This is How Hamas Penetrated the Minds of Westerners

A British police officer was seriously injured and rushed to the hospital after being hit in the face by a glass bottle thrown by a protester opposing the war in Gaza. How have we reached a point in our society where someone is willing to risk four years in prison on behalf of a terrorist organization committing genocide in a country 2,000 miles away?

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Undoubtedly, they may portray themselves as part of "peace marches," but in reality, they directly support the war objectives that Hamas seeks to achieve. Hamas's sole aim in this conflict is survival, and they aim to achieve this by leveraging international pressure to force Israel to the negotiating table for a ceasefire. Their primary tool is cultivating anger, making civilian casualties inevitable, and then weaponizing images of these casualties to incite outrage in the West. This article examines the disinformation and manipulation techniques employed and their roots in Soviet intelligence.

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Hamas in Gaza has deliberately created a situation where collateral damage to civilians and infrastructure has become an intrinsic feature of war. From their perspective, it is both guaranteed and desired. This is less about using human shields and more about a strategy of human sacrifice.

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Their entire military strategy is built around civilian infrastructure. Their weapons depots, headquarters, and storage facilities are located in civilian buildings such as schools, hospitals, mosques, universities, and residential homes. Gaza’s 500-mile network of tunnels, some as deep as 15 stories—longer than the London Underground—is central to this strategy. Before the war, Gaza had more hospitals than Paris, many connected to Hamas tunnels, providing access, ventilation, and power supplies. To destroy the tunnels, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have no choice but to target the buildings above them.

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All of this was deliberately designed by Hamas as a defensive strategy. Israel had no choice but to respond after October 7, 2023.

The West fails to grasp the magnitude of the trauma inflicted on Israeli society. I only truly understood it after visiting the town of Be’eri myself in April. Walking through the ruins of a house burned by Hamas was the moment I realized the sheer horror of what had occurred. The damage to the bodies was so severe that archaeologists were called in to help identify the remains. As I walked through the rubble, I was likely stepping on the ashes of burned human bodies.

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I am not Israeli. If it impacted me so profoundly, its impact on Israeli society—a tightly-knit community where everyone among the 10 million inhabitants knows someone directly affected by October 7—is exponentially greater. It’s a trauma that will ripple across generations, compelling Israeli society to demand a military response. Here is where Hamas’s strategy bore fruit.

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Hamas anticipated the damage that Israel’s defensive response would cause. They wanted this damage. They were ready to weaponize the language of the oppressed left: “genocide,” “apartheid,” “massacre.” They knew civilians in Gaza would die; they wanted them to die. They wanted their images to incite outrage in the West, pressuring Israel and allowing them to escape accountability for October 7.

This is a strategy of anger and emotion. It’s impossible to combat these with logic. Urban warfare is horrifying under any circumstances, but the horror is magnified when a civilian city is deliberately targeted as part of the pre-designed strategy.

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All urban wars are primitive at their core, encapsulating the most terrifying aspects of conflict. Despite IDF efforts to move civilians to safety—evacuating over one million from Gaza City and more than 900,000 from Rafah—civilians used as human shields will inevitably die. Hamas was ready to document this with their cameras to provoke global outrage.

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But why has the Western public been so receptive to Hamas’s narratives? To answer this, we must go back to the late 1960s when Yasser Arafat led operations against Israel in the Soviet Union, according to former Soviet intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. It was then that the term “Palestine” entered the international stage.

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The Soviet intelligence agency's disinformation tactics were legendary, encompassing control of the press in foreign countries; complete or partial forgery of documents; spreading rumors, innuendo, distorted facts, and lies; operating international and local front organizations; running clandestine radio stations; and exploiting academics, politicians, economists, and media figures in the target country.

Arafat weaponized all these tactics to support the Palestinian Liberation Organization under Moscow’s direction. He cultivated a sympathetic base within the Western political left and provided them with the necessary terminology. It’s no coincidence that figures like Jeremy Corbyn ride this wave into The Hague, buoyed by South African legal activists.

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Hamas has followed in Arafat’s footsteps, employing every aspect of Soviet disinformation strategy in the West to this day. The media is manipulated with false reports; facts are distorted; casualty figures are exaggerated; atrocity images are staged or falsified; and civil institutions, particularly universities, are undermined through financial investments from Hamas-supporting states like Qatar. Front organizations like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign recruit tens of thousands of deceived individuals to march in London, supporting Hamas’s war objectives.

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Thus, we arrive at a point where someone in the UK is willing to go to prison for throwing a bottle at a police officer in the name of “Free Palestine.” This is the result of decades-long information warfare that Israel has been unable to counter. The tragic civilian deaths and manufactured outrage are Hamas’s own Iron Dome.