I recall what the famous poet Abu Firas Al-Hamdani said: “And my companions said fleeing or escaping. I said: They are two things, the sweetest of which is bitter.”

This is exactly the condition of those who follow the bloody scenes in the Gaza Strip. The number of martyrs in the Gaza massacres exceeded 21000, most of them women and children. The door is still open for killing and destruction if a final agreement on the truce is not reached, which seems a very difficult possibility because the Israeli war machine limits the war to two goals: eliminating the Hamas movement, and liberating all Israeli hostages, especially “dual nationals.”

The people of Gaza must realize that any truce is not for the sake of safeguarding their lives and blood, as much as it is to allow Hamas to release the hostages it has been holding since the day of its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. As soon as the truce ends, the roar of planes and the sound of tanks and shells will return, and this leads to a legitimate question: Why did Hamas perpetrate what it did when it knew with certainty that the people of Gaza, who are certainly not all “Brotherhood,” will be the ones who will pay the price for the actions of the group, its leaders, and its associate Abu Obaida?

Hamas has learned nothing from the lessons of the past 20 years. Rather, it continued to sell illusions of victory among the Gazans without meeting the slightest conditions. It is crystal clear that the October 7 attack plan was prepared with the involvement of regional parties that proved to the public that they were capable of standing up to the world, represented by the United States and its European allies to the point that the spokesman of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Obaida, launched the “Unity of the Squares” slander, which is an evil plan to ignite the entire region.

The “Unity of the Squares” means that there is great coordination between the forces of the so-called “Axis of Islamic Resistance” to open several fronts against the United States and Israel on the border between Lebanon and Israel, targeting American forces in their bases in Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf, and throwing others into a war in which they have no choice but to do so. Did Hamas succeed in achieving any goal in its attack on Israel other than kidnapping women, children and the elderly? Did it succeed in igniting the fronts to achieve the slogan of the “Unity of the Squares”? Didn't Hamas realize that its attack on Israel would open a “Pandora’s Box” of evil on innocent civilians, amid an ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip for 17 years?

The claims of “the Unity of the Squares” collapsed from the first day of their announcement. The “greatest ally” of the “Axis of Resistance” has emerged and has been reluctant from day one to join the war. After the United States sent its two aircraft carriers and its nuclear submarine to the Mediterranean, this “greatest ally” realized that the balance of power did not allow it to confront, except through skirmishes with its proxy militias. This is because this country knows that any expansion of the fronts (the Unity of the Squares) will lead to striking it in depth and cause harm to it, as well as to its clients and agents in the region.

This is the problem with the “politicized” Islamic movements. They have been behaving in these reckless ways for more than 50 years. And every time they were besieged by destruction and devastation, their combat capabilities diminished. Eventually, they turned out to be without real capabilities, except for the words they sells to the mob, such as “Unity of the Squares,” “liberating Palestine from the sea to the river,” and “throwing Israel into the sea of Gaza.”

The extremist “Islamists” did it with the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and they did not succeed in derailing the peace between Egypt and Israel. They did it 30 years ago in Sudan when the “Brotherhood” regime used Sudan’s resources to supply Hamas with weapons by smuggling them through mountains along the Red Sea coast and the Sinai Peninsula.

This issue ended with Israeli raids in the heart of Khartoum and Port Sudan. They did this in Yemen by empowering the “militia” that they installed in Sana’a, and this militia impoverished Yemen and starved its people. They did it in Tunisia, and their end was the overthrow of the regime and the arrest of its ideologue, Rashid Ghannouchi.

It is certain that those who have not learned a lesson over the decades will not achieve their false slogans based on exploiting religion for political purposes. Rather, they did not achieve their greatest goal, which is to unite extremist religious movements -- despite their well-known sectarian contradictions -- to “Islamize” the world by force.

Hamas began its path full of failures with the wrong choice: a coup against the Palestinian Authority and the division of the Palestinian home. The end of this dream was the destruction of Gaza, and the martyrdom of more than 21,000 of its men, women, and children. When the guns fall silent, and the language of blood and the smell of gunpowder stop, the people of Gaza will wake up to a completely new reality that what was before October 7 is not the same as after it! And the remaining Hamas will have no choice but to play the role of a troublemaker capable of spoiling things, and nothing else other than showing 'hamasat' or enthusiasm leading to loss and defeat.

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