‘I judge a man by one thing’, said the early 20th-century English Liberal MP Isaac Foot: ‘Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?’ He was referring to the Battle of Marston Moor of 1644, during the English Civil War, in which the Parliamentarian side under the command of the radical Lord Fairfax roundly defeated the Royalist side. It was the military victory that propelled these isles towards democracy. I’m starting to feel similarly about the Battle of Gaza City – that you can judge a person by which side they’re taking in this clash between the army of Israel and the neo-fascists of Hamas.
As the 98th and 162nd divisions of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) roll into Gaza City to confront the 3,000 armed anti-Semites of Hamas, a burning question confronts us all: which side are we on? You can say ‘I just want the war to stop’ until you’re blue in the face. You can carry a handbag saying ‘Cease Fire!’ like one of the turbo-smug celebs at the Emmys did. You can call the IDF ‘reckless and appalling’, as did Britain’s new foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, in an act of snivelling moral perfidy that heaps shame on our nation. None of it will make a blind bit of difference. This battle is as unstoppable as the sunrise tomorrow. Neither the IDF nor Hamas is backing down. So only one question remains: whose victory do you wish for?
The Battle of Gaza City is already one of the most maligned clashes of modern times. Much of the media coverage leaves one with the wholly post-truth impression that the IDF is raiding Gaza City for sport. Or for land. Or in further, feverish pursuit of its curiously unsuccessful ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian people. The other side in the battle – Hamas’s army of apocalyptic Jew-haters – has been virtually invisibilised. We rarely hear of them. It’s as bizarre as if newspapers had reported on the Battle of Raqqa without mentioning ISIS, or the Battle of Berlin without ever saying the word ‘Nazi’.
Anyone who writes, tweets or talks about the Battle of Gaza City without referencing the numerous cells of tooled-up guerrilla fighters lying in wait for the soldiers of the Jewish State is flat-out engaging in misinformation. It’s a kind of wartime censorship to erase one side in a battle – worse, the side that started the war in the first place with its pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. The truth about the Battle of Gaza City is that on one side there are tens of thousands of soldiers from two divisions of the IDF, and on the other an estimated 3,000 Hamas gunmen and their Islamist allies under the command of Izz El-Din al-Haddad.
Haddad is called ‘the last Hamas commander’. He’s believed to have been commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, since May 2025, following the IDF’s assassination of Yahya Sinwar and then his brother, Mohammed. Earlier this month, the Saudis reported that Haddad had sent an internal communique to Hamas cells in Gaza City telling them to prepare for a ‘fierce battle that could last for months’. All available forces will be mobilised to inflict ‘severe blows’ on the IDF, he said. He is coordinating with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, too. As a result of his military conspiring, Gaza City is overrun with ‘small cells of well-prepared guerrilla fighters’, refortified with ‘more explosives, more anti-tank missiles and more sniper fire’.
If you’re reading a media report about Gaza City and it doesn’t mention any of this, stop reading. You’re being fed half-truths. And when you hear about scores of people dying in Gaza City – a horrendous inevitability of war – remember that some of them will be these fanatics that Haddad has rallied to deliver ‘severe blows’ against the Jewish nation. So many canards and one-sided claims swirl through the media coverage of the war in Gaza that it falls to serious-thinking citizens to fill in the gaps. To remember that Hamas exists, that it continues to fight the IDF, and that its leaders dream of the further fascistic slaughter of Jews – ‘We will do this again and again’, as they’ve said of 7 October.
What the Israelophobes of the West falsely call ‘genocide’ is war. The thinness of their ‘genocide’ accusation, the sheer defamatory cynicism of it, was summed up in that report published this week by a UN commission of inquiry. Israel is committing genocide, it said. Its proof? That ‘Israeli security forces were aware that their military operations since 7 October 2023 would cause the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza’. They ‘knew of the high numbers of casualties’, but they did not ‘intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed’. Am I going mad or is that just war? By this infantile definition – basically, your military action caused casualties – every war in history has been a genocide. Remember this historical illiteracy and moral treachery with which the genocide lie is weaponised against the Jewish State when you hear that the Battle of Gaza City is ‘genocidal’ too, which you will.
To be clear, the Battle of Gaza City does represent a new and dangerous turn in the Israel-Hamas War. As Haaretz says, so far in 2025 the IDF has ‘operated in areas with few civilians’, focussing on ‘destroying Hamas’s tunnels and other terror infrastructure’. Its targets had mostly been ‘mapped before the troops entered’. Gaza City is a more daunting prospect. Hamas militants have decamped there in their thousands. They’ve rebuilt their tunnels. Not all civilians have evacuated. And of course there are the Israeli hostages. Chillingly, it is reported that Hamas is starting to move some hostages above ground, in an effort to ‘hinder [the] IDF offensive’. Using Jews as human shields against the Jewish army – a new low in savagery for this army of anti-Semites.
And yet the battle is happening. It’s underway. And sides must be taken. Here’s the thing: some people have taken a side without realising it. For if you tell only one side in an existential war to cease fire, then you’re objectively aligning with the other side. Imagine two men are having a duel and you tell just one of them to put away his gun. That isn’t peacenik behaviour – it’s an implicit statement that one man’s life is worth less than the other’s. That’s what I hear when the opinion-forming classes squawk ‘Stop Israel’ – that they’ve decided, however witlessly, that the security of the Jewish nation is of less moral worth than the deranged ambitions of those Hamas cells in Gaza City. That’s what was so unforgivable about Yvette Cooper’s slamming of Israel’s ‘reckless and appalling’ incursion into Gaza City – she will have inadvertently boosted Hamas and confirmed it in its sick belief that the IDF is a marauding gang deserving of punishment.
The Battle of Gaza City will be bloody and awful. Palestinians will suffer and young Israeli soldiers will die. Yet that should not detract from the moral truth that this is a battle between the army of a democratic nation and a terrorist militia that loathes the infidel West as much as it does the Jews. Sitting this clash out might be a luxury the lost souls of our cushioned, faux-virtuous elites can afford. But it’s too risky for the rest of us. So what do you want: the victory of the Jewish nation or the victory of radical Islamists who slit the throats of Jews? A win for our ally in Enlightenment or a win for the regressive forces of violent medieval intolerance? Quit your performative angst and pick a side.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The Battle of Gaza City is already one of the most maligned clashes of modern times. Much of the media coverage leaves one with the wholly post-truth impression that the IDF is raiding Gaza City for sport. Or for land. Or in further, feverish pursuit of its curiously unsuccessful ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian people. The other side in the battle – Hamas’s army of apocalyptic Jew-haters – has been virtually invisibilised. We rarely hear of them. It’s as bizarre as if newspapers had reported on the Battle of Raqqa without mentioning ISIS, or the Battle of Berlin without ever saying the word ‘Nazi’.
Anyone who writes, tweets or talks about the Battle of Gaza City without referencing the numerous cells of tooled-up guerrilla fighters lying in wait for the soldiers of the Jewish State is flat-out engaging in misinformation. It’s a kind of wartime censorship to erase one side in a battle – worse, the side that started the war in the first place with its pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. The truth about the Battle of Gaza City is that on one side there are tens of thousands of soldiers from two divisions of the IDF, and on the other an estimated 3,000 Hamas gunmen and their Islamist allies under the command of Izz El-Din al-Haddad.
Haddad is called ‘the last Hamas commander’. He’s believed to have been commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, since May 2025, following the IDF’s assassination of Yahya Sinwar and then his brother, Mohammed. Earlier this month, the Saudis reported that Haddad had sent an internal communique to Hamas cells in Gaza City telling them to prepare for a ‘fierce battle that could last for months’. All available forces will be mobilised to inflict ‘severe blows’ on the IDF, he said. He is coordinating with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, too. As a result of his military conspiring, Gaza City is overrun with ‘small cells of well-prepared guerrilla fighters’, refortified with ‘more explosives, more anti-tank missiles and more sniper fire’.
If you’re reading a media report about Gaza City and it doesn’t mention any of this, stop reading. You’re being fed half-truths. And when you hear about scores of people dying in Gaza City – a horrendous inevitability of war – remember that some of them will be these fanatics that Haddad has rallied to deliver ‘severe blows’ against the Jewish nation. So many canards and one-sided claims swirl through the media coverage of the war in Gaza that it falls to serious-thinking citizens to fill in the gaps. To remember that Hamas exists, that it continues to fight the IDF, and that its leaders dream of the further fascistic slaughter of Jews – ‘We will do this again and again’, as they’ve said of 7 October.
What the Israelophobes of the West falsely call ‘genocide’ is war. The thinness of their ‘genocide’ accusation, the sheer defamatory cynicism of it, was summed up in that report published this week by a UN commission of inquiry. Israel is committing genocide, it said. Its proof? That ‘Israeli security forces were aware that their military operations since 7 October 2023 would cause the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza’. They ‘knew of the high numbers of casualties’, but they did not ‘intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed’. Am I going mad or is that just war? By this infantile definition – basically, your military action caused casualties – every war in history has been a genocide. Remember this historical illiteracy and moral treachery with which the genocide lie is weaponised against the Jewish State when you hear that the Battle of Gaza City is ‘genocidal’ too, which you will.
To be clear, the Battle of Gaza City does represent a new and dangerous turn in the Israel-Hamas War. As Haaretz says, so far in 2025 the IDF has ‘operated in areas with few civilians’, focussing on ‘destroying Hamas’s tunnels and other terror infrastructure’. Its targets had mostly been ‘mapped before the troops entered’. Gaza City is a more daunting prospect. Hamas militants have decamped there in their thousands. They’ve rebuilt their tunnels. Not all civilians have evacuated. And of course there are the Israeli hostages. Chillingly, it is reported that Hamas is starting to move some hostages above ground, in an effort to ‘hinder [the] IDF offensive’. Using Jews as human shields against the Jewish army – a new low in savagery for this army of anti-Semites.
And yet the battle is happening. It’s underway. And sides must be taken. Here’s the thing: some people have taken a side without realising it. For if you tell only one side in an existential war to cease fire, then you’re objectively aligning with the other side. Imagine two men are having a duel and you tell just one of them to put away his gun. That isn’t peacenik behaviour – it’s an implicit statement that one man’s life is worth less than the other’s. That’s what I hear when the opinion-forming classes squawk ‘Stop Israel’ – that they’ve decided, however witlessly, that the security of the Jewish nation is of less moral worth than the deranged ambitions of those Hamas cells in Gaza City. That’s what was so unforgivable about Yvette Cooper’s slamming of Israel’s ‘reckless and appalling’ incursion into Gaza City – she will have inadvertently boosted Hamas and confirmed it in its sick belief that the IDF is a marauding gang deserving of punishment.
The Battle of Gaza City will be bloody and awful. Palestinians will suffer and young Israeli soldiers will die. Yet that should not detract from the moral truth that this is a battle between the army of a democratic nation and a terrorist militia that loathes the infidel West as much as it does the Jews. Sitting this clash out might be a luxury the lost souls of our cushioned, faux-virtuous elites can afford. But it’s too risky for the rest of us. So what do you want: the victory of the Jewish nation or the victory of radical Islamists who slit the throats of Jews? A win for our ally in Enlightenment or a win for the regressive forces of violent medieval intolerance? Quit your performative angst and pick a side.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
17 comments:
I choose Israel 🇮🇱
Israel’s actions in Gaza have matched four of the five ways of committing genocide listed in the foundational and binding 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as well as the 1998 Rome Statute:
There is nothing to discuss about facts: Water is wet, blood is red, and Israel is committing genocide. Whoever is still denying this crime or trying to smear those reporting it as “Hamas proxies” and “antisemites” – as Israel is, as expected – is only delivering more evidence of their limitless dishonesty. As Chris Sidoti, member of the UN Commission, noted at the press conference presenting its report, “no one takes” such Israeli propaganda “seriously” anymore. At least, no one with a working brain and a decent conscience. If nothing is done, we all deserve to live in a world where genocide is the norm, and the way of Palestine will be the way of the world.
https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/opinion/its-not-enough-to-recognize-israels-genocide-in-gaza/
Pick sides? And you argue for the side that’s killing men women children everyday, starving them??
Yet, I bet these same mental gymnasts think they would hide Ann Frank 🤔
It's a bit rich Anon 9.18 talking about having a working brain. A basic grasp of the English language would make any person with a working brain understand the real meaning of genocide. And I don't mean a self-serving definition that has been dreamed up by HAMAS and embraced by the handwringers at the United Nations in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. Embraced also by the brain-dead liberal effete of the West, a group that does not have the remotest idea of either the history of the Middle East or the motives of the combatants. Yes, war is hell. But it's preferable to extinction. Ask any Jew. And O'Neill makes that case blindingly clear, week after week after week.
When will Brendan O'Neill stop shilling for the murderous Israelis? He's been writing the same article every few days for the last two years, and he just looks ridiculous at this point.
It is about "picking sides" but its about doing what anyone with a conscience would do, and picking the side who isn't bombing Gaza into rubble and indiscriminately killing Gazans, making them flee for their lives never to return, or brutalising the ones who remain.
The clear subtext (sometimes explicit) in all pro-Israel apologism is "Jews can do what they like because non-Jews have always given them a hard time." Maybe the Jewish attitudes behind what we have seen from the Israelis for the last 2 years is the reason why non-Jews and Jews don't get along.
A largely forgotten fact.
On Oct 7th 2023, Hamas terrorists carried out genocidal barbarity on a peaceful Israeli music festival. Despicable acts of inhumanity was unleashed, killing 1200 peaceful souls and dragging 240 prisoners away for the merriment of the Palestinians to torment. And now these degenerates expect quarter from the Israeli army? Don’t make me laugh.
I agree Jones Boy. 3,000 Israeli soldiers have been killed and wounded in the fighting in Gaza so far. Hamas have booby trapped many buildings and use the population as human shields. The Hamas fighters are jihadists and no doubt many have fought in places like Syria.
I chose Israel. It’s a no-brainer.
I'm with the jews.
Cannot people of the west see this conflict is but one of many attacks on the democracies, this one being brutal and real.
The others being waged using more subtle means but equally devastating to our very existence as free and open societies.
630,000 plus Palestinians killed/genocided in the open air prison called Gaza, of which 340,000 were infants under the age of 5.
I choose Israel, don't stop till you get enough.
Clear Gaza of Human's, so there is no threats to Israel.
The UN and Aljazera are certainly not credible or reliable sources of information.
Staged news items are as relentless as they are obvious. Any fool, knows if one lie is told, all accounts of figures and reported atrocities are suspect.
Remember the strategy of Hammas is as much a propaganda war trying to invoke the west into believing their status as the victim, and yet, it was Hammas who committed such atrocities knowing exactly what the response would be.
This fanatical anti human terror organization have zero reguard for anyone's life, if it stands in the way of their goals, even their own.
anon @12.28... I think your numbers are off.
I think the numbers are too conservative myself, but the 630,000 total of which 380,000 are infants come from Ms Albanese, the UN special rapporteur here:
Francescą Albanese Drops a SHOCKING REVELATION That Will Shake the World to the Core!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SC0OcoROLs&list=TLPQMTYwOTIwMjX-fIWSPEjbEg&index=4
Everyone with a desire to get a proper perspective on this bloody situation should listen to the son of Hamas co founder His name is Mosab Hassa Yousef, and he features on many sites. He sides with Israel and is very outspoken about the sheer barbaric nature of Hamas and blames the humanitarian crisis entirely on Hamas who have no concern at all for Gazan's suffering. and create it for propaganda purposes to win over the gullible West . He describes Hamas as kamikaze suicidals , looking forward to the virgins made available to them after death.
After listening to him speak , the only humane choice , for anyone would be Israel.
The propaganda the Western media are absorbing and believing and promoting is so self destructive to traditional civilized Western Values.
I'm afraid the comment of Anon 12.28 is a sad example of the nonsense being spouted by the river-to-the-sea mob. On 4 September, PBS News reported the Gaza Health Ministry as saying "64,231 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war". Wikipedia reports the slightly higher figure of 65,643 as at 10 September. Yet Anon 12.28 hysterically proclaims "630,000 plus Palestinians killed/genocided". Isn't this just typical of how careless these people are with the facts (to say nothing of the grammar). But even the Health Ministry's figure is stretching credulity since it is, after all, HAMAS' propaganda arm and has everything to gain from exaggerating the body count. And of course they always pretend the dead are innocent bystanders by not revealing how many HAMAS operatives and fellow-travellers are included in their totals. While that metric varies depending on your source it is likely to be in excess of 10,000. So civilian deaths are bound to be rather less than the the 65,000 asserted by HAMAS and obviously nowhere near 630,000. And I won't even bothering fact-checking Anon 12.28's preposterous alleged infant death toll.
I think the use of grammar in this case is a sign of the level of intelligence.
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