If You Think Hamas Uses Human Shields... Wait Till You See What Hizballah Can Do
Will the West wake up or keep going along with the brutal game?
While the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is in the media spotlight, another, closely related war between Israel and Hizballah has been raging along the Israeli-Lebanese border—and well within both Israel and Lebanon in the form of tit-for-tat shelling and Israeli airstrikes.
True, the Israel-Hizballah war is on a much smaller scale, with so far about 20 fatalities on the Israeli side and more than 300 on the Hizballah side—far less in both cases than the totals from the fighting in Gaza.
Many believe, though, that—Hizballah being a much larger force than Hamas in terms of both manpower and firepower—it’s the Israel-Hizballah war that has the potential to turn into a much larger, much more devastating conflict.
That being so, it shouldn’t—even amid the relentless focus on Gaza—have gone almost unnoticed the other day when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that Hizballah “places its production infrastructure in the heart of civilian populations in southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa and in Beirut, and uses the Lebanese people as a human shield.”
The IDF stated further that Hizballah’s “method of operation” includes “stor[ing] explosives and dangerous chemical substances in civilian villages.”
It sounds particularly ominous in light of the great success, so far, of the Hamas human-shields strategy.
The degree of that success was glaringly evident when, to Israel’s chagrin, the US refrained from vetoing Monday’s UN Security Council resolution on the Israel-Hamas war.
Resolution 2728 states that the Security Council “[d]emands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
Israel’s sharp objection, both to the resolution itself and to the US abstention on it, is twofold.
First, 2728 doesn’t make a ceasefire conditional on the release of the more than 130 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Second, it enshrines a “ceasefire” as a remedy at a time when a substantial part of Hamas’s forces still survive in Gaza, enough to enable the terror group to recuperate and resume its atrocities against Israel.
Indeed, the atrocities of October 7, 2023, seem already—for almost everybody except Israelis and those most sympathetic to them—to be fading into a distant past.
It was on October 10 that President Biden said: “[I]n this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”
Five and a half months later, though, the tune has changed—to threats of withdrawal of US support if Israel attacks the remaining, largest concentration of Hamas forces in the Rafiah area. Even though all of Israel’s political and military elite, and the vast majority of its population, know that if Israel doesn’t attack and defeat those forces, the upshot is that Hamas gets away with October 7 and wins the war.
And what, during those five and a half months, has caused the change in Washington’s tune—along with Canada’s recent cutoff of arms supplies to Israel, and threats from Britain and other European countries to follow suit?
It’s primarily, of course, those relentless TV images of devastation and suffering in Gaza.
And what is the main cause of those images?
As Barry Posen, professor of security studies at MIT, put it:
Hamas... appears unconcerned about putting Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. Indeed, this is a feature, not a bug, of their political and military strategy. Some use the term “human shield” for this strategy, but that is incomplete. This element of Hamas’s strategy could also be described as “human camouflage,” and more ruthlessly as “human ammunition.” (emphasis added)
Or, one might say, cannon fodder. Hamas—as its fighters shelter in the immense underground network of tunnels it used billions of dollars in aid money to build—leaves Gazan civilians aboveground, unprotected, to serve as cannon fodder in its propaganda struggle against Israel. And—with the all too willing complicity of Western media that love to vilify Israel—it’s prevailing in that struggle.
Which brings us back to the Israel-Hizballah confrontation. Soon after those hostilities broke out on October 8, Israel evacuated tens of thousands of citizens from the border area to relative safety in other parts of Israel. Those citizens, understandably, want to return to their lives—but under reasonable security conditions, not with Hizballah projectiles slamming into their homes.
Hizballah, for its part, says it will keep attacking for as long as the Gaza war lasts. That means Israel might have to expand the northern war by finally driving Hizballah well back from the border.
Hizballah, meanwhile, cannot have overlooked the success of Hamas’s cannon-fodder strategy—and will not hesitate, with its “chemical substances in civilian villages” and so on, to use it even more cynically and brutally.
The upshot is: Can Israel still win its wars? Can it still get support from the US, or will it have to go it alone? If the West capitulates to the terrorists’ human-shields strategy, what does it think that means for the future of civilization and the morale and determination of belligerent forces and countries?
Coming later this year, GOTD’s debut title:
It is scary. But as we know -- we have nowhere else to go. So we will do what we have to do when our backs are against the wall.
Nice and disturbing summary.