RUTHFULLY YOURS

Almost as soon as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was declared on Sunday, footage of Hamas fighters on Gaza’s streets was being broadcast to the world. We saw masked assailants, armed with Kalashnikovs and sporting green headbands, riding pick-up trucks through crowds of cheering men in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We heard reports of thousands of Hamas-run police in uniform emerging on to rubble-strewn streets. Most striking of all, Hamas fighters were filmed swarming around three Israeli hostages during their handover to the Red Cross in Gaza City. The message being sent around the world was clear: this movement of violent anti-Semites is still a force. It’s still in control of Gaza. And it’s still a threat to the Jewish State.

The sight of Hamas out and about over the past few days should have surprised no one. After all, they’re the reason Israeli forces have been waging a painful, brutal military campaign there for the past 15 months. Yet incredibly, too many in the Western media did indeed seem shocked. It was as if it didn’t compute. ‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.

Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.

This shock and surprise at the seeming re-appearance of Hamas is telling. After all, it is coming from those same press outlets that have spent the past 15 months of this devastating conflict erasing Hamas from the picture. Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians.

This erasure of Hamas from the conflict it started serves the anti-Israel narrative that has long been dominant among the right-thinking classes. It allows for the fiction that this is not a war at all. That it’s an act of aggressive ‘colonisation’. An act of ‘ethnic cleansing’. An act of ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians.

Think back to the coverage of the fighting in and around al-Shifa Hospital over the past 15 months. The IDF first clashed with Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters there in November 2023, after intelligence showed hostages were being held captive inside. After a protracted shootout, the IDF gained access to the area around the hospital only to discover the hostages had been killed. Fighting re-erupted in the vicinity of the hospital last March, after Hamas had started using it again. On each occasion, the gun battles were intense and went on for days. Yet the coverage virtually removed Hamas from the scene. ‘Israeli soldiers raid al-Shifa hospital in escalation of Gaza offensive’, reported the Guardian in November 2023. ‘Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital in ruins after two-week Israeli raid’, declared the BBC in April last year. It gave the impression that the IDF were attacking the hospital for the sheer hell of it.

Or recall the coverage of Israel’s hostage-rescue operation in Nuseirat last June. Hamas attacked IDF troops with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds. As the battle became more entrenched, Israeli airstrikes were called in, causing many more deaths. Yet in the subsequent reporting, Hamas’s role simply disappeared. ‘An Israeli operation rescues four hostages and kills scores of Palestinians’, announced CNN. ‘Gaza health ministry says Israeli hostage rescue killed 274 Palestinians’, reported the BBC.

Politicians soon drew the predictable anti-Israel conclusions. Then EU diplomat Josep Borrell called it ‘another massacre of civilians’. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, went even further, claiming that the IDF’s hostage-rescue operation revealed Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’.

This has happened time and again since the Israel-Hamas war began. As Brendan O’Neill has argued on spiked, Hamas is constantly being ‘invisibilised’. It is an absent combatant, dark matter in a war in which only Israeli forces are seemingly observable. Even the unspeakable act that started this awful conflict on 7 October has been reduced to a mere moment in a much longer tale of supposed Israeli aggression and occupation.

As French poet Charles Baudelaire put it, ‘The greatest trick the devil pulled is to convince the world he didn’t exist’. Hamas hasn’t had to do much convincing. Too many among the Western political and media class have been only too happy to pretend it doesn’t exist – and to present Israel’s war of self-defence as a war of aggression.

Yet now, as Hamas parades on the streets of Gaza, this propagandistic fiction has become unsustainable. In a statement it put out on Monday, Hamas has vowed that Gaza ‘will rise again to rebuild what the occupation has destroyed and continue on the path of steadfastness until the occupation is defeated’. That is not a statement of peace. That is a statement of aggressive intent.

Hamas has certainly been diminished by the past 15 months of conflict, but there can be no doubt that it is still there – and is still the ultimate cause of the Gazan tragedy.