If Hamas leaders keep repeating this delusion of victory, enough of their own people, and others around the world, will believe it.
By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine
Hamas has been battered by the IDF over the past fifteen months of war in Gaza. Twenty thousand of its operatives, about half its prewar numbers, have been killed. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, many so severely that they will never be able to engage in combat again.
The IDF has destroyed or seized many of its weapons, which had been hidden both in civilian structures — including schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and mosques — and in the vast network of tunnels underneath Gaza that, taken together, are longer than the New York subway system.
Most of those tunnels have been unearthed, and blown up, by IDF soldiers. Hamas’ leaders in Gaza have been killed, including Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attack on Israelis at the music festival and at ten kibbutzim.
Many of Hamas’ most important commanders have been killed. Dozens of its command-and-control centers have been blown up.
But while we in the outside world recognize that Hamas has suffered a devastating blow, inside Gaza, Hamas has been insisting on a different narrative, one in which Hamas is the “victor” because it has not yet been completely destroyed.
More on this campaign by Hamas to convince the Palestinians and the world that the terror group has emerged victorious can be found here:
“A ‘victory’ in branding: Hamas is solidifying its narrative with the ceasefire agreement – opinion,” by Eran Lahav, Jerusalem Post, January 29, 2025:
“Hamas and its supporters have begun disseminating social media content that presents the terrorist organization as triumphant and solidifies a narrative in which “Israel is expelled” and “the Al-Aqsa Flood is the first spark of victory” — and of “freedom….”
The temporary, 60-day ceasefire that Israel has agreed to during the hostages-for-criminals exchange with Hamas will require the IDF to pull back from major cities in Gaza — Rafah, Khan Younis, Gaza City, to positions on their outskirts.
But the IDF remains very much a presence in Gaza; Israel has not, despite Hamas’ claim, been “expelled.” And far from being “the first spark of victory,” the Al-Aqsa Flood (the name given to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023) has been a disaster for both Hamas and for the people of Gaza, who now are living among the heaps of rubble that Hamas’ atrocities brought upon the Strip.
“Hamas has even changed the branding of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” and begun distributing content that now terms it “the “Flood of the Free,” drawing a connection to the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and winking a message to the Gazans and to the Palestinians of the Judea and Samaria area to the effect that the October 7 attack was the opening salvo, the first step on the way to freeing the Palestinians from the “Israeli occupation.”
Hamas also seeks to boost the motivation of its supporters by portraying this as “the first phase in the course of Jerusalem’s liberation….”
Hamas insists that everything is going as planned. “The first phase” in the campaign to “liberate Jerusalem” will end with 1,900 prisoners being released, and with Hamas having been able to replace three-quarters of those operatives who were killed with 15,000 new recruits.
That can be pointed to and boasted about, as a demonstration of the terror group’s resilience. It still has close to the numbers it had before October 7, and that, in and of itself, according to Hamas’ view, constitutes a victory.
“Until recently, Hamas had directed its incitement machine at urging Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to carry out terror attacks in Israel. Now, in addition, it has launched a broad social media campaign to promote its “victory” narrative….”
On social media, Hamas has its operatives posting accounts of the terror group’s putative victories and the signs of defeatism — often imaginary, but effective just the same — among the Zionists.
The lopsided hostages-for-criminals swap, where 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, including nearly 450 murderers, will be exchanged for about 50 hostages (of a total of 98 once believed held by Hamas, which almost certainly murdered the rest) will be dwelt upon as a sign of Hamas’ steadfastness in negotiations.
Those social media posts will emphasize that the “Zionist entity” will have been forced to free more than twenty times as many prisoners as the number of hostages Hamas will free in exchange.
Stories about exhausted Israeli reservists wanting desperately to return to their civilian lives, and doubts about the Gaza campaign voiced by far-left Israelis, are the kind of stories Hamas will likely focus on to convince its own people that the Israelis are now in a defeatist mood.
“Nukhba terrorists were greeted like rock stars by cheering crowds. Children rushed after them and hugged them, and the masked terrorists taught the children the slogan “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud,” invoking a centuries-old Arab massacre of Jews….”
The full menacing cry is “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad soufa yaʿoud,” which means “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” Khaybar was the oasis where Muhammad led his troops to attack the Jewish farmers who lived there.
American intelligence believes that Hamas has managed over the last year to recruit 15,000 new operatives among the young people in Gaza, which means three-quarters of the 20,00 Hamas members killed have been replaced, albeit with recruits who are young and untrained in military matters.
Meanwhile, Hamas carefully stage-managed the whole handover of the three hostages. They had been well-fed in recent weeks to “plump them up” from their previous emaciated state.
They were wearing decent clothes — unlike what they had to wear during the past 450 days. They were given little “gift bags” containing photographs of Gaza and of themselves in captivity. They were instructed to smile for the cameras.
And Hamas operatives, balaclavaed bezonians, some waving Palestinian flags, others gripping their rifles, swarmed around them, in a frenzy of fake triumph, as the three girls, both frightened and relieved, were transferred from a Hamas vehicle to a Red Cross vehicle that would deliver them to Israel.
Muhammad Darwish, the head of Hamas’ Shura Council, has shared his delusions with representatives of the other Palestinian terrorist groups meeting in Doha about Hamas proving itself to be a “resolute, united fighting nation” — when in fact, Hamas has just suffered the greatest defeat in its entire existence.
But if Hamas leaders keep repeating this, enough of their own people, and others around the world, will believe it. And they are especially keen on persuading young people in Gaza to join Hamas and take part in more such victories.
“The Hamas “victory” campaign was intended to re-energize Palestinian support for the organization. But with it comes the question of where the current public support in the streets of Gaza derives from.
Hamas controls all of the media that is allowed to broadcast in Gaza, and it prevents most stories about Hamas’ losses to the IDF from being disseminated in the Strip.
Meanwhile, it floods social media with stories of brave Hamas fighters who, despite everything the “Zionist entity” could throw at them, after sixteen months are still standing.
Hamas fighters are said to be regrouping in northern Gaza, and rearming themselves with weapons that the IDF failed to locate and destroy.
Hamas has been recruiting eager young Gazans who are determined, after swallowing the “victory narrative” that Hamas’ propagandists have been pushing, to fight “the Jews” in order to achieve another such “victory.”
And those young recruits who, with only a few weeks of military training, join Hamas on the battlefield, will discover, to their horror, that the IDF did not lose the Gaza war, as they had been led to believe, that Hamas was not triumphant but a hollowed-out shell of its prewar self, and that now they, too, were about to be devastated by the indomitable soldiers of the IDF.
The post Hamas’ ‘victory narrative’ as a recruitment tool appeared first on World Israel News.