Of course, the Gazans didn’t listen to him: They moved away and took the bombs with them anyway. Perhaps he thought he had not made himself clear enough, and perhaps he foresaw the final attack, when Haniyeh appeared again on pan-Arab television Al Mayadden on Thursday and made things worse: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the blood of women, children and the elderly… I’m not telling you that this blood needs you. I say that we are the only ones who need this blood to awaken in us the revolutionary spirit, the determination, the challenge. And urge us to move forward!
Let us arm ourselves and die. Long live martyrdom. Of the others, however: Like Khaled Meshaal, his successor, Dr. Haniyeh spends his time between Turkey, Lebanon and Qatar. Since 2019, he has been living in a luxury apartment in Doha – “Stay in the air conditioning and invite the people of Gaza to jihad…” was the objection last week from a television journalist from Al Arabiya – and is struggling with his personal struggle Emir of Qatar, Al Thani, who is fed up with international pressure and wants to expel the entire Hamas leadership.
It’s not just the strategy of the human shield to hide in hospital basements, says Israel. What Haniyeh invokes is a specific duty of martyrdom enshrined in the Gaza constitution. In a few months, Hamas, if it still exists, will celebrate its “first shahid in the Zionist country,” or rather its first suicide bomber: a change in strategy that led the Islamic movement to abandon Hamas’s traditional intifada in 1994. Tanzim (the militiamen) and turning everyone into a martyr. “We need your blood” is not an exaggerated command: Hamas, as it says in Article 8 of the 1988 statute, “has Allah as its goal, the Prophet as its head, the Koran as its constitution, jihad as its own Method and “death, to the glory of Allah, as the most fervent wish.”
Haniyeh’s rant hits the West, not those who watch TV like Al Mayadeen: Founded eleven years ago in Beirut, financed by Iran, run by a relative of Syrian dictator Assad, it has one of its three permanent correspondence offices in Tehran and broadcasts every day the flagship program “A Window on Palestine” reports entitled “The Shoah, a great deception” or “Why the end of the Jews is certain”… In 2014, the Israelis discovered the largest Hamas tunnel in Gaza: 2.4 km long , 30 meters deep, 800 tons of reinforced concrete with electricity and WiFi, cost 10 million dollars. “It doesn’t matter,” Haniyeh warned on television back then: “We have a lot more.” And if they aren’t enough, we have the blood of our children…”