“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba.

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.

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[–] Tatar_Nobility@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where did you get your info from?

Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestine and head of Fatah, was the one to suspend both legislative and presidential elections and not Hamas. In fact, the latter “strongly opposed the decision to call off elections” (npr.org).

Abbas' party has been working closely with the Israeli authorities. His excuse was that “Israel refused to commit to allowing Palestinians to vote in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem” (npr.org).

Some (quite convincingly) hypothesise that the suspension of the elections was aimed at preserving his presidency and salvage “his fractured Fatah party [which] was expected to suffer another embarrassing defeat to Hamas.” (apnews.com).

How can one expect the people to not fight if democracy can't be exercised freely?

[–] guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for the updates, I wasn't aware there had been scotched election plans in the last few years. I follow various global situations but Israel-Palestine is so hopeless it's honestly hard to keep up with. It's worth noting Hamas has also scotched attempts to hold elections since 2006. Interesting to note they called for municipal elections 10 days ago and apparently intended to discuss with the PA such elections at the same time as they were planning an actual massacre whose only strategic merits I have even heard suggested are "Israel's response will galvanize Gaza against Israel," except I'm not sure what iron resolve does against a military with IDF's resources and lack of restraint.

Anyways, they can fight if they think it will help, but given how more or less every single armed conflict has panned out ultimately in Israel's favor, I'd question if in their case going even harder and massacring civilians even harder is really going to help anything.

Since legislative/presidential elections haven't actually been held since 2006, we can't really know if the 44% of the vote (in a vote which had 76% turnout, so really, about 33% of all eligible voters, similar democratic mandates as GW Bush or Trump) would even still support Hamas today, so it's a little generous to say Hamas massacring civilians is the same as "The Palestinian people fighting"