Thread by @JewhadiTM

Can Hamas, an Iranian Proxy, Be Deterred?

Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist: “Hamas is using its people to protect its rockets.”

besacenter.org/can-hamas-an-i… via @BESA_Center

For those familiar with Iran’s strategy of warfare-by-proxy, the placing of non-combatants in harm’s way comes as no surprise.

Starting with Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and foreign division unit, the Quds Force (QF), have sought ways to protect proxy militias.

The Guards chose the practice of embedding within and hiding among civilians (ekthefa dar miane gheire nezamian).

The IRGC manual describes embedding as “the concealment/hiding of strategic assets in places the enemy cannot target.”

Hassan Abbasi, head of the Guards’ Center for Borderless Doctrinal Analysis, notes that while international rules of war require a strict separation between combatants and civilians, proxies can, by embedding fighters within local populations, dictate “the rules of the game.”

To justify the resulting casualties among fellow Muslims, the Guards embraced The Koranic Concept of War by Brig. Gen. S. K. Malik, an Islamist who served on the Pakistani High Command.

Malik famously stated that Muslims are duty bound to bolster jihad, either as volunteers in suicide attacks or passively, as collateral damage.

In the latter capacity, they would serve as human shields, boosting casualty numbers and creating the perception that retaliation was not “proportional” as required by laws of war.

Human shielding became a critical element for Iran when, in the early 2000s, the IRGC substituted rockets and missiles for suicide bombings.

Under the leadership of senior IRGC commander Muhammad Hejazi, Hezbollah gradually built up an arsenal said to contain some 150,000 projectiles and dispersed those weapons across heavily populated areas.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, the IDF was surprised by the extent of embedding it found: Hezbollah had positioned its assets in public spaces such as schools, mosques, and private houses, along with an extensive network of tunnels and command posts.

Abbasi proudly noted, “Hezbollah skillfully used different places including mixing of military forces with civilians. It also stashed military hardware and communication devices in cities so they could not be identified.”

After the war, engineers from Khatam al Anbia, the Guards’ construction company, helped rebuild the underground fortifications. Recently, a 100 km tunnel between the Shiite south and Beirut was constructed to draw the IDF in case of another war.

Hamas and PIJ used the Hezbollah blueprint to radically embed its military wings—Izzadin al Qassam and the al Quds Brigades, respectively—in the densely occupied Gaza Strip.

Over time, under the direction of Khatam al Anbia, an elaborate network of tunnels and command bunkers was built, some of them cross border for smuggling purposes as well as to facilitate the kidnapping of IDF personnel and Israeli civilians.

A study on underground warfare gave Hamas high grades for mixing components of urban and tunnel warfare. Assets and fighters were also stashed in public spaces and private homes.

Thousands of Gazans have died during the rounds of conflict, exposing Israel to charges of violating war conventions: an outcome the embedding doctrine all but predicted and, indeed, intended.

As Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist, put it: “Hamas is using its people to protect its rockets.”

In 2007, the terror group expelled Fatah in a bloody coup and has ruled the enclave with an iron fist ever since. While the de facto sovereign, the terror group feels no obligation to create an economy capable of providing the population with any comfort whatsoever.

To all intents and purposes, Gaza is a ward of the international community, which has poured billions of dollars into it to keep it afloat.

Hamas has diverted considerable resources to the acquisition of a massive arsenal of projectiles and the construction of an ever-more extravagant infrastructure for underground warfare.

If the past is any guide, Hamas and PIJ will be able to rebuild and start another conflagration sooner rather than later. In the words of former Oslo negotiator Dennis Ross, “If they have rockets, they will shoot.”

None of Israel’s options to avert another cycle of violence are good.

The intersectionality movement, which is constructed around the notion that all “oppressed minorities,” be they racial, gender-based, or ethnic, must support each other, has embraced the Palestinian cause, marshaling large crowds in the US and Great Britain.

Black Lives Matter (BLM), a part of the intersectionality conglomerate, gave the anti-Israeli demonstrations a huge boost—so much so that Politico concluded that BLM has changed the American discourse on the Middle East.