In 2023, with roughly 1.4 million Gazans displaced and some 641,000 of them crowded into 150 UN shelters running at nearly 3 times their intended capacity, Ismail Haniyeh appeared on Al-Mayadeen television and said it plainly. Speaking of the women, children, and elderly of Gaza, the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau declared, “We are the ones who need this blood.” That blood, he said, awakens the revolutionary spirit. It is worth noting that Haniyeh’s net worth was between $3 and $4 billion.
Two years of American argument have treated those deaths as if they arrived by accident, or as if the only live question were whether Israel has been careful enough. Haniyeh told his audience the deaths were useful to him.
Urban guerrillas have always fought in cities. That fact, by itself, proves almost nothing. Human shielding is the deliberate placement of fighters and weapons among civilians so that the enemy must either hold fire or kill innocents. The laws of war forbid it because it exploits the protections those laws give civilians. Hamas has gone further. Its leaders have treated the resulting deaths as a political harvest: mobilization at home, pressure on governments that watch the footage. Photographs of rubble cannot prove that intent. Hamas’s own recorded words can.
The words are not new. In February 2008, years before this war, Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad boasted on Al-Aqsa TV that “death has become an industry” and praised human shields assembled from women, children, and the elderly. On October 24, 2023, Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese television that Hamas was proud to sacrifice martyrs and promised to repeat the October 7 attack again and again. The next raid was already priced in.
Three days later, Mousa Abu Marzouk was asked on Russian television why Hamas had built hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, a network it had claimed exceeded 500 kilometers as early as 2021, without building bomb shelters for civilians. “We are fighting from inside the tunnels,” he said. Protection of Gaza’s civilians, he added, was the job of the UN and of Israel. The organization solved the engineering problem of keeping its fighters alive underground, then announced on camera that the 2.2 million people above ground belonged to someone else.
In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported messages in which Yahya Sinwar called civilian losses “necessary sacrifices” and calculated that mounting deaths worked to Hamas’s advantage. A 2019 study from the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence had already mapped the loop: civilian proximity deters strikes on Hamas assets, while strikes that kill civilians impose reputational costs on Israel. Hamas collects in both directions.
Critics will say this is Israeli messaging. Check the provenance. UNRWA itself, not the IDF, announced the discovery of roughly 20 rockets in one of its schools in July 2014, then announced 2 further discoveries within the same month. Ban Ki-moon’s office condemned those responsible for turning schools into potential military targets. Amnesty International, no friend of Jerusalem, documented at least 23 extrajudicial executions of Palestinians by Hamas during the 2014 conflict, some processed through an interrogation site at al-Shifa hospital. The US Treasury assessed Hamas’s covert investment portfolio at more than $500 million in 2022, which is not the balance sheet of a militia too poor to pour concrete for shelters. In January 2026, the Treasury sanctioned 6 Gaza-based organizations that posed as humanitarian groups while supporting Hamas’s military wing. A movement with half a billion dollars in assets built tunnels for its gunmen and nothing for its children. That was a choice. The men who made it have explained the choice in their own words.
The design still requires an audience. A pressure campaign aimed at Western opinion works only if someone converts casualty imagery into political leverage. After October 7, a large share of that conversion happened on American campuses. High school chapters, undergraduate coalitions, and recent graduates were the fastest to circulate footage stripped of context and the quickest to fold a massacre into the seminar language of decolonization. On October 8, 2023, before Israel had mounted a ground response, campus coalitions called the slaughter resistance. They were doing the work Haniyeh’s sentence assigns to sympathetic foreigners: making the blood count. Hamas does not need American or F-1 students to fire rockets. It needs them to keep the pictures moving.
The conversation now has a faction inside the Democratic Party. The Islamic Marxist wing organized through the Democratic Socialists of America, and personified now by figures such as Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, has made Gaza its central moral drama while refusing to describe Hamas’s method in the words Hamas uses. New York City’s DSA chapter promoted the October 8 rally at which the massacre was celebrated, an event the organization continues to justify. Mamdani, now among the most prominent elected Islamic Marxists in the country, spent a mayoral campaign declining repeated invitations to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” El-Sayed has built a national profile on the premise that the salient evil in Gaza is Israeli conduct, full stop. The movement’s energy depends on the casualty narrative Hamas manufactures. Naming the manufacturer would cost it the story. A politics that cannot repeat Haniyeh’s sentence, out loud and on tape, has made itself useful to him. If that blend of Islamist apologetics and socialist organizing captures a major American party, the strategy will have a permanent office in American politics.
Marco Rubio's campaign to revoke the visas of foreign students who endorse or materially support Hamas has been denounced as an assault on free speech. The First Amendment protects persons in the United States from punishment for their views. Citizens who march for Hamas may not be jailed for the marching, however shameful the cause. A student visa is a grant of hospitality, and federal immigration law has long treated endorsement of designated terrorist organizations as a ground of inadmissibility. A foreign national may praise Hamas. The United States does not have to underwrite the praise with a visa. Once Western campuses are understood as part of the apparatus that turns civilian deaths into diplomatic pressure, Rubio's policy is a way to shrink the apparatus. Criticism of Israeli operations, sympathy for Palestinian suffering, and demands for humanitarian access remain open to citizens and visitors alike. What should close is the pipeline by which beneficiaries of American universities serve the propaganda arm of an organization that Amnesty caught executing the Palestinians it claims to represent.
A Palestinian child is not an asset on Hamas’s books. The people who take that seriously refuse to let Hamas collect a political dividend from the child’s death. Civilians suffer in every urban war. Hamas’s leaders called that suffering useful, hid the fighters, left the people exposed, and put wepons in the schools and hospitals those people need. Refusing to reward that method is how you protect Palestinians. Refusing visas to the foreigners who help sell it is how you protect the country. Both refusals start with the willingness to repeat what Hamas has already said about itself.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
Thanks for this. Hopefully more people will be exposed to the facts and understand the level of expert gaslighting conducted by Hamas, the IRGC and it's Jihadi supporters around the world.
"Islamic migrants, Islamic Muslims" Point of fact, America's constitution should not be read as some 'suicide pact.' That First Amendment's 'FREEDOM of religion' should not be an open invitation for some 'faux' religion, as is Islam, to enter the country and carry out its Theocratic ideology of 'Death to Israel, the little Satan, and death to America, the great Satan!' Any "Muslims," radical or "Peaceful," that practice that (non)religion Islam, should be removed from the country to any of those 7th Century bastions of idiocy they would have America become!
There are over 2 BILLION Muslims in the world, and NONE of them know how or why their 'faux' religion Islam came to be. They worship a "false prophet" that the Bible warns of in Matthew 7:15 "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."
Call me an Islamaphobe for I believe: “Islam is a caustic blend of paganism and twisted Bible stories. Muhammad, its lone "prophet", who made no prophecies, conceived his religion to satiate his lust for power, sex, and money. He was a terrorist.” BIBLE PROBE As Ripley would say, "BELIEVE IT OR NOT."