On Oct. 7, the Palestinian government of the Gaza Strip, Hamas, perpetrated an act of genocide against the Israeli people. They intended to wipe out, in whole or part, the Israeli population. They specifically targeted young women, families, and elderly people. They attacked a music festival specifically in order to mass murder young Israelis. They used systematic rape as a method of torture and abuse, including driving nails into the genital areas of women, slicing them open, and shooting them in their groins. (This has been documented and reported even by the New York Times.) In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocity, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official and therefore senior Palestinian government official, celebrated the event and promised further terror attacks:
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the name Hamas gave its October 7 onslaught] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth”.
Hamas not only perpetrated genocide, it openly spoke to the world about its intentions to continue committing acts of genocide as long as it were allowed to exist. The United Nations Charter, paragraph 138, speaks about genocide prevention and puts it this way:
138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.
Notice the phrase “appropriate and necessary means”. Oct. 7, together with Hamas’ stated intention to re-perpetrate this act of genocide, shows that the only appropriate and necessary means that the Israeli government could take to guarantee its population will not suffer another genocidal attack is an all-out assault on and complete annihilation of Hamas. It is important for the rest of this article to establish early on that Israel’s military campaign is not only in accordance with international and U.N. law, it is necessary: in other words, were Israel to accept anything less than the total destruction of Hamas, it would be failing in its “responsibility” to its citizens and to the broader international community, including the Palestinian population – more on that later.
