The Death Cult of Hamas

The recent parading of the remains of four Israeli hostages was yet another ugly reminder of the manner in which the terrorist organization has weaponized everything.

On a grim Thursday morning in Gaza, Hamas unveiled its latest act of macabre theater by ceremonially parading the remains of four Jewish hostages including those of Oded Lifshitz and the Bibas family who were abducted during the October 7 Massacre. Before a jeering crowd of masked militiamen and their supporters, the coffins were hoisted aloft like trophies of war, as if parading corpses could substitute for military success.

Amid a fragile truce, this was spectacle designed to humiliate Israel and cynically reinforce Hamas’ grip on its own population. Like all of Hamas’s strategies, it was as tactically foolish as it was morally bankrupt.

Hamas has always been adept at turning anything within its reach into a weapon. Bodies, both of the living and the dead, are no exception. The group’s signature innovation in the Second Intifada was the suicide bomber, transforming young men and women into human projectiles for mass murder. In Gaza, civilians have long been repurposed as human shields, positioned strategically around Hamas’s command centers, ammunition stockpiles, and tunnel networks. When those civilians die, whether by Israeli airstrikes or Hamas’s own errant rockets, their bodies are used again as ‘props’ in the theater of international sympathy.

It is a tragic irony that the very same weapons Hamas wields so indiscriminately often backfire on the very Palestinians it claims to defend. In October 2023, the IDF reported that one in five Hamas rockets landed inside Gaza. Only last week, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by a misfired Gazan rocket. But such details never deter Hamas from the same nihilistic strategy. Its leaders, ensconced in Qatar, are far removed from the daily devastation they orchestrate. Their calculus remains unchanged for Palestinian suffering, so long as it serves their broader narrative, is a price worth paying.

In a remarkable feat of ideological contortion, significant sections of the global Left continue to lend it credence, rationalizing its atrocities as an ‘anti-colonial struggle.’ For them, the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians was not an act of unprovoked savagery but an ‘understandable’ response to Israeli occupation.

This moral relativism is particularly bizarre given that Hamas’s own ideology is deeply at odds with the progressive values these leftists claim to champion. Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, secular governance - none of these exist under Hamas rule. And yet, from university campuses to social media feeds, the slogan “From the river to the sea” is parroted uncritically, with little acknowledgment of what it actually calls for - the extinction of Israel and its people.

The Thursday morning parade of coffins was not just an act of psychological warfare against Israel but a desperate attempt to rally a war-weary Palestinian population that has borne the brunt of Hamas’s disastrous leadership. The spectacle was intended to distract from the staggering losses of the past fifteen months - thousands of Hamas fighters dead, its top commanders eliminated, its military infrastructure systematically dismantled by the IDF.

Hamas sees Israel as a colonial outpost akin to French Algeria, believing that if the cost of living there becomes unbearable, the Jews will leave. The comparison is a fantasy. Israelis are not pieds-noirs with passports to distant homelands. And Hamas, by devaluing life so grotesquely, only strengthens Israeli determination to destroy it.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s supporters in the West scramble to deflect responsibility. They claim that an Israeli airstrike, not Hamas’s own hand, killed the Bibas family. The evidence is unclear, but even if true, it would not absolve Hamas of the horrors it inflicted upon the family. No Israeli airstrike forced Hamas gunmen to storm Kibbutz Nir Oz and drag a nine-month-old baby from his home. No Israeli airstrike compelled Hamas to hold civilians hostage for 500 days, using them as bargaining chips in a conflict of its own making.

Hamas’s apologists refuse to acknowledge that it is not merely resisting Israeli occupation but perpetuating a death cult that thrives on suffering.