"Opinion: Hamas weaponized sexual assault to deliver a message to its enemies"
Opinion by Paul Becker & Joel Poznansky, opinion contributors
From The Hill (via MSN).
"Finally, an important possibility is that, with these additional violations, Hamas planners were simply telegraphing explicit articles of their 1988 Hamas Covenant and Hamas Principles and Policies of May 2017, which express no interest in any negotiated settlement or two-state solution, but only in total victory over Israel or death. The atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists have effectively prevented any way back for either side to a peace negotiation. This certainly is a message that would serve Hamas’s Iranian backers and the mission of Hamas’s political manifesto.
"For Hamas’s own troops and active members, such a tactic serves Sun Tzu’s maxim: 'Throw your forces into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.' For Hamas terrorists and leaders who actively planned or participated in the Oct. 7 attack — as with Germany’s Einsatzgruppen troops during World War II — their actions have placed them in a legal position where there can be no way back for them individually, no negotiated peace and no surrender.
"In time, and with the various investigations currently underway, it should be possible to determine for certain whether the new Hamas tactics were intentional. It will take longer to fully confirm the purpose behind them, although it is likely that, even now, Hamas leaders are claiming credit for the evil innovation and incorporating this into their terrorist playbook.
"For us in the West to misinterpret the extreme sexual violence, butchery and real-time social media sharing committed by Hamas terrorists as abhorrent but merely unplanned and mindless war crimes committed by individual terrorists, rather than as new tactics adopted by Hamas leaders with an underlying rationale, is to underestimate and misunderstand the enemy. To paraphrase Sun Tzu again, that would be a losing strategy."
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