If you don’t want civilians killed by military operations, don’t have your “military” (i.e., Hamas terrorists) hide in schools, hospitals, and mosques. Don’t take hostages and hold them in apartment buildings. Then again, what is a civilian. Journalist Daniel Greenfield argues that most Palestinians hardly qualify.

Americans expected Osama bin Laden to be found in a cave in Afghanistan. In reality, he was living comfortably in a military town in Pakistan under the protection of local authorities. Similarly, Israeli hostages, including the four who were last rescued, have come home telling stories of being kept captive in ‘civilian’ households.

In both cases we fundamentally misunderstood what Islamic terrorism is. It’s not a “fringe group of extremists”, as politicians and the media describe it, but an ethnic and religious movement. The religious values of Islamic terrorists are universally shared by the vast majority of Muslims, while the ethnic ones ground Islamic warfare in the interests of specific clans and families.

Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and has a widespread base of support across the Muslim world which is dotted with branches of the Brotherhood, but its ethnic power base is also grounded in the key clans and families that control Gaza. That is why Hamas still retains the support of the majority of the Muslim colonists currently occupying Gaza. It’s also why those same ‘civilians’ held Israeli hostages prisoner and could be trusted not to inform on them.

The latest Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll shows that 71% of Gazans support the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7 and 56% expect Hamas to win the war. 62% in Gaza are happy with the performance of Hamas during the war and 59% want Hamas to stay in power.

That’s because they are Hamas and the terror group is also them.

Greenfield goes on to dispel the “myth” of the Palestinians, who are thought to be the “indigenous” people of the land. Instead, he says, “The reality is that they were Arab settlers who arrived with and after the Islamic conquest of Israel.” Clans and families play a critical role in the ensuing structure.

It’s not just that Hamas uses human shields, which it certainly does, it’s that its infrastructure depends on clans whose adults provide fighters and whose women and children act as human shields for the greater glory of the clan and for Islam. The same clans that will kill teenage girls for violating family honor will also serve up even younger children as human shields for honor.

There is no way for Israel to rescue its hostages without going into dense neighborhoods under the control of the clans to get them out. And that will lead to firefights and ‘Black Hawk Down’ moments. Clan members, who never identify themselves as such, will cry that they were massacred. And foreign leaders and the media will condemn the deaths of ‘civilians’.

Defeating Hamas without civilian casualties is impossible because the Islamic terrorist group not only operates among civilians, but is rooted in the society of Gaza.

Greenfield further hashes this out, saying, “There are no civilians in Gaza. The vast majority of the population supports Hamas or some Islamic terrorist movement. Only a tiny minority opposes Islamic terrorism and wants peace.” He concludes:

Hamas can’t be defeated by waiting until its terrorists take off their civilian clothes and put on uniforms. Hamas are the civilians. They are the ones holding the hostages. The only way to free the hostages and defeat the terrorists is to destroy the terror culture in whatever form it takes.

Read the whole thing here.