As they accuse Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza and scream for Intifada – holy war – pro-Palestine protesters have been heard to suggest that the young people whom Hamas terrorists so viciously slaughtered at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023 deserved it because ‘the place where Zionists decided to rave was next to a concentration camp’ – i.e. Gaza. Accusing the Jews of setting up a concentration camp has been a constant claim against the Jewish state ever since it withdrew from the Strip in 2005. But it is an absurdity.
When Israel handed over Gaza, its population was around 1.3 million. By 2023 it was more than 2 million. That would make it the first concentration camp in history in which the population actually grew. There was no population boom in Auschwitz in the 1940s.
So why the claim? It was for the same reason that Israel is so glibly accused of being ‘Nazi-like’ in its actions – to wound and hurt the Jewish state as deeply as possible by smearing it with the most powerful terms in Jewish history.
The ‘concentration camp’ claim was supposedly based on the fact that Israel imposed carefully controlled border checks on Gaza and that supplies were sometimes unfairly kept out. But these were necessary precautions because, from the very start of Hamas taking full control of Gaza, it was stockpiling weapons to attack Israel, bringing them in under the guise of food and provisions.
Any and all trade was a means to transport weapons or anything else that would further Hamas’s war aims. When, for example, the Israeli authorities tried to crack down on building supplies entering the Strip, knowing that much of this material was being used by Hamas to build its tunnel network, they were condemned by the international community and accused of denying the people of Gaza their rights.
But the truth is that while Hamas’s paymasters and mouthpieces in the region and across the West were proclaiming that Gaza was a concentration camp, it was a place that much of the rest of the region would envy.
Even in 2010, while Western media talked about Gaza as constituting one great humanitarian catastrophe, it boasted fancy restaurants, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and shopping malls. The Lonely Planet guidebook noted that at the Roots Club in Gaza you could ‘dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu’.
Reconstruction was under way thanks to input from Qatar. In 2020, a Hamas leader acknowledged publicly that people who came to Gaza could not believe that this was Gaza, because it was so beautiful, with promenades and restaurants and so forth.
A man carries on his shoulders a young child holding an assault rifle and wearing military fatigues during a rally held in the Huthi-controlled capital Sanaa on October 18, 2024 in protest against Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip
Hamas very much ran things their own way, for instance on one occasion burning to the ground a UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children, and threatening the UN staff with murder because it was deemed ‘un-Islamic’. But still the living standards in Gaza were high for the region.
There were no Olympic pools in Yemen; no peaceful promenades in Sudan. Yet the Hamas authorities insisted simultaneously that this place was under ‘siege’ and that Gaza was beautiful.
Nothing had to be the way it now is in Gaza. Things could have panned out differently after Israel unilaterally handed over the Strip in 2005, one of the most difficult and divisive decisions in modern Israeli history. Benjamin Netanyahu resigned as finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s government over it.
The territory (which had previously belonged to Egypt) had been captured by Israel during the war of 1967. Thereafter, policing it was a continual headache that cost lives, to the point where the Israeli government, despite concerns about what an independent Gaza might become, chose to leave.
But the Egyptian government would not play ball, making it clear it had no interest in taking back Gaza and wanted no role in governing its million or so Arabs. So the territory – with its infrastructure that included greenhouses for agricultural work – was handed over to the Palestinian Authority, dominated by the Fatah political party.
The following year, 2006, under pressure from the US, elections were held in Gaza, in which the Iranian-backed forces of Hamas beat Fatah convincingly, then solidified its grip on power by murdering Fatah officials in Gaza.
Scores of Palestinians were executed in the streets, thrown off tall buildings, shot in the back, and in some cases had their bodies dragged through the streets tied to the backs of motorbikes driven by exultant Hamas militants. From that day on, there has not been another election in Gaza.
Money, though, poured into the territory. For almost two decades taxpayers in Europe and North America contributed billions through direct aid and through international aid programmes. Without exception, it ended up in the hands of Hamas. Anything that came in, from the lowliest food truck to the largest suitcase of cash, went straight to them.
Former Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar (centre) holds the child of an Al-Qassam Brigades fighter who was killed in fighting with Israel in May 2021. Sinwar himself was killed by the IDF in October 2024
For years the Israelis warned the outside world that UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, through which much of the money passed, was part of Hamas’s network but they were ignored. It seemed that governments in the West didn’t care where the money went in Gaza, just so long as they kept sending it.
Even when the Israelis pointed out that UNRWA was teaching young Gazans not to aspire to a better life but instead to see killing the ‘Zionists’ as life’s ultimate goal, the Western taxpayers kept paying them money. And it kept coming even when the Israelis pointed out that food and every other provision was being diverted by Hamas for their own means.
When the world was told that the Israelis were somehow starving the booming population of Gaza, the Israelis knew the real reason – that those in charge in Gaza were not only pursuing an agenda of their own but also had their hands in the till.
By the start of the 2023 war, the international community had made every Hamas leader into a billionaire. Ismail Haniyeh, Moussa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Mashal were estimated to have a combined worth of some £8.5 billion. Haniyeh alone, the leader of the Hamas politburo, was worth more than £3 billion.
While claiming that their people were living in a poverty-stricken concentration camp, these leaders lived in luxury hotels and penthouses in Qatar.
Every dollar they stole was money that could have been used to actually improve the lives of Palestinians. They might even have actually created the Singapore on the Mediterranean that so many people hoped for when Gaza was handed to the Palestinians in 2005, instead of living the high life in Doha, buying weapons and building tunnels for terrorists.
Inside Gaza, where I was taken by the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, I visited those tunnels that Hamas had constructed during their 18 years in power.
When people think of a tunnel network, many imagine small scurry-holes. In fact, besides being longer than the entire London Underground, the network was also much more elaborate. In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas built more than 350 miles of tunnels, with around 6,000 entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilian houses, mosques, hospitals and other non-military buildings.
Writer Douglas Murray says spending time with Israeli troops has convinced him that Hamas is a ‘death cult’
Along with storing weapons in such places, this is a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which are meant to preclude an army hiding military infrastructure in civilian buildings. Doing such a thing obviously puts civilians at risk. But this was one of Hamas’s tools of war. Where most countries would seek to protect its civilians, Hamas had a stated aim of using them as human shields.
They knew that no country would be able to tolerate the build-up of rockets and other military infrastructure to be used against it, but they also knew that whenever Israel targeted a ‘civilian’ facility in which Hamas had put its infrastructure, it would be Israel that the world would condemn. Hamas had virtually a free rein to embed its military and terror infrastructure in every part of the Strip. And this was the situation the IDF faced when it advanced into Gaza after the October 7 atrocity to try to rescue hostages and root out Hamas.
While much of the world was blaming Israel, I spoke to an IDF officer whose job was to go from building to building in Gaza looking for weapons and tunnel entrances. An American by birth, Major ‘Y’ went to Israel immediately after October 7 to use his expertise.
What he saw shocked even him. Stories had already emerged in the international press about Hamas explosives being found smuggled inside children’s toys, but these were just the start.
By two months into the war his estimate was that every two to three civilian homes in Gaza contained AK-47s, grenades and rocket launchers or tunnel entrances.
From very early, he and his team had worked out where to search whenever they entered a civilian house. They no longer bothered with the main rooms, the kitchens or the parents’ bedroom.
They now went straight to the children’s bedrooms. That was where tunnel entrances and weapons were generally located, including under cots. Major ‘Y’ had recently found a rocket-propelled grenade under a crib. While back in Israel families built safe rooms to protect their children from rockets, these Gazan families actually used their families to protect their rockets.
I heard similar stories from many other soldiers, plus details of the books they found inside homes, indicating how radicalised the population had become.
Palestinians flooded the streets of Gaza by the tens of thousands on December 15, 2007, to show support for Hamas
Copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Arabic were common in civilian homes, as well as tracts like ‘How to kill Jews’.
It was the same in every United Nations school they went into. The major told me: ‘Every school and kindergarten we go into we find guns in the basement. ‘In each one we found more than ten AK-47s, machine guns, and grenades.’
And every mosque and place of worship. While Hamas was claiming their members were devout Muslims, they had no problem at all putting tunnel entrances and hiding large stores of weaponry inside Gaza’s mosques – again against every rule of war.
Whether schools, hospitals or mosques, Hamas’s cynical strategy turned out to work. If they could hide their armoury in civilian buildings, then whenever the IDF even searched such a building the terrorists could rely on the world turning on Israel for such a flagrant breach of etiquette.
I asked Major ‘Y’ why Israeli troops treated even people coming towards them with white flags with suspicion. He told me how recently a group of old men and women had emerged from a building waving a white flag.
Suddenly a terrorist came out from among them and started shooting at the soldiers. They knew that because of the civilians, the Israelis could not and would not shoot back. Situations like this happen every day, according to the major and numerous other soldiers I spoke to on the battlefield. Among the many laws of war that Hamas cynically ignores is that members of its terror army dress as civilians. They operate in civilian areas, out of civilian buildings, and dress in civilian clothing.
They do so in the knowledge that this makes it easier for their gunmen to operate and the certainty that if civilians are caught up in it, that will be a public relations advantage to Hamas.
The major told me of a recent incident when his unit spotted an old woman in a wheelchair alone on a street corner, ‘looking like my grandmother’. As they approached her they were suddenly fired on by a Hamas terrorist lying flat on the ground underneath her wheelchair. For Hamas, using an elderly, disabled woman as a human shield is normal operating procedure.
A boy points a toy gun as he balances on the head of his father as Hamas supporters shout slogans against Israeli military action in Gaza, during a demonstration in the West Bank city of Nablus Israel on July 31 2014
How do you fight an enemy that wants you to wound and kill people on its own side The question of how any army is meant to fight in such a situation is a terrible conundrum.
What the IDF were up against, this disregard for the lives of others, was shown by Yahya Sinwar, a Hamas enforcer who was imprisoned by the Israelis in 1989 for the murder of four Palestinians he had believed were informers.
In prison, his life was saved when a tumour was removed from his brain, ironically by a Jewish surgeon.
Sinwar was grateful enough to thank the doctor but he didn’t change his views. He was released in a prison exchange in 2011 – 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for just one Israeli – and returned to Gaza to plot against Israel.
He told the citizens of Gaza in 2018: ‘We’ll take down the border with Israel and tear out their hearts from their bodies.’
And on October 7, 2023, after years of planning and dreaming, he masterminded the attack which did just that. He called it the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ operation after the mosque in Jerusalem, which showed what his ultimate intention was.
When Israel hit back he made his way to relative safety in the south of the Strip through the tunnel network, most likely surrounded by what he would regard as the ‘best’ of the Israeli hostages, including the children and babies that he knew would be the ultimate ‘human shield’ for him against Israel.
Handwritten messages from him to his team – which were intercepted by the Wall Street Journal – revealed, as the Journal wrote, ‘a cold disregard for human life’. He described the deaths of civilians in Gaza as ‘necessary sacrifices’.
Family members visit the memorial site for those killed during the Nova music festival in the October 07 Hamas attacks
Yet, against such fanaticism, the Israelis continued to hamstring themselves. The war in Gaza was made more difficult not just by Hamas’s tactics, but by the tactics the Israelis used in response. The Israeli way of war was to drop leaflets, take over radio and television channels and send millions of text messages to warn residents when a building was going to be hit.
One special forces soldier whose job involved hostage rescue said that on a number of occasions he came across places where Israeli hostages had recently been held.
He knew they had been there because he found the T-shirts of people from the kibbutzes and saw cages in which they had been kept as well as handcuffs. He told me: ‘We always felt one step behind. Because we kept telling the Gazans beforehand when we were coming.’
They were also losing the battle for hearts and minds around the world as claims multiplied that the Israelis were committing genocide in Gaza – that old ‘concentration camp’ slur again. The condemnation grew, in part because the only casualty figures that were used came from the Gazan Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas government.
If the highest Hamas casualty figures that were lapped up by the international press were true, then by the end of the first year of the war, the casualty rate inside Gaza was some 42,000 people.
Hamas simultaneously claimed that such numbers consisted entirely of civilian casualties while at the same time posting about the ‘martyrs’ of their movement who had been killed in battle.
If the Hamas figures were true and the Israeli figures for Hamas operatives killed in Gaza are accurate, then at the very most this would mean a civilian-to-terrorist death toll of one-to-one.
That is a terrible figure, to be sure, but it would also be the lowest civilian death toll per enemy combatant in military history. Both the British and American armed forces operate on a rough estimate of one enemy combatant killed for every three to four civilian deaths. What helped the anti-Israeli lobby too were the so-called journalists covering the war as the propaganda wing of Hamas. Qatar, which helps fund and house Hamas, also funds and houses the media outlet Al Jazeera. Its journalists in Gaza turned out not just to be sympathetic to Hamas but actually part of the group.
Gaza-based Palestinian journalist Abdallah Aljamal, who was allegedly ‘imprisoning Israeli hostages in his own home’ while filing articles about the humanitarian suffering inside Gaza
One, Muhammad Washah, was presented as a stellar part of the press corps. The IDF says he was in charge of research and development for aerial weapons for Hamas. He would, it is alleged, present himself by day as a journalist but in the evenings go back to his job as a senior Hamas commander firing rockets at Israel.
When two Al Jazeera ‘journalists’ were killed in an air strike, this was immediately presented as an intolerable attack on the free press. Al Jazeera complained that the Israelis had no right to hit the vehicle they were travelling in. But it did not mention that these ‘journalists’ were in a vehicle with a Hamas drone operator targeting Israeli soldiers.
The most egregious examples of the world being duped in this way was when the IDF rescued four hostages. Among them was a young woman who had been at the Nova music festival when the terrorists struck on October 7. Footage of her being driven off on the back of a Hamas motorcycle, screaming in terror, became one of the formative images of that terrible day.
The IDF rescue team discovered that one of the people who had been holding the four of them was one Abdallah Aljamal, who had filed many articles about the humanitarian suffering inside Gaza, including to Al Jazeera. Yet he had failed to tell his readers that he was imprisoning Israeli hostages in his own home, where they were being tortured daily.
Yet details like this were lost all the time. The world seemed ready to believe every claim that presented Israel in the worst possible light. And if anyone disagreed – as did Major John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, when he argued that the IDF had implemented more precautions to prevent civilian deaths than any military in history, far beyond what international law requires – they were dismissed as mouthpieces of the Israelis.
It had been the same for years. Point out that Israel is a liberal democracy – a rarity in the Middle East – with all the benefits and complexities that that entails and you will be told that you are excusing ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and diverting attention from the plight of the Palestinians.
Notice that Israel is a pluralistic, multiracial and multicultural society and you will be accused of being an apologist for ‘apartheid’.
It is a game set up for one side to lose.
Adapted from On Democracies And Death Cults by Douglas Murray (HarperCollins, £25), to be published April 10.
© Douglas Murray 2025. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 12/4/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
