Trudeau Liberals buying Hamas ‘lies’ on Gaza: John Spencer

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John Spencer, the world’s foremost expert on urban warfare, has choice words for the Trudeau government: “Do your homework.”

At a lecture at a Toronto synagogue late last week, he said that the federal Liberals, “believe lies” coming from Hamas, and “base their policies on them,” including withholding weapons from Israel needed to fight the terror group. (Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly announced on September 10 that Canada suspended about 30 permits for arms shipments.)

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A 25-year veteran of the U.S. Army, Spencer has been on fact-finding missions in Gaza three times since last December, where he was embedded with the Israel Defense Forces.

He claimed that “you have national leaders just repeating the talking points of Hamas,” including their casualty numbers, and the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing in Gaza City on Oct. 17, 2023, that turned out to be an errant rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Contrary to the reports coming from Hamas – believed by NGOs and many world leaders – Israel is not exercising disproportionate or excessive force, and takes “every step possible” to avoid civilian casualties, he said.

Their enemy is doing the reverse: “That’s called human sacrifice, not human shields, when Hamas wants its entire population getting in the way of battle.”

When asked by moderator Amir Epstein, director of Tafsik, whether there was a genocide in Gaza, Spencer’s simple answer: no.

The International Court of Justice, which called on Israel to “take all measures” to prevent a genocide of the Palestinians, “did not make a ruling to tell Israel, in the meantime, stop the operation,” Spencer said. The UN’s definition of genocide, he continued, includes a list of specific criteria – including intent to systematically erase a culture, identity, nationality and people – which Israel is not guilty of. This is clear, to him, everywhere from the aid flowing in, “a flood of vaccinations,” and Israel “doing everything it can to avoid innocent casualties,” he said.

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The Associated Press has reported that Israel’s offensive following the Oct. 7 attack has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. The war has caused widespread destruction, forced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to flee their homes, AP reports.

South Africa last year accused Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, of violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Israel has strongly rejected the claim and has argued that the war in Gaza is a legitimate defence against Hamas for the attack that killed around 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.

Spencer served two tours in Iraq, advised four-star generals and Pentagon officials, and serves as a colonel in the California State Guard as director of urban warfare training. He is also chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

It is his belief that “international pressure had caused Israel to slow down,” the counteroffensive, similar to past campaigns in Gaza, where the Jewish State was “not allowed to win wars.”

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But once Hamas is defeated, the next step is deradicalization, that could take “a decades-long” process. “But it cannot start until you get the radicalizer out.”

One of those purges should be United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), that to his mind is anti-Israel. “There is enough data” to show how the NGO and Hamas have a symbiotic relationship. “You can’t have someone working in Gaza without Hamas accepting it,” he said, also noting how UNRWA schoolbooks preach incitement against Jews.

With the discovery of Hamas tunnels beneath UNRWA facilities, including a substantive data centre, “that alone – UNRWA has to justify it. Explain how a number of employees were involved in Oct. 7. Explain the number of UNRWA facilities where Hamas has turned into military headquarters.”

“That they refuse to answer any of those questions” would be enough to necessitate putting funding “on hold until we conduct an investigation.” It should be enough for Canada to insist “where’s the money going?” rather than re-instating the $25 million handout, as did on March 8.

Hamas has been clear about what it wants, and what it doesn’t want – in addition to what they’ve been silent about, he said.

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“They’ve never said that they want the release of all the (Palestinian) prisoners in Israel, and that means they’ll turn a new leaf. They’ve never said that they want a two state solution. They’ve never said that they want self-determination or they want human rights or they want equality. They’ve never said that. The only thing they’ve ever said is ‘we want the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews around the world.’”

The Philadelphi corridor, at the Egypt border in Rafah, is important for Israel to hold, to cut off Hamas’ supply passage. Hamas “loved the fact that the world has said, ‘just leave Rafah.’ They’ll do anything for that, because that’s their oxygen. That’s their hope to survive the war,” he said. “That’s all they have to do, hold hostages and survive the war. They win by military definition.”

The world was silent, he said, when 50,000 Palestinians living on the Egyptian side of Rafah were “mass displaced” in 2017. “Nobody cared,” he said, even when Egypt “destroyed most of their buildings.”

Hamas’ tons of weapons are well-known to have been smuggled in to Gaza, but tracing the sequence of the transaction proves elusive, he told National Post. He saw captured artillery from unsurprising sources – Russia, China, North Korea, Iran – but also unexpectedly saw the sophistication of weapons-making facilities discovered by the IDF.

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“That was a bigger surprise. How did Hamas create a rocket manufacturing capability underground with the chemicals, the lathes. That’s more, for me, as a researcher, more impactful than the different countries of weapons that they found there,” said Spencer, who has for a decade researched military operations in dense urban areas and subterranean warfare.

Ordinary militant tunnels are cruel environments; the ones Hamas uses for hostages, crueller.

“It’s foreign to the human body to be in that environment. There are soldiers that go into it within minutes, if not hours, they get claustrophobia, vertigo, lose sense of time. They pass out. They can’t breathe the air. There’s so many contaminants,” he said. Hostages were kept in places where they could not stand, and had to relieve themselves where they were held.

“It is so inhumane, which I personally would think there are some international groups whose responsibility is to check on them,” a possible reference to the Red Cross, who has been criticized by Israel for not following their mandate.

“Even the Hamas guidebook to tunnels that recently was discovered, talks about how you have to rotate forces. It starts to deteriorate your health.”

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