Imagine this ludicrous scenario: Your angry neighbor breaks down your fence and ransacks your house. He kills your dog and takes your children as hostages.
Prior to this unprovoked aggression, your neighbor had been using your unsecured wireless internet. After his attack, you password-protect your Wi-Fi. He then has the audacity to complain about your “cruelty.”
The absurdity is obvious. Someone who engaged in such behavior is a menace and should be in jail. You have no obligation to provide him with anything.
Yet some insist this is what Israel must do.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and brutally murdered around 1,200 people. They also kidnapped hundreds of people. Civilians in Gaza joined in the attacks.
During their brutal attack, Hamas kidnapped Mia Schem, who was 21 years old at the time. She was released after more than seven weeks in captivity. Hamas didn’t keep Ms. Schem in a prison but in a home. “There are no innocent citizens there,” she said in 2023. “They’re families controlled by Hamas. They’re children who from the moment they are born, they teach them that Israel is Palestine and just to hate Jews.”
Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages, including dozens of dead bodies. This is sick and evil.
The Israeli government faces an difficult task. To defend its country and citizens, it must neutralize Hamas. But it must save as many hostages as possible.
To that end, Israel recently ordered the Israel Electric Corp. to stop providing electricity to Gaza. This has led to a steady stream of stories about how this is making life difficult in Gaza. Most notably, the region’s desalination plant policy runs on electricity. It’s now operating on generator power, which has dramatically reduced available water. Hamas complains this shows Israel’s “starvation policy.”
Don’t buy the self-serving deflections. Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for providing power and water to the people it governs. If Hamas wanted to improve the lives of people in Gaza, it would release the remaining hostages and withdraw from the Gaza Strip. Instead it uses them as human shields, eagerly sacrificing the lives of its own people for propaganda purposes.
Hamas launched this war in an effort to fulfill its fanatical goal of wiping Israel from the map by triggering a larger conflict involving other Arab nations, including Iran. Blame the suffering in Gaza on the group’s woeful miscalculations and its decision to favor death and destruction over peace.
Those who think Israel is obligated to supply power to a terror group still holding Israeli civilians as hostages might want to reorient their moral compass.
