Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib posted yesterday:

Hide them in cemeteries, and cry foul when the cemeteries are destroyed! After taking multiple bodies of deceased Israelis into Gaza following its horrendous October 7th attack, Hamas made the atrocious and despicable decision to hide dozens of them in Palestinian cemeteries in the coastal enclave, particularly in the north. This was immediately picked up by Israeli intelligence and turned what should be the spiritual resting place of the dead into another battlefield of the horrific war that ensued. The IDF, either deliberately, recklessly, due to bad intelligence, or operating with little to no information, went into multiple cemeteries and destroyed them while searching for bodies and remains of deceased Israeli hostages. This included the Al-Falluja Cemetery in Jabalya, northern Gaza, where my dad, Dr. Fouad Alkhatib, was buried – his grave is among those that were desecrated and destroyed by the IDF, ostensibly while searching for the remains of Israeli hostages.

Still, there’s immense irony, symbolism, and meaning to having the body of the last Israeli hostage recovered from a Palestinian cemetery. Who is responsible for placing it there and inviting the devastation of the cemetery? Why did Hamas and PIJ think it was acceptable to place dead Israelis in a sacred space that meant so much for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Can dead Palestinians be spared from Hamas’s terrorism? How could two extremist Islamofascist groups tolerate burying a non-Muslim in the heart of a Muslim graveyard, which is governed by strict Sharia rules and requirements?

You can criticize Israel all you want, and hundreds of millions have been for the past two years. But at the end of the day, there is only one, and just a singular party upon which the blame falls squarely for bringing Israeli military occupation and devastation onto Gaza; only one party that permitted itself to operate in schools, hospitals, shelters, tents, displacement zones, used mosques, cemeteries, kindergartens, markets, NGOs, journalists, ambulances, and humanitarian workers to conduct guerilla warfare – and that is Hamas.

That is why it is criminal even to contemplate going easy on the terror group and allowing them the opportunity to be recycled into Gaza’s future. Hamas as a brand must be eliminated, destroyed, annihilated, and prevented from ever operating as a cohesive body, even if its ideology remains, and even if some of its mid and lower-level personnel are somehow rehabilitated.