A new UN report says more than two-thirds of Gaza’s estimated 2.3 million Arabs have fled their homes as Israel’s onslaught on the northern part of the Strip has intensified. The Hamas health ministry reported on Thursday that 10,818 Gaza Arabs have been killed since the unprovoked attack of some 3,000 Hamas Nazis on peaceful Israeli settlements that resulted in some 1,200 raped, tortured, and murdered, most of them civilians, and more than 200 kidnapped to be held as hostages, most of them women, children, and the elderly.
If the war continues for a second month, the UN projects that the Gazan GDP, which stood at $20.4 billion before the Shabbat Simchat Torah pogrom of October 7, 2023, will drop by 8.4%, to a little over $18 billion. A third month would bring the Strip’s GDP down by 12%, to around $15.5 billion, with more than 660,000 people dipping below the poverty line.
Meanwhile, the Hamas leadership is not doing so shabbily. The personal fortune of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s politburo who owns homes in Qatar and Turkey, is estimated at $4 billion. Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashaal, and his deputy, Musa Abu Marzouk, are each estimated to be worth $3 billion. Also, the Hamas leadership group controls an investment portfolio estimated at $1 billion and owns assets in Sudan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and Egypt.
On Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres suggested that the high number of civilians killed in the Gaza Strip shows that there is something “clearly wrong” with Israel’s military operations. Guterres compared the high number of children being killed in Gaza with conflicts around the world, and said Gaza was becoming “a graveyard for children.”
The IDF retorted that the high number of dead children in Gaza is the result of Hamas using an inordinate number of children as human shields. “While the world sees neighborhoods with schools, hospitals, scout groups, children’s playgrounds, and mosques, Hamas sees an opportunity to exploit,” the IDF said in a statement Friday morning.
The IDF released this aerial photograph to illustrate this point:
And IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari released countless images like the one below of Hamas tunnel shafts located in schools, mosques, hospitals, and even an amusement park:
pictures of the launch pits near a playground: pic.twitter.com/foeznj4lDJ
— דובר צה״ל דניאל הגרי – Daniel Hagari (@IDFSpokesperson) November 5, 2023
And this ordinary home in the middle of a civilian neighborhood was used as a weapons factory by Hamas:
Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan responded to Guterres’ remarks, saying, “Would the Secretary-General dare say that since the number of German civilian casualties during World War II was higher than American or British civilian casualties, it meant that something was ‘wrong’ with the US and UK military operations when fighting a genocidal regime?”
Incidentally, the UN issued a sanitized summary of the Gaza conflict, saying: “On 7 October 2023, Palestinian armed groups in Gaza launched thousands of rockets toward Israel and breached through the perimeter fence of Gaza at multiple locations, entering into Israeli towns and killing and capturing Israeli forces and civilians. The Israeli military declared ‘a state of war alert,’ and began striking targets in the Gaza Strip, including residential buildings and health care facilities. Since then, thousands of people have been killed and more than one million have been displaced, as parts of Gaza have been reduced to rubble.”
I say, make more rubble.
