RUTHFULLY YOURS

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’.

Soon, however, an inconvenient discovery intruded on these feverish efforts to blame Israel for the death of its own people. IDF autopsies discovered ‘marks suggestive of gunshots’. ‘Bullets were found in the bodies’, said the Hostages Family Forum, which represents the relatives of the Israelis still held captive in Gaza. No, these ‘marks’ do not prove the men were executed by their captors. As the New York Times reports, it is ‘too soon to determine whether gunshot wounds were the cause of death’. But these scars of the inhuman treatment meted out to the men by Hamas certainly complicate the early IDF-blaming narrative of Hamas’s Lord Haw Haws in the Western media.

So the debate goes on: did Hamas kill the men or did the IDF? Were they ‘butchered’ by reckless Israel or by their captors? As one report asks: did the IDF ‘again accidentally kill Israeli hostages’ or was this a ‘Hamas execution’? Who’s to blame? I’ll give you a clue: it’s the terrorist army who forced the men against their will to become actors in an apocalyptic war. It’s the racist gunmen who dragged the men into an underground hell that they knew perfectly well would be fired on and bombed. It’s Hamas. The commentariat’s reluctance to hold Hamas responsible for anything, even its own wicked deeds, is getting scary now.

The dire fate of the six innocents is an indictment of one thing: the barbarism of Hamas. Two of the men, Haim Peri and Yoram Metzger, were 80 years old. Eighty. What kind of lowlife kidnaps elderly, vulnerable people and forces them into the cold and black of a terrorist dungeon? Another of the men, Avraham Munder, was 79. Then there was Alexander Dancyg, aged 75. These four ageing Jews were all seized from the Nir Oz kibbutz on 7 October by the young, heavily armed racists of Hamas. To compel the frail to become players in your demented war games is ISIS levels of cruelty and depravity.

Then there was Yagev Buchshtab, just 35, cut down in his prime as a result of Hamas’s warmongering. And Nadav Popplewell, 51, who was a British-Israeli. Born in Wakefield. A Yorkshireman who later made his home in the Israeli border town of Nirim. How shameful that British leftists and liberals showed no solidarity with Mr Popplewell upon his death in the captivity of fascists. Not so much as a squeak of anger or sorrow from our self-styled ‘anti-fascist’ movers and shakers following the discovery of the body of a Yorkshire Jew 10 months after he was seized from his home by a movement devoted to killing Jews.

The culpability for the horror in Khan Younis belongs entirely to Hamas. Yes, the exact cause of death is yet to be established. But we know, with not a shred of doubt, the cause of the situation. The cause of the savagery these men found themselves swirled up in. The cause of the hell that enveloped them. It was Hamas’s conscious decision to start a war with Israel. And its calculation that seizing Jews might work to its military benefit. And its deliberate placing of these men in one of its terror caverns in Khan Younis. These men are dead because of the Jew-hate of Hamas.

Western observers’ weird reluctance to discuss Hamas’s responsibility for these six deaths – and their instinct instead to wonder if mad Israel did it – is of a piece with how the whole war is being talked about now. Hamas is constantly invisibilised. That it started the war, and is still fighting it by firing rockets into Israel and bullets into IDF soldiers, is all but memory-holed in the media coverage. Even Hamas’s continued criminal internment of Israeli civilians is turned back on Israel by the Israelophobic press: ‘Don’t do anything that might harm the hostages’, observers bark at Israel, rather than interrogating the depth of depravity Hamas has clearly reached to be able to hold Jewish innocents of all ages for such a long time.

We are witnessing a kind of unwitting absolution of Hamas. It seems the West’s cultural elite, drunk on woke, can only interpret this war through the warping prism of identity politics. So ‘white’ Israel is seen as the only true, conscious actor in the war, while ‘brown’ Hamas are the victims, or at least hapless players whose actions are not worth dwelling on for long. In this twisted vision, Israel acts, Palestine is acted upon – even though it was Hamas’s acting upon Israel on 7 October that started the entire thing. It’s time to stop blaming Israel for everything. It’s time to talk about Hamas’s culpability. It’s time to give evil its due.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy