Hamas uses civilians as human shields everywhere it can. It places its command-and-control centers, its rocket launchers, and its operatives, inside or near schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment houses, and playgrounds, where civilians become human shields. The terror group knows how hard Israel tries to minimize civilian casualties, including warning people away from targets that the IDF is a about to hit, even if that allows enemy forces to escape, while Hamas does everything it can to maximize casualties, well aware of the propaganda value of dead Palestinian civilians.
Now the IDF has found inside Gaza rocket launchers situated very close to a child’s playground and a swimming pool. More on this story can be found here: “IDF says troops found Hamas rocket launchers near playground, swimming pool in Gaza,” by Emanuel Fabian, Times of Israel, November 5, 2023:
The Israel Defense Forces announced on Sunday the death of a soldier killed a day earlier during the ground operation in Gaza, and the military said it had located Hamas rocket launchers in close proximity to a swimming pool and a playground in the Strip.
Sgt. Yehonatan Maimon, 20, of the Nahal Brigade’s reconnaissance unit, from Ofakim, was killed during fighting in the northern part of the enclave. His death brings the toll of slain soldiers in Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza to 29, and 346 since the massive Hamas terror attack on October 7.
Additionally, another soldier of the Nahal Brigade’s reconnaissance unit and a reservist officer in the Armored Corps were seriously wounded during the fighting, the IDF added.
Meanwhile the IDF shared footage of its troops locating rocket-launching positions in civilian areas, amid efforts to uncover and destroy Hamas infrastructure. The terror group uses such sites to fire rockets at Israeli population centers.
Troops found four underground launchers some five meters (16 feet) from a children’s swimming pool, and around 30 meters from residential homes in the northern Gaza Strip, footage showed. Another clip showed troops locating a number of rocket launchers within a children’s playground and amusement park compound.
“This is further proof of the Hamas terror organization’s constant use of the civilian population as a human shield for terror purposes,” the IDF said in a statement.
Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel on Sunday, targeting the Gaza border communities which have been largely evacuated.
At the same time, the military continued to carry out airstrikes on Hamas targets while forces deepened the ground offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The IDF said that since the beginning of the ground offensive in the Gaza Strip a week ago, it has struck more than 2,500 targets by land, air and navy forces, and that ground forces also directed aircraft to strike Hamas infrastructure, weapons storage sites, observation posts and command centers.
The Hamas-run health ministry claimed that more than 30 people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Al-Maghazi neighborhood in central Gaza late Saturday. Hamas figures cannot be independently confirmed, and the terror group has been accused of artificially inflating the death toll.
An Israeli military spokesperson said they were looking into whether its troops had been operating in the area at the time.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said Sunday that more than 9,770 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas sparked war with its murderous assault. The figures do not differentiate between terror operatives and civilians nor between those killed in Israeli strikes and those killed by the hundreds of rockets fired by terror groups that have fallen short inside the Strip….
There is no way to verify the figures put out by Hamas, which has a long record both of exaggerating the total number of Palestinians killed by the IDF, and of not telling the world how many of those killed are its own operatives and how many are civilians. Nor does Hamas acknowledge that many of those killed in Gaza fell victims to Hamas’ own rockets that fell short, landing inside Gaza itself.
The IDF has showered northern Gaza with 1.5 million leaflets, urging residents to flee to the south before the war in Gaza City heats up. Hamas has tried to block residents from leaving. Nonetheless, more than 800,000 have taken the Israeli warning seriously, and fled southward.
While IDF troops were preparing one of the two existing north-south roads in Gaza for mass evacuations, Hamas — hoping to stop their work — fired missiles and mortars. They missed their targets; no IDF soldiers were hurt; the work continued without interruption.
On Saturday [Nov 4] Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “taking apart Hamas battalion after battalion” and would eliminate the terror group’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar.
Gallant said Israeli forces were attacking terror targets in Gaza City from both the south and north, and had entered urban areas.
He said “Hamas has no limits,” as Israel saw on October 7 with the terror group’s horrific assault and brutal killings. “The Hamas leadership is responsible. We will get to that leadership,” he vowed. “We will get to [Hamas Gaza chief] Yahya Sinwar and eliminate him. If the residents of Gaza get there ahead of us, that will shorten the war.”
Gallant knows, as the Americans do not, that ordinary people in Gaza have endured Hamas’ brutal despotism and rampant corruption for too long. They are now suffering from the decision of Sinwar and other Hamas leaders to unleash that attack on Israelis on October 7, and no doubt many Gazans would like to get their hands on him for what he has unleashed on the Strip, the ruination he has brought down on so many while Hamas leaders are either sitting out the war in five-star hotels in Doha, or sitting in tunnels deep underground. Thus Gallant’s somber prediction of what could happen to Yahya Sinwar: “if the residents of Gaza get there ahead of us, that will shorten the war.”
Israel presses on, relentlessly, taking Hamas apart, as Yoav Gallant says, “battalion by battalion.” The discovery of rocket launchers placed by Hamas close to a children’s playground and a swimming pool are just the latest evidence of the terror group’s malignity, willing even to endanger the lives of small children who are being used as human shields. The IDF does its best to war civilians away from targets it is about to hit — schools, mosques, hospitals, where fighters and their weapons, including rocket launchers, are located. But how can the IDF contact children in a playground or at a swimming pool? It can’t telephone, message, or use its “knock-on-the-roof” technique to warn those children away. Does the world realize the depths to which Hamas operatives will sink, in trying to save their own skins by endangering the lives of children in Gaza?
CogitoErgoSum says
Why would Muslims be upset about being granted the opportunity to become a martyr and be rewarded with immediate entry into Muslim Paradise? To them the life to come is more important than anything in this world. Every Muslim, every single man woman and child of them, is to fight in the Jihad against the Infidel. If the only contribution some of them can make is to become a useful propaganda tool by dying in battle, then Allah will reward them for that. Hamas does not care if children are killed. The Muslim children will have served Allah by becoming martyrs and the Jews and their children will be either killed or humiliated. It’s hard for us to understand such a sick way of thinking but it is the way they have been taught to think.
Wellington says
“..a sick way of thinking…”
Indeed, CES. But then if one minus ways of sick thinking from Islam you might actually come up with enlightened religious thought as found in Christianity and Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism too. But unfortunately, sick ways of thinking, “courtesy” of Islam, dominates this complete rip-off of two infinitely finer faiths, Judaism and Christianity, and as already mentioned.
Lisel Sipes says
They are cowards. They are a different species, even animals protect their babies.
gravenimage says
+1
Wellington says
Hamas gets my vote for being a collection of excellent Muslims, the best of the best of Mo’s followers.
And until such a “recognition” about Islam and its immensely deluded followers is the standard assessment of Mohammedanism by a vast majority of non-Muslims across the world, still will Islam get a pass and which pass it deserves none at all.
Until Islam in its entirety, with no more rubbish distinctions about Islam and Islamism, or radical Islam and mainstream Islam, or the especially nonsensical and disgusting bogus difference between moderate Muslims and Islamic terrorists, is accurately described for the egregious excuse for a major religion which it is, then idiots aplenty like Kamala Harris will continue to spout nonsense about Islamophobia.
Time for mankind to do a major gut-check, i.e., to properly characterize Islam, alone among the major religions of the world, as rotten to the core. Until this occurs, lethal games aplenty will continue. Guaranteed.
Islam sucks. Throughout. It is entitled to no respect. Legal status I would accord it but I would say the same about Nazism and Marxism. Proper identification of iniquity is everything. Banning iniquity is NOT the right approach. Let iniquity, a la Jefferson, function in a free society to show just how powerful liberty really is. BUT, it is imperative for this most important of societal paradigms to continue, i.e. free societies, that accurate description of evil is not absent.
FYI says
Some foolish people think Israel is waging a genocidal war against the gazans
FALSE and RIDICULOUS.
The IDF are conducing military operations against HAMAS.Rightly so.
The only people who want dead children are HAMAS
JOEL 3 v 19-21
The YHWH of the OT is of course the same as the God of the NT{at least to Christians}The prophecies come from God and God is a JUDGE.
What the palis did was invade the Holy Land and killed INNOCENT people.
The palis by supporting HAMAS did this to themselves.Their god allah is hubaal of the kaaba.
Anyone who thinks God is not capable of anger read JOEL 3 v 19-21
gravenimage says
Hamas’ Use of Children as Human Shields: Rocket Launchers Next to Swimming Pool and Playground
……………………………
Just appalling–but this from Hamas is nothing new. But much of the world ignores this, and instead blames Israel.