Hamas admits it has no idea how many hostages it has -- because plenty are held by actual criminals
Amid all of Hamas's bluster and gun-waving as a bigshot military organization taking on the Israeli war machine, negotiations for its hostages have revealed that actually, Hamas isn't quite sure how many hostages it's holding, owing to the fact that actual criminals are holding some of them.
What? What is Israel dealing with here?
According to Axios:
[Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya ] Sinwar has agreed in principle to increase the number of women and children who will be released under the two-phase deal to more than the 50 he originally agreed to, according to two of the sources.
- But Sinwar is demanding that Israel halt its aerial surveillance of Gaza for six hours per day during the pause so that Hamas operatives will be able to locate hostages without being spied on by Israel, the sources said.
- Sinwar is also demanding that Israel release all Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons, two of the sources said. There are roughly 150 Palestinian women and minors held by Israel for taking part in attacks against Israelis.
Between the lines: Hamas is not holding all of the Israeli and international hostages taken on Oct. 7. Some are believed to be held by other militant or criminal groups.
How the hell these hostages got into the hands of scummy criminal groups is unknown, but two likely scenarios come to mind:
Hamas was in league with the criminals when it launched its October 7 attack on Israel and its foot soldiers were actual organized crime foot soldiers.
...or...
Hamas's vaunted "fighters" are so corrupt they sold the hostages to the criminals for a handsome price and too bad about their value to the Hamas terrorists as hostages.
Either scenario paints a picture of a vile and sleazy criminally linked organization that launched the attacks.
Not that we didn't already know, based on what they did and left behind. But it would explain how they could do such heinous deeds such as rape women, behead ten year olds, bake a baby in an oven, and burn women and children tied together alive in their homes, and then go home and dance around waving their guns in a vile "victory" dance and eat dinner afterward.
Only truly evil criminals can do that, experienced ones, psychopaths. Cartel members with dead eyes can do that and carry on the next day. A normal person, even a deluded fanatic, probably couldn't.
Who, for example, were these Captain Phillips extras who dragged this raped woman out of this car? How'd they get into Gaza?
Israeli woman who was seen in a viral video on Oct 7th after being brutally raped and dragged out of the back of a car in Gaza has been identified.
— Meghna Naidu (@AsJSpeak) November 8, 2023
Naama Levy, 19, a student of chemistry has been identified as the woman in the video. HAMAS is ISIS
#NaamaLevy pic.twitter.com/II9A0ijmRy
Which again, raises questions as to what Israel is dealing with. One almost wonders if pirates, or organized crime, actually was driving the October 7 attack, given the preoccupation with stealing aid money and living it up in exile that the Hamas leadership has. That activity doesn't do much about the crime scene that plagues Gaza and the rest of Palestine.
The other question is raises is what the criminal groups are going to do with the hostages -- expect to get ransom, or send them onto their criminal operations abroad in human-trafficking and slavery conditions. Insight Crime reports that there are Israeli gangs operating whorehouses and drug consumption dens in Colombia, which may or may not include Palestinian criminals. Are the hostages going to end up in nightmarish places like that?
I found a useful piece in LeMonde that with difficulty I was able to access through archive.vn, an extraordinary article that describes the growth of organized crime in the Palestinian territories, leading one to wonder if its growth may have set the stage for the October 7 attack.
In Israel's Palestinian communities, increasingly deadly violence accompanies the development of rising aggressive criminality, with family disputes, quarrels between landlords, unpaid loans, arms and drug trafficking and extortion. One hundred and fifty-seven Israeli Arabs have been killed in such settlements since the beginning of the year, compared with 116 in the 12 months to 2022, according to Abraham Initiatives, an NGO that campaigns for equality between Jewish and Arab citizens. According to a Knesset report, 70% of those killed in Israel between 2018 and 2022 were Palestinians, even though this community makes up only 20% of the country's population.
So Palestine, including Gaza, was a crime pit, a narcostate, a place full of criminals like parts of the northern Mexico or the Colombian coast even before the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
"The police aren't doing their job, but they're not the only ones. We need to offer more opportunities, more help, more housing," said Samir Sobhi Mohammed, mayor of Umm al-Fahm, the country's third-largest Arab city with a population of 60,000. "Violence has always been present in our communities. It was due to conflicts between families, over property, marriages or divorces. What's new is crime, which has risen sharply in recent years. Here, it's based on the black market. Banks charge interest rates that are too high – when they lend. People turn to the mafias, who raise the rates over time. There comes a time when debtors can no longer repay. And the violence begins. Threats, murders."
And Hamas, which purports to be the lawfully elected ruling party of Gaza via elections, let this stuff go on right under everyone's noses. Le Monde pointed out that illegal guns certainly make a lot of crime possible:
Their violence is fueled by the number of illegal weapons circulating in the country, which has risen from 267,000 in 2017 to 400,000 in 2020, according to a Knesset report – a huge arsenal.
Bloomberg Law points out that cryptocurrency makes their purchase possible:
In February 2019,
Binance Holdings Ltd. ’s then-Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim acknowledged that the cryptocurrency exchange was being used to funnel money to Hamas, explaining to a colleague that terrorists normally sent “small sums.”Hamas could “barely buy an AK47 with 600 bucks,” the colleague responded in a chat message, according to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s March lawsuit against the world’s largest crypto exchange.
That apparently nonchalant attitude caught up with Binance and its chief executive officer,
Changpeng Zhao , on Tuesday. In announcing $4.3 billion in fines against the company and a guilty plea by Zhao for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering laws, the US government put Hamas and other terrorist organizations front and center. The broad settlement also resolves the CFTC suit.
The Le Monde article lays down blame onto Israel for not putting out more police and it's possible there is blame there, too. But Hamas runs the place and hasn't made any complaints -- if anything, they have collaborated with the criminals to launch their terrorist attack. And things are so out of control now they don't even know where the hostages are.
That's a failed state, a failed government that lets drug dealers, human smugglers, and other evil groups run wild. Now they've got hostages and Hamas has no idea where they are.
The U.S. took Panamaian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega out for less.
The reality of criminals running the place raises the case for the elimination of Hamas, which is nothing more than a criminal adjunct of these organized crime groups.
Israel has got to do it.
Image: Twitter screen shot