Still Waiting for What Kind of Peace?

Posted on August 11, 2026 by First.One.Through

The New York Times published a photo essay under the headline “Still Waiting for Peace in Gaza.” Its Palestinian Arab photojournalist documents the world around him: shattered buildings, displaced families, rubble and danger. The photographs powerfully show what war looks like from inside Gaza.

But what does peace look like?

For Israelis living a few miles away, peace means sleeping without rockets overhead. It means children not watching their parents gunned down before them. It means young adults attending a music festival without being hunted, families living on kibbutzim without gunmen entering their homes, and civilians never again being murdered or dragged across the border as hostages.

Those images are outside the Times’ frame. And their absence raises the central question: Are Gazans waiting for peace with Israel, or peace from Israel?

Palestinian Arab polling makes the distinction important. After October 7, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research repeatedly asked whether Hamas had been correct to launch its attack. In March 2024, 71 percent of Gazans said yes. Three months later, after enormous destruction inside Gaza, 57 percent still considered the decision correct. Support showed a desire to live with violence inside Gaza if it led to the destruction of Israel.

The pattern predates October 7. Palestinian polling over decades has repeatedly recorded substantial support for attacks against Israelis, including civilians. The question of peace therefore cannot be answered simply by photographing people who desperately want the war around them to end.

Peace is reciprocal. It requires imagining security for the people across the border as well as for oneself.

A revealing photo essay would turn its lens outward. Ask Gazans whether Jewish families should live safely in Sderot and Kfar Aza. Whether Israelis should be able to dance near Gaza without fear of armed Palestinian Arabs crossing the border. Whether rockets should stop permanently. Whether Hamas should disarm. Whether the future they envision includes Jews living securely beside them.

Those answers would tell us whether Gazans are waiting for an end to war or waiting for peace.

And this is where the New York Times itself enters the frame. This is the newspaper’s own photojournalist, presented under the Times’ own headline and editorial framing. By calling the desire for calm inside Gaza “waiting for peace,” the newspaper takes one side’s desire for relief from war and gives it the language of reconciliation between two parties. It portrays the Palestinian Arabs as desirous of coexistence when it is plainly not so.

That framing is particularly consequential when the war began with Hamas crossing into Israel on October 7 to murder and abduct civilians. When thousands of Arab civilians invaded Israel to rape women and abduct children and spit on their corpses as they arrived in Gaza. Removing Israel from a story about “peace” reduces peace to what happens to Gaza after the attack, rather than what Gazans want to happen to Israelis in the future.

The Times reinforces a distorted understanding of the conflict: Palestinian peace becomes the absence of Israeli violence against Palestinians, while the Palestinian attitude toward violence against Israelis disappears beyond the edge of the photograph.

A camera pointed only into Gaza can show us what Gazans want to stop seeing. Peace begins with asking what they want Israelis to stop seeing too.

Gazans Own This War

Posted on May 29, 2026 by First.One.Through

In October 2025, after two years of war and the devastation of Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published findings that should have dominated headlines around the world:

Hamas remained the most popular Palestinian political movement.
More than half of Palestinians continued to view October 7 as the correct decision.
Nearly seven in ten opposed Hamas disarmament even if disarmament would prevent another war.

After two years of destruction, support for Hamas remained strong. Support for October 7 remained widespread. Opposition to disarmament remained overwhelming.

These findings did not come from Israeli politicians or government spokesmen. They came from Palestinians speaking to Palestinian pollsters.

Yet still, the New York Times publishes lengthy articles that the Gaza war continues because of Israel.

Readers were taken inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations. They learned about coalition pressures, right-wing ministers, territorial ambitions, and supporters who view the war as unfinished business.

By the end, a clear narrative emerged: the war continues because Israelis want it to continue. Because of greed for land, for power.

There was no mention that Gazans want Hamas to remain armed and for the war to continue. That is the political reality that keeps a ceasefire from taking hold.

The omission matters because it changes the reader’s understanding of the conflict. It places blame solely on Israel when a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel despite the devastation in Gaza.

Until journalists devote the same attention to Palestinian motivations that they devote to Israeli motivations, Americans will continue receiving a false explanation for why this war endures.

The Bomb Shelters Gazans Were Never Allowed to Use

Posted on April 13, 2026 by First.One.Through

The images out of Gaza arrive stripped of their foundation. Open the The New York Times opinion pages this week and the story feels preassembled: civilians suffer, Israel strikes, outrage follows. It reads cleanly because something essential has been left out. This war does not begin and end on the surface.

It runs underground.

Beneath Gaza sits one of the most extensive underground military networks in the modern world, built by Hamas over years with money, materials, and time that could have gone elsewhere. The elaborate system of reinforced corridors, command centers, weapons depots, communications lines was designed to survive bombardment and keep a war going no matter what happens above.

Call it what it is: a vast network of bomb shelters.

Now say the part that rarely gets said clearly: Those shelters were never meant for civilians. They were never opened to families. They were never opened to children. They were never opened to the elderly. They were reserved—by design—for fighters, for leadership, for the preservation of the war machine itself.

In any other place, that would be unthinkable. Governments build shelters to protect their populations. When sirens sound, people go underground. Here, the system was inverted. Protection went below ground for those prosecuting the war. Exposure remained above ground for those living in it.

So when the bombs fall, the images follow. Families in rubble. Crowded rooms. Children pulled from collapsed buildings. The world reacts to an outcome shaped long before the first strike in this round of fighting. The protection existed. It was built. And Gazans were never allowed to use it.

That is the story that flips the frame.

This is not only a story of what Israel is doing. It is a story of what Hamas chose to build, and who it chose to protect with it. The tunnels are not just military infrastructure. They are a hierarchy set in concrete. Survival below ground for the regime. Exposure above ground for everyone else.

Once you see that, it becomes impossible to unsee. The destruction remains devastating but it has critical context. It sits alongside a governing strategy that hardened one layer of Gaza while leaving the other to absorb the war.

And that strategy is not finished. It points directly to what comes next. If Hamas remains, Gaza does not rebuild in the way people hope. It continues in the direction it has already taken. More tunnels. More infrastructure embedded beneath dense civilian areas. More resources pulled downward into war instead of upward into life.

The future of Gaza is not being debated. It has already been built.

It just was never built for the people living above it.

And the socialist-jihadi media like The New York Times, will paint a picture of pure fiction, one in which Gazans are the victims of rubble, not tunnels; victims of the Jewish State, not Hamas; victims of “genocide,” not perpetrators of genocide.

And for good measure, it will add a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor protesting about Israel committing a genocide in Gaza, to completely embalm its inversion of genocide.

Hamas built bomb shelters for the exclusive use of its terrorist army while it let women and children get attacked overhead. We are similarly witnessing the socialist-jihadi media build narrative shelters for those same jihadi terrorists, leaving Jews to take the brunt of the antisemitic tidal wave.

The UN Has Wiped Raped Jewish Women From History

Posted on March 17, 2026 by First.One.Through

The United Nations has released yet another report on violence against women. It reads like a catalogue of human depravity – Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza – each documented, each calibrated to shock the conscience.

And it does but not for the reason the authors intend.

Because one of the most documented episodes of mass sexual violence in recent history is missing. Not debated. Not contextualized.

Absent.

On October 7, an estimated 6,000 Gazans invaded Israel and carried out atrocities that included the systematic rape and mutilation of women. This is not a matter of competing narratives. It has been documented by eyewitnesses, first responders, forensic teams, and subsequent investigations.

And yet, in a sweeping global report about violence against women, these victims disappear.

The report finds space for a child raped every half hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the explosion of abuse in Haiti, for war deaths in Ukraine, and for casualty figures in Gaza. Horrific and worthy of attention.

But the omission is not accidental. It is instructive.

Because what the United Nations is quietly establishing is a hierarchy of victims. Some suffering is elevated. Some is ignored. And some – when it disrupts a preferred political narrative – is erased altogether.

Jewish women fall into that last category.

That is not human rights reporting. It is narrative management.

And that distortion does not stay confined to UN documents. It bleeds outward. When the international system refuses to clearly name and center atrocities committed against Jews, it creates a form of moral cover. The record itself becomes a kind of absolution.

So when figures in the West – like the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji – publicly express approval for the October 7 massacre, the reaction is muted, rationalized, or ignored. The most grotesque elements of that day, including the sexual violence, have already been softened, blurred, or omitted by institutions that claim to stand for universal rights.

If the crime is not fully acknowledged, then the celebration of it can be more easily excused.

That is the downstream consequence of selective memory and outrage.

The United Nations is not failing to see. It is choosing not to look and remind the world about violent antisemitism. And in doing so, it transforms a report about protecting women into something far more revealing: a document that tells us which victims matter and which ones are inconvenient.

In that calculus, the rape and murder of Jewish women is not denied. It is deemed unworthy of inclusion. Perhaps even harmful, lest it paint its forever wards, the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in an unfavorable light.

Such silence is not neutral. It is the story.

“Screams Before Silence” movie

Palestine 2.0

Posted on November 13, 2025 by First.One.Through

The world keeps pretending we’re about to build something new when we talk about a “future Palestinian state.” As if Palestine 1.0 never happened. As if the first real test of Palestinian self-rule didn’t already give us a precise answer.

Because when Palestinians were first allowed to govern themselves, they told us exactly who they were politically:

They elected a Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas, to be president.
They handed 58% of their parliament to Hamas — a terror group that doesn’t hide behind euphemisms. Hamas says openly that its mission is killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state, and Palestinians rewarded that platform with victory.
Then Hamas seized Gaza, and the public celebrated.
Then they launched war after war — 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 — and Palestinians cheered again.
They spent their time and energy building a terrorist infrastructure under homes, mosques, schools and hospitals.
And then came the last two years, the worst carnage of all, and PCPSR polls showed overwhelming support in both Gaza and the West Bank.

*Gazans celebrate the parade of dead Israeli Jews through the streets*

This was Palestine 1.0. It wasn’t Israel running the show. It wasn’t occupation controlling the ballot box. This was Palestinian society expressing its political will.

And the result was catastrophic: a corrupt leadership, a terror government, zero investment in coexistence, zero preparation for statehood, and a culture built not on governance but on grievance.

Palestine 1.0 didn’t collapse because of logistics. It collapsed because of values.

Yet the world now wants to release Palestine 2.0 — a supposedly “upgraded” version where terrorists are kept out, Hamas is disarmed, and nicer leaders are installed. As if changing the packaging changes the product.

So the question becomes unavoidable: Was Palestine 1.0 a failure of government or a failure of the people?

If it was the government’s failure, then why did Europe rush to recognize it as a state? How do you crown a political project as a nation when its first attempt at self-rule ended in a terror dictatorship?

And if the failure was the people — if majorities truly wanted leaders who promised Israel’s destruction — then what confidence should anyone have that Palestine 2.0 will be any different?

You can replace leaders.
You can write new constitutions.
You can disarm militias.
But you cannot create a peaceful state when the foundational political culture rejects the existence of the neighbor it must live beside, one that even Palestinian advocates acknowledge is a profound “deformity.“

*The majority of Gazans have always supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel*

Palestine 2.0 is being sold like a software update: “Bug fixes. Improved performance. No terrorism this time.” But the core virus — the ideology that Jewish sovereignty is unacceptable — has never been removed.

And until it is, every version will crash.

The world can fantasize about Palestine 2.0, but if the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) still believe the destruction of Israel is their national purpose, then all we’re doing is reinstalling the same system and acting surprised when the outcome doesn’t change.

You don’t upgrade a failure by renaming it. You upgrade a failure by changing the values that made it fail.

And until that happens, no one should pretend Palestine 2.0 is a new future.
It’s the same code with the same flaws — and the same predictable ending.

Gazans “are like locusts”

Posted on August 11, 2025 by First.One.Through

In April 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon essentially blessing Sharon’s proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in exchange for the US backing Israel’s positions that the future contours of Israel would account for “new realities on the ground” and not follow “the armistice lines of 1949,” as well as ending the Palestinian so-called right-of-return by “settling of Palestinian refugees there [in a new Palestinian State], rather than in Israel.” In response to the letter, Israel withdrew all Jewish civilians from Gaza and its military in September 2005.

Gaza has ravaged itself since then.

As a charitable generous gesture, several Jewish and Israeli businessmen purchased Israeli greenhouses and related equipment, and gifted them to the Palestinian Authority (PA) which had elected Mahmoud Abbas as president in January 2005. The PA never was able to secure any of it. Palestinian security officials were overrun, saying that the Gazans looted it completely, leaving nothing behind “like locusts,” as soon as Israel pulled out.

News reports at the time were prescient regarding “concerns about Gaza’s future.”

Abbas made grand and empty proclamations. The PA did not have the respect of Gazans and the region would not be controlled by its leader from the Fatah party.

A few months later, Palestinians elected Hamas to 58% of parliament. Then, in 2007, a mini civil war broke out it Gaza which routed the PA and gave Hamas exclusive control of the strip. Amid the public failure of Abbas, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stressed his full support for Abbas and the PA, while he worried about food and aid getting to Gaza’s civilian population.

Does any of this ring familiar? Gazans overrun the Palestinian Authority; PA makes grand and empty declarations; Gazans saddle up with Hamas; UN worries about food and aid.

In 2025, twenty years after Israel left the Gaza Strip, the situation repeats. Gazans loot food and aid trucks; the UN decries the situation; Abbas reads statements as though anyone respects and listens to him; and Hamas – or whatever is left of it – still has the support of the local population.

The underlying reality in Gaza is that the western-backed Palestinian Authority has never had a presence in the strip. The region has never truly been part of “Palestine” as envisaged by the many conferences over the last decades. How can there be a “two state solution” of Israel and Palestine, when the dreamed up “Palestine” is two distinct entities itself? What are countries “recognizing” when they cannot see reality?

The Greenhouses Swarm of 2005. The Fatah Swarm of 2007. The Israel Swarm of 2023. The Aid Swarm of 2025.

Gaza devours charity, donors, neighbors and itself so completely, that the request for ever more attention and aid is either completely nonsensical or understandable. Or both.

*Italian Pro-Palestinian activist Vittorio Arrigoni, killed by the same people he tried to help in 2011*

The Success Of Martyrdom

Posted on July 22, 2025 by First.One.Through

“Victory or Martyrdom.”

That has been the rallying cry of Hamas since its inception. It was not a metaphor or rhetorical flourish. It was a strategic doctrine and a religious creed. Victory would mean the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a devout Islamic state “from the river to the sea.” Martyrdom meant dying in pursuit of that cause — not just willingly, but eagerly.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas made its major play for victory. Thousands of militants and civilians from Gaza poured into Israel, raping, torturing, and slaughtering Jews in a pogrom of medieval barbarism. They hoped the spectacle would provoke a regional war — Hezbollah from the north, Iran from afar, Arab street uprisings across the Middle East. They imagined a domino collapse of the Jewish State.

It did not play out according to the preferred plan.

Hezbollah has been badly bruised. Iran has been humiliated. The IDF shattered Hamas leadership and destroyed its terror tunnels. The remaining Hamas fighters are mostly hiding — or dead or captured. Gaza’s infrastructure, above and below ground, is rubble.

Which leaves plan B: martyrdom.

Not just for themselves — many of whom will choose death over surrender — but for the people of Gaza whom they have indoctrinated for two decades. From kindergartens to mosques, from textbooks to television, they taught Palestinians that death for Allah is better than life without “liberation.” That there is nobility in dying while killing Jews.

Over 20,000 Hamas fighters are dead. There are almost twice that number of dead civilians. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza are leveled. Tunnels, schools, hospitals are gone.

That’s not failure for Hamas. That’s evidence that the campaign for martyrdom worked. Every dead Gazan is a stepping stone to paradise. Every civilian loss is a propaganda weapon. Hamas always calculated that if they couldn’t beat Israel in battle, they could win in death.

And it’s working.

Around the world, nations are blaming Israel for a “power vacuum” in Gaza — as if Hamas’s evil leadership was a success story over seventeen years. They demand “reconstruction” — as if Gaza was a victim of a natural disaster and not a self-inflicted holy war launched atop a powder keg. The idea that Gazans were brainwashed into seeking martyrdom is dismissed as Islamophobic. The western mind cannot comprehend that death is an accepted goal, not a consequence.

New York Times article blaming Israel for Hamas’s refusal to surrender

In the West, every death is a tragedy. But in Gaza under Hamas, it is currency. Suicide bombers once strapped explosives to their chests. Now, the entire Strip has been strapped into a suicide vest, and the detonator pressed.

This isn’t suicide-by-cop. It’s martyrdom-by-genocide — a warped campaign in which Hamas initiated all-out war against a vastly superior enemy, knowing full well the toll. And the more people die, the more it fuels the narrative they’ve crafted: that they are eternal victims, even while firing rockets from hospitals and launching ambushes from schools.

It is cruel. It is evil. And it is successful.

Because the more Gazans die, the more the world turns on Israel. The more Israel defends itself and fights to return its hostages, the more it is blamed for the destruction of Gaza. The West is so allergic to the idea of mass death as a chosen outcome that it must assign blame elsewhere.

So Hamas continues to fight, not to win, but to die. And in death, they declare success because the narrative of the Global South has been successfully instilled into consciousness of the Global North for the past decade. The insidious jihad has now reached peak toxicity.

“Victory or Martyrdom.”

A true defeat of Hamas – in which it gets neither victory nor martyrdom – would be for it to surrender. To hand over its weapons. To leave the Strip and be stripped of mention on any building, square or monument. To be vacated from government, military and textbooks.

That is precisely what Hamas is avoiding at all cost. It will not hand over the hostages and lay down its weapons. It will fight until every child in Gaza is dead rather than concede defeat. And the majority of Gazans continue to back that plan, even as recently as a May 2025 PCPSR poll.

The world refuses to admit the reality and prefers to blame Israel for the continued deaths rather than pressure Gazans to stand down. Without a Hamas concession, there is really no “day after.” The war will continue. Deaths will fill the pages of the next chapter.

Israel has denied Gazans the victory of victory and the world is enabling the victory of martyrdom.

All because the West cannot comprehend the mindset of psychopaths and remains blind to the mainstreamed antisemitism in their midst.

ACTION ITEM

Post on social media that the Gazan dead are not only victims of Hamas’s war but Hamas’s education. No such society is deserving of sovereignty.

For The Love Of Jihad (June 2025)

Between Hamas And A “Genocide.” Between Radical Faith And Coexistence (April 2025)

Hamas’ War Is A Radical Religious Jihadi War Of Annihilation (August 2024)

Sue The United Nations For Supporting Terrorism (February 2024)

The Insidious Jihad in America (July 2019)

The Parameters of Palestinian Dignity (August 2016)

The Palestinians aren’t “Resorting to Violence”; They are Murdering and Waging War (November 2014)

Extreme and Mainstream. Germany 1933; West Bank & Gaza Today (October 2014)

Gaza’s Women And Children

Posted on December 5, 2024 by First.One.Through

There have been many articles about about the women and children in Gaza who have died in the Iranian proxies- Israel war, which began when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people. The BBC quoted the United Nations which said nearly 70% of the Gazan dead were women and children over the period November 2023 to April 2024 (44% children and 26% women). The report concluded that there was “an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare,” sharply criticizing Israel’s war effort.

What the report does not discuss is the demographic situation in Gaza, where the vast majority of people are women and children.

Children under 14 years old make up 38.8% of the population according to the CIA World Factbook, and there are slightly more men than women. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 47% of Gaza is under 18 years old, meaning roughly 8% of the population is between 15 and 18, and half of that figure would be fighting age males.

Taken together, it means that between 26% and 30% of the Gaza population are men of fighting age, and therefore, 70 to 74% would be considered non-combatants, if one were to assume that no women participate in the fighting.

Applying the sub-70% figure cited by the UN over the first six months of the war to the demographic data shows that there were slightly FEWER non-combatants killed than random probability would imagine (44% less than 47% children, and 26% women less than 27% in region).

More recent data published by Al Jazeera as of December 3, 2024, claims that 44,532 Gazans have died in the war of which 17,492 (39.3%) are children. As 47% of Gaza’s population is under 18, the much lower 39% figure would suggest that Israel’s war effort is having fewer bystanders killed as the battles continue. As the 39.3% statistics include the first six months of the war when 44% of the dead were children according to the UN, it would imply that since April 2024, 38.2% of those killed in Gaza were under 18, significantly lower than the 47% of the population.

Beyond the raw statistics are other factors.

Gaza’s military is fighting underground and placed its women and children in the front line of fire. One would therefore assume that a much greater percentage of those killed would be women and children. The fact that the figures are lower than the demographic composition showcases Israel’s effort to minimize harm and target combatants.

Further, the figures do not distinguish between women and children bystanders from family members of terrorists. It is likely that a great number of the women and children were killed alongside terrorist family members.

It is always tragic when young children and bystanders are killed. The fact that the psychopaths and cowards of Hamas dictated such situation is perhaps even more barbarous than their heinous massacre in Israel on October 7.

The statistics of Gaza’s dead as provided by the terrorist group Hamas may show a significant number of women and children but it also shows that Israel is using efforts to minimize casualties among civilians.

West Bank Arabs Support For Sinwar And War

Posted on October 20, 2024 by First.One.Through

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 massacre, was killed by an Israeli military operation in Gaza on October 17 one year later. The mourning among West Bank Arabs was likely much greater than for Gazans.

According to the September 2024 Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll, Sinwar was much more popular than current head of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas. In a head-to-head competition for the presidency, Sinwar would have trounced Abbas by 74% to 24%, a 50 point margin.

*September 2024 PCPSR poll results for race for presidency*

The appreciation for Sinwar was much greater in the West Bank than in Gaza, with 70% of West Bank Arabs expressing satisfaction with Sinwar to 29% in Gaza. Presumably this is because the Gaza Strip has felt more of the ramifications of Sinwar’s war against Israel than those living in the West Bank, although the poll does not ask.

The poll does ask about the “best means of achieving Palestinian goals in ending the occupation and building an independent state,” which showed the majority of 56% of West Bankers still preferring violence to 36% in Gaza, a 20 point spread.

Beyond the fighting forces of the decimated military in Gaza military while the armed terrorist groups in the West Bank remaining intact, is the gap in news sources. According to the poll, by far the biggest source of news to the region came from Qatar’s Al Jazeera, and “West Bankers are more likely than Gazans to watch Aljazeera, 80% and 30%, respectively.” That’s the media company which has told Palestinian Arabs that thousands of their comrades did not commit mass rape of Israelis and burn families alive, making films whitewashing the atrocities, despite ample evidence.

The war has made Gazans turn towards negotiations with Israel, as their military has been defeated and the propaganda machine has fizzled, yet West Bank Arabs continue to prefer a war to negotiations by a two-to-one margin. It remains to be seen whether it will take a conclusive defeat and termination of Iranian and Qatari propaganda to make West Bank Arabs give up their quest to destroy Israel.

Or the Palestinian jihadists of the West Bank can continue to threaten Israel, much like Monty Python’s Black Knight.

Iranian Proxies In The West Bank? (October 2024)

Note To Kamala: Vast Majority Of West Bank Arabs Are Terrorist Supporters (July 2024)

This Is Actually A West Bank War (December 2023)

Israel May Have Stopped A Bigger Massacre From The West Bank (November 2023)

Palestinian Arabs Are Fighting For All of Israel, Not A New State In West Bank and Gaza (September 2023)

UNRWA’s West Bank Terrorists (July 2023)

Beheadings are Not Terrorism for Al Jazeera (October 2020)

Al Jazeera’s Lies Call for Jihad Against the Jewish State (November 2017)

Alias Armies Of Jihad

Posted on September 27, 2024 by First.One.Through

The escalation of the war between Iranian Proxies and Israel continues to lay bare the alias armies of Iran embedded around the region.

The United Nations is demanding diplomatic negotiations commence between Israel and the Palestinian Authority while only narrowly condemning the Hamas (not Palestinian) savage massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. For the UN, Hamas is at once distinct from Palestine, and simultaneously a legitimate Palestinian political group, as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”

Does the UN think that Hamas is a separate group inside of Gaza or does it acknowledge that Palestine launched a genocidal war against Israel?

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has vast military capabilities, estimated to be around 150,000 missiles. In conjunction with Hamas’s October 7 war, Hezbollah began its attack on Israel. Israel’s response to Hezbollah has been characterized as an attack on Lebanon rather than Hezbollah.

The shifting nouns makes Israel appear to be the aggressor against a neutral party: while Hamas attacks Israel, Israel attacks Gaza; while Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel attacks Lebanon.

Hamas controls Gaza and has 58% of the seats in the Palestinian parliament. Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon and has 48% of the Lebanese government.

In no other sphere can a country claim that its military is not a functioning arm of the government. Such fictitious divide affords the government a veneer of peaceful intentions while its army wages war.

Simultaneously, both are proxy groups of the Islamic Republic of Iran, colonial outposts on the borders of Israel.

Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel are either 1) a rogue third party terrorist group attack on the Jewish State, 2) a Lebanese attack, or 3) an Iranian attack. If it is a separate entity, than a diplomatic solution must a) have the Lebanese government confiscate all its weapons, b) strip the group of all seats in parliament, and c) expel it from Lebanon. If the attacks on Israel were from Lebanon, than Israel has full right to attack all of Lebanon. If the attacks were spearheaded by Iran, than we have long been in a regional war.

Multiple countries issue a release calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon (people and government), making no mention of Hezbollah or Iran, tacitly accepting that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon and that Lebanon launched an unprovoked attack on Israel.

The same should hold for Hamas and Palestinian territories: Palestinians launched a war against Israel, not Iran or a limited wicked entity.

Labeling armies with unique names distances the governments and population from the violence they perpetrated. It falsely shields the attacking government and people from fault and casts the defensive response as unwarranted and sinister.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calls members of Hezbollah “innocent civilians” and Israel’s attack a violation of “international humanitarian law,” which implies that she believes that the people and government of Lebanon started a war with Israel and Israel is acting in self defense.

The anti-Israel world does not believe that non-Hamas Gazans who are killed by Israel’s defensive war are civilians caught in a war that its government started, but defenseless targets of an Israeli initiated attack. The “Hamas attacks Israel / Israel attacks Gaza” (not Hamas) narrative obfuscates the culpability of the people and government of Gaza.

The antisemitic jihadists in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza launched a war of annihilation against the Jewish State using alias armies, attempting to shield the people and governments as uninvolved bystanders. Much of the world has ingested the red herring and is defaming Israel’s just war in the latest incarnation of a blood libel.