Hamas leader says 'we have the Israelis right where we want them' in leaked messages, WSJ reports

[sboatcar]

38. I agree, and it was a mistake for the people of gaza to elect them in the first place

From what I estimate, the Hamas leadership is hoping to create a wider war by sacrificing a lot of their own people, because they knew Israel would immediately go to war after Oct 7th, and that it would diminish any goodwill Israel had it the first place. They were correct on the first count, but the fact that this many months into the war, no other muslim nations have risen up against Israel shows that it was all for nought, and they have sacrificed the lives of thousands of their civilians for nothing.
The part that really sucks is how happy Israel was to oblige them and destroy huge swaths of Gaza, and destroy schools and hospitals and kill civilians that may or may not have been used as human shields. Both sides have a lot to gain from manipulating the news that gets out of there, and I feel like neither side is telling the full truth about what's going on.
It just pains me because it seems like the majority of the people uprooted or killed in this conflict were just people who wanted to live their lives and didn't have a conflict. That's the real tragedy here, those who died on Oct 7th and then the tens of thousands who died in the subsequent conflict that it caused. I see people constantly dehumanizing the people of Gaza and calling the deaths of all of these civilians just a cost of war. These are HUMAN BEINGS, the majority of whom don't want anything to do with the war, we need to start treating them like people instead of like pawns (and I mean across the board, Hamas, Israel, people discussing here).
We seem to be forgetting that we're talking about mostly civilians here, that they're real people with real lives and real families, and a real desire to not be killing in any kind of war that they didn't start and want nothing to do with. When I saw the news about Oct 7th, I had a sinking feeling that the end result of this would be tens of thousands of gazans being killed, because they're civilians, not soldiers. The real tragedy of it is that neither side seems to care, except for the political points it gets them one way or the other.