Hamas and other Palestinian militants deliberately target Israeli civilians.

Hamas has consistently stated that its struggle is against Israeli occupation and military forces, stressing that avoiding harm to civilians is "a religious and moral commitment." The logic of settler colonialism is fundamentally different: Palestinians are treated as a demographic threat to be displaced, contained, or eliminated, whether armed or unarmed.

Palestinian armed groups rely largely on crude, locally manufactured rockets and improvised weapons. Israel, by contrast, has the fifteenth most powerful military in the world, equipped with precision-guided weapons, and sophisticated intelligence capabilities, all backed by the world's most powerful states. Yet it systematically employs unguided bombs, disproportionate force, and widespread destruction, including by bombing hospitals, schools, and refugee camps in one of the most densely populated places on earth.

This claim seeks to erase the colonial context and equate the colonized with the colonizer. Palestinian armed resistance emerged in response to settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid; conditions against which international law recognizes the right of peoples to struggle for self-determination, including by armed struggle. Israel, by contrast, is an occupying power whose military occupation as a whole has been recognized as unlawful by the International Court of Justice. To equate the actions of the colonized and the colonizer fails legal standards and moral common sense.

Claims that Palestinian armed groups deliberately target civilians are difficult to reconcile with the treatment of prisoners documented during numerous prisoner exchanges. During Israel's genocide in Gaza, many released Israeli captives described receiving food, medical care, and humane treatment while in Hamas captivity. By contrast, Israel has turned its already notorious prison system into a site of systematic torture, rape, sexual violence, and deaths in custody, as documented by UN bodies and human rights organizations.

Israel's own military doctrine further undermines this myth. For decades, the Hannibal Directive accepted the risk of killing its own soldiers and civilians to prevent their capture. Multiple investigations indicate that Israeli fire killed its own citizens on October 7.

The historical record already shows that the systematic targeting of civilians points overwhelmingly in one direction. From the 1947-1948 Nakba massacres, which killed 15,000 Palestinians, to Qibya in 1953, Kafr Qasim in 1956, Jenin in 2002, repeated assaults on Gaza, and now genocide, which has killed more than 75,00000522-4/fulltext) Palestinians, including over 21,000 children, the deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians is an integral component of Israel's broader settler-colonial project.

Although Hamas is a resistance movement and Israel is the occupying colonial power, their responses to international accountability are telling. Hamas has publicly stated that it would cooperate with independent investigations into alleged violations of international law, including by the International Criminal Court. Israel, by contrast, has rejected the Court's jurisdiction, obstructed investigations, and sanctioned or attacked international accountability mechanisms and their officials.