Mick Hartley

The Israeli forces are accused of targeting civilians in Gaza. Douglas Murray in the New York Post explains why they have no choice:

To get a better sense of what the IDF is actually facing on the ground in Gaza I spoke this week with a man I can only identify as “Major Y.”

He is an American who went to Israel to fight in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.

He has been fighting in Gaza constantly since then in a special forces unit.

These are some of the things he told me about his experiences there.

The first thing that the outside world does not seem to know is that Hamas routinely uses civilian houses as weapon stores.

This is a complete flouting of the laws of war, including the Geneva conventions which mandate that armies must not use civilian sites for military use.

Major Y and other people on the ground I have spoken with say that they estimate about one in every two or three homes in Gaza they go into has military weaponry, including AK47s, grenades and rocket launchers.

And they routinely find entrances to Hamas’s terror tunnels inside civilian houses.

And not just anywhere, but most often in the children’s bedrooms and even under cots.

Indeed one member of the IDF I spoke with this week says that this is such a pattern that when they search a house they now go straight to the children’s bedrooms to uncover weapons caches and entrances to the tunnels.

They recently found an RPG underneath a baby’s crib.

Furthermore, Major Y says that every single mosque they go into has a Hamas weapons store.

As has every UN school that they go into. Again this violates every rule of war.

Hamas use places of worship — while pretending to be such “devout” Muslims — because they know the Israelis will not target their places of worship.

They use schools as arms dumps because they know that if Israel targets an empty school the world will go berserk.

It is a cynical tactic, that of course puts at risk the very Palestinians who Hamas pretend to be representing.

According to the Major, “every school and kindergarten we go into we find guns in the basement. In each one we found more than ten AK47s, machine guns and grenades.”….