to 8 miles. Yet the length of the terror tunnel network under Gaza has been estimated to be between 350 and 450 miles. Since Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, many tunnels have been destroyed by Israel, but many remain.

Moreover, there are (were) an estimated 5,700 tunnel shafts coming out into Gazan homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, chicken coops, and fields. And there are (were) huge stockpiles of rockets and other weapons distributed throughout the underground landscape. Much has been destroyed by Israel, but much remains.

Led by Hamas, Gaza has been building its tunnels for almost two decades (reminder: Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas was elected by Gazans in 2006). In fact, many Gazan tunnels were built through the 1990s and 2000s prior to Gazans voting in Hamas. Some tunnels were built between Egypt and Gaza for smuggling purposes (weapons, soldiers, and other supplies were smuggled into Gaza), and some were built as attack tunnels into Israel (used in the early 2000s and in 2014). Many—most—of the tunnels were built within (under) Gaza in recent years and are a part of a war effort. The tunnels facilitate troop movements throughout Gaza, provide access to rocket-launching sites, serve as command centres, protect troops and leaders, provide weapons building areas, facilitate easy access to weapons caches distributed throughout Gaza, store supplies, and imprison hostages. Connected by a web of hundreds of miles of tunnels, Gaza’s towns and cities have been tooled for war—war against Israel.[1]

Not only has the land of Gaza been tooled for war, but also Gaza’s people have been tooled for war. Gazan children (now young adults) have been indoctrinated over the past two decades (or more) to serve not only as fighters but also as human shields—martyrs—in Gaza’s Islamist jihad against Israel. (An Islamist martyr is one who is killed or dies for the cause of Allah, typically via jihad/war, and thus skips Allah’s judgment and gains immediate entrance into paradise/ heaven, which is filled with sensual delights.) The parents and grandparents of Gazan young people also drank heavily at the well of Islamist jihadist doctrine. It should be remembered that many of the older Gazans were original so-called Palestinian refugees who moved to Gaza in 1947–48 and did so to facilitate the (failed) war on Israel by Islamist neighbours bent on wiping out Jews.[2]

This means that Israel’s fight in Gaza is not similar to the urban warfare as in, say, Mosul (when US-backed Iraqis fought to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State in 2016-17). That is, the war in Gaza is not merely a fight that happens, unfortunately, to occur in towns and cities. It’s not due to mere happenstance. Rather, it is due to deliberate decisions by Gazans and years of preparation by Gazans.[3]

This should be emphasized and remembered: The choice for tunnel warfare was made by Gazans years prior to its Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Reminder: In that invasion 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered and 240 hostages taken into Gaza. Over the at least two decades prior to October 7, 2023, Gazans spent billions of dollars (repurposed internationally-supplied aid funds) building terror tunnels, stockpiling caches of weapons, and teaching (indoctrinating) its people to hate and murder Jews. By its massacre of Israelis and then taking hostages into Gaza—a land outfitted for war—it is clear that Gaza’s goal was to have a war against Israel inside Gaza.

In other words, leading up to October 7, 2023, Gaza made itself into a WAR MACHINE. This war machine includes not only its terror-tunnel-infested land abundantly seeded with rockets, grenades, and booby traps, but also its blood-thirsty Jew-hating jihadist soldiers, mostly young men, and jihadist martyr-minded civilians, whether children, mothers, or elderly, willing to die as martyrs—human shields—for the fighters.

Apparently (if my most recent news sources are correct), Hamas has been using the most recent ceasefire to re-group, re-arm, and prepare for yet another October 7-style massacre in Israel.

Yes, many civilian deaths have occurred in Gaza. This is horrible, to be sure. Nevertheless, the number of civilian deaths relative to combatant deaths is low in the Israel-Gaza conflict when compared to urban warfare ratios in Mosul and elsewhere. This is a tribute to the Israeli Defence Forces.[4]

And, yes, among Gazan’s civilians, many Gazan children and women have been killed. This is a tragedy. But keep in mind that for Gaza (led by Hamas), it’s a strategy. And keep in mind that in Gaza the line between civilian and non-civilian is blurry. 

With its many miles of military-grade attack tunnels coupled with the Islamist jihadist mindset of many of its people, Gaza remains a war machine, not a peace-seeking nation.

Westerners in general and Israelis in particular should remember this.[5]

 

NOTES

1. The news agency Reuters published an informative and visually impressive report on the Gazan tunnels about a year ago. See Adolfo Arranz, Jonathan Saul, Stephen Farrell, Simon Scarr, and Clare Trainor, “Inside the tunnels of Gaza: The scale, and the sophistication, of Hamas’ tunnel network,” Reuters, December 31, 2023.

2. For more on this topic, see Hendrik van der Breggen, “Settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing: Two false assumptions about Israel’s inception,” APOLOGIA, October 8, 2024 (see especially reason 3 of part 1 and the whole of part 2).

3. The innocence of large numbers of Gaza’s civilians is dubious. In fact, it very much seems that large numbers of Gaza’s civilians are either terrorists or supporters of terrorists. There is much evidence to support this view. Consider the following:

 

• (a) Evidence of many Gazan civilians cheering when dead Israelis were paraded in Gaza shortly after the Hamas October 7 attack.
• (b) Evidence that many Gazans (including children) were involved in the looting during the October 7 attack.
• (c) Evidence that many Gazan young people have been for years indoctrinated with a murderous anti-Jewish/anti-Israel ideology (in UN schools) and have helped Hamas terrorists by carrying messages and munitions.
• (d) Evidence of 560 to 700 kilometres (350 to 450 miles!) of cement tunnels that were built in Gaza over the past 16 years—so surely many Gazan civilians were aware of this.
• (e) Evidence of 5,700 tunnel shafts being hosted by (i.e., coming out of) homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals all across tiny Gaza—and again, surely, many Gazan civilians were aware of this. And surely many Gazan civilians were aware that the tunnels’ purpose was for war against Israel and to wipe out Jews (per the Hamas charter), yet Gazans did not protest.
• (f) Evidence of hostages being held in civilian homes.

 

For some references concerning the above evidence, see notes for Reply 4 of “Israel’s response to Hamas is not proportional?” which is chapter 12 of my book Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War; link here.

Also, for additional evidence for thinking the people of Gaza are not innocent, see Einat Wilf, “Einat Wilf Answers 18 Questions on Gaza, Anti-Zionism, and the Israel-Hamas War,” 18Forty, December 4, 2024 (80 minute video). Einat Wilf has a BA from Harvard, an MBA from INSEAD in France, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. Wilf served as an intelligence officer with the Israeli Defense Forces, is a former member of the Israeli parliament, and works presently with the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office. Also, Einat Wilf is co-author of the book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (St. Martin’s, 2020), which I highly recommend.

Many Gazans—especially children—are innocent, of course. And some adult Gazans no longer support Hamas. The following recent report from Gatestone Institute is relevant. “Although many Palestinians continue to support Hamas and the ‘resistance’ against Israel, a growing number are speaking out against the terror group.” “If the Palestinians living in Gaza want to end the war, they must revolt against Hamas and provide Israel with information about the whereabouts of the hostages. Sadly, most Palestinians seem unwilling to do so, either out of fear of Hamas or because they simply identify with the terror group and its goal of destroying Israel.” Khaled Abu Toameh, “Palestinians: ‘We Are Dying Because of Hamas,’” Gatestone Institute International Policy Council, March 20, 2025.

4. Yes, we should keep in mind the fact that the civilian-combatant death ratio in Gaza is low when it is compared to other cases of urban warfare in recent history. That is, the other cases of urban warfare by Western democracies have more civilian deaths per combatant death than is the case in Israel’s war against Hamas (even though Hamas has, unlike the other cases, spent years not only embedding itself among civilians in Gaza but also fortifying its underground war machine). And add to this the fact that the misfiring of many Hamas rockets caused many Gazan casualties.

It also is important to keep in mind that before and during the war with Hamas, Israel engaged in extraordinary efforts to protect Gazan civilians from potential harm. How? By warning them of Israel’s invasion by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text and voice messages, and “knocking” (hitting a building’s roof with an unexploding “bomb” to warn residents that the next bomb will explode). And Israel has provided humanitarian corridors and safe zones (often made unsafe by Hamas).

5. And we should remember that the Gazans, led by Hamas, started the war with Israel, a war in which it was foreseeable and planned by Gazans, led by Hamas, that Israel’s military response would appear to Western observers to be lacking proportionality and thus be deemed unjust. How so? By using Western moral qualms (which Hamas does not have) against Westerners. Reminder: Hamas/Gazan terrorists embedded themselves among Gazan civilians (of whom many have aided and abetted the terrorists; see evidence in note 1 above), knowing there would be huge numbers of civilian casualties which constitute, for Hamas, a military strategy, not a moral tragedy. Moreover, the foreseeable-to-Hamas vividness of the horrors of dead civilians, especially children—vividness provided by the terrorists themselves to the world in abundance via photos and video on the internet—is intended by Hamas to play on the oft-emotion-based moral reasoning of Western observers. For many Westerners, bloodshed of civilians is repulsive, full stop, and no further moral reasoning is done to discern who is actually responsible. This is sometimes called “the CNN effect.” The byline of ethicist Shlomo Brody’s article “Israel and the CNN Effect” is helpful here: “Images of bloodshed in Gaza should upset anyone with a healthy moral sense. But they don’t help determine whether the actions that brought these scenes about were ethical.” (Shlomo Brody, “Israel and the CNN Effect,” Mosaic, January 4, 2024.) Brody adds: “We might be saddened by these deaths, but our moral analysis must remain sober. Good reasoning must overcome our instinctive revulsion to bloodshed. We cannot fixate on body counts or CNN coverage. Instead, we must determine with whom culpability lies.” Sober-minded moral reasoning based on evidence shows that the culpability lies with Hamas-led Gaza, but Gaza hides its culpability (along with its fighters) behind the broken and bloody bodies of its Gazan human shields, children included. Thereby Gaza, led by Hamas, gains world sympathy and Israel loses it. The alleged lack of proportionality and alleged injustice, then, are more apparent than real—and more by Hamas design than by Israeli intent—due to Hamas’s wicked machinations coupled with Gazan civilian help and Western gullibility.

 

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Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosophy professor who lives in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada. Hendrik is author of the book Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War.