Israeli TV: Gaza residents increasingly directing anger at Hamas over war
According to report, evacuees to Rafah in the south of the Strip have been greeting each other with ‘May God take revenge upon Hamas’
Israel’s Channel 12 news reported that Gaza residents are increasingly expressing anger at Hamas as the war between the terrorist organization and Israel continues.
The Tuesday report showed footage of clashes between Hamas operatives and civilians over supplies, with the civilians yelling expletives at the gunmen. The channel’s Arab affairs commentator Ehud Yaari said such scenes have become increasingly common.
The network also cited conversations with Gazans inside the Strip who said residents “are praying that Israel will destroy Hamas and are saying it out loud.”
Reporter Ohad Hemo said that among those evacuated to Rafah in the Strip’s south, the greeting “May God take revenge upon Hamas” has become common.
Channel 12 stressed that negative sentiments toward the terror group have not, so far, been translated into action.
Despite the harsh humanitarian conditions in the Strip, civilians who spoke with Channel 12 said that “Hamas will not surrender even if we all die.”
The southern Gaza Strip is now intensely crowded, with some one million people — about half the entire enclave’s population — having moved there from the north amid Israel’s ground offensive. With Khan Younis in the south now also in the IDF’s crosshairs, civilians are moving out to Rafah. Multitudes are living in tent cities and in the streets, having no shelter and little supplies.
The report said that Hamas has been stealing much of the humanitarian supplies that enter the Strip and that residents are aware of this.
The report also noted that the UN has stopped and delayed some trucks with humanitarian supplies from entering the Strip in recent days, which could be explained by repeated incidents of Gazans ransacking the trucks for supplies before UN officials have an opportunity to hand out the goods.
“It’s, in a word, anarchy,” Hemo said.
The rising death toll and unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza have sparked outrage in much of the world. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says Israel’s military campaign, in response to the terror group’s murderous attacks, has killed more than 16,000 people so far, most of them women and children. Those figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both Hamas terrorists and civilians, and people killed as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires.
According to Israeli military estimates, some 5,000 Hamas members have been killed in the Gaza Strip, in addition to more than 1,000 terrorists killed in Israel during the October 7 onslaught.
The October 7 atrocities saw thousands of terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing some 240 hostages of all ages, amid acts of horrific brutality.
