War in Gaza | What Do You Call People Who Fight on Their Own Land Against Foreign Soldiers?

Displaced Palestinian children line up to receive food in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip, on May 19, 2024.Credit: AFP

It's rare to hear by phone from two people in Gaza whose relative was killed in battle. He was a soldier in the Hamas army.

A: "We haven't talked for a long time." (I say this apologetically. There are so many people I want to know about, to find out whether they are "well," that I don't manage to talk to all of them every day. Moreover, contact with many of them has been lost over the last two weeks.)

Friend: "That's right. How are you? (That's a question I always respond to haltingly. It's hard when I am safe in a well-lit, warm house, with the friend sitting in a tent, half-destroyed house, or apartment with 18 relatives.)

Friend: "I'm in Cairo. I managed to get out two weeks ago, with my family. Just a few days before Rafah was invaded." (I suddenly remember his sense of humor. Once, in 1994 or 1995, his neighbor and I collected testimonies about Gaza's economic situation. We met him and others on the beach. "What are you doing?" we asked. "Waiting to turn 40," he answered. Permits to work in Israel were then given only to men 40 or older.)

Palestinian children gather empty US ammunition containers in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 16, 2024.Credit: AFP

A: "That's good to hear. Tell me about yourself. What's your situation?" (It's hard for me to directly ask, 'How are you?' so I look for words that are less committal or ones that are not anchored in customary phrasing." Friend: "My sister was killed two days ago."

A: "Oh, where?" (In such hellish conversations, people say they receive such news with dull emotions. But videos from Gaza, which most Israelis are unwilling to watch, show the opposite. The grief and longing with which fathers hold the bodies of their children, the cries to the heavens after they manage to extricate the body of a daughter from the ruins, the shocked, tear-streaked face of a bereaved mother, the pain with which a friend writes about losing a brother a week earlier.)

Friend: "In the Jabalya refugee camp, in an airstrike or shelling. She was outdoors. The next day, her son was killed. The day after that, her second son was killed as well."

A: "Both sons? Were they inside the house? Or are they part of the resistance?"

Children stand near a crater caused by Israeli bombardment in a street in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on May 18, 2024.Credit: AFP

Friend: "In the resistance."

A: "Were they hit by a missile or in battle, in an exchange of fire?"

Friend: "I think they died in battle."

A: "That's something different. That was their choice. To fight."

Friend: "That's true."

It's rare to hear by phone from people inside the Gaza Strip after a relative of theirs is killed in battle, meaning that he was fighting for Hamas. The speed at which the friend in Cairo knew that his sister's sons were killed indicates that many families know relatively quickly about armed sons who are killed, alongside other families who live with uncertainty for a long time, not knowing if their sons are alive or not. And if he was killed, whether he was buried, or whether his corpse is rotting somewhere. Perhaps people are hesitant to share such reports on the phone, from inside Gaza, for fear that eavesdroppers from Israeli army intelligence and the Shin Bet will mark the speaker as a supposedly legitimate target for a missile or drone or arrest and abuse.

Displaced Palestinian children stand amid the rubble of a destroyed building in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 18, 2024.Credit: AFP

In Israel, the press reports on "terrorists" who were killed. But this is not the correct definition for those who are fighting within their territory, in Gaza, against an occupying army and the soldiers of a foreign army. "Terrorist" is a generic, condescending term, deliberately devoid of any historical, social and political context, and it fogs our ability to understand and analyze the situation. Another detail in the failed, arrogant conceptions that led to October 7. For an armed militant whose victims are the elderly, women, children, and babies – the definition "murderer" is suitable. One who stands opposite soldiers of a powerful army equipped with powerful technology – is a fighter.

Seven and a half months after October 7, it appears that Hamas still has a large reservoir of young armed men ready and willing to fight, and who have been trained to make things difficult for the invading Israeli army. Another fact that the captains of war did not anticipate when they embarked on the campaign for total victory. It's very easy to say that these young militants have been brainwashed, that they hate Jews, and that they want to see Israel eliminated. But it's harder and more accurate to say that they have courage and that they are ready to die because the reasons to live – and not just to merely survive – have steadily diminished in Gaza, which Israel cut off from the rest of the world long before the war.

Does the wholesale killing of their families – in Israeli bombings that, with the approval of IDF legal advisers, kill 20 or 30 people including women, children, and elderly to kill one "legitimate" target – deter other young people? How many of them are motivated by it to join the Hamas army? The failure of the total victory doctrine does not derive from Benjamin Netanyahu's personal motivations to endlessly continue this cruel war. It comes from most Israelis' refusal to grasp that the oppressed Palestinian people is no longer willing or able to go along with its oppression. And that includes many opponents of the war and of Hamas.