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Comment by sudopluto | Hacker News Reader

you bring up an interesting point, in that after two years of war, almost none of the pre-war hamas leadership is left alive. why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead? it should be clear that the "axis of resistance" wasn't coming to help on oct 8th itself, and two years later iran and it's proxies are toast. yet hamas opts to continue fighting, at this point it looks like a suicide cult that wants to drag civilians down with it for the purpose of martyrdom

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>why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead?

How's an organization supposed to surrender when all of its leaders have been assassinated? Who's going to walk up to an IDF emplacement while claiming to lead Hamas? How would such a death-defying individual prove that they had any actual significance to Hamas?

the recent talks in qatar suggested that even though disorganized, enough of a hierarchy still exists within hamas to negotiate. the main complaints from the american side was that hamas seemed to be inconsistent / fractured in their demands, outside of forcing the israelis to return to pre-war status-quo via a ceasefire that protects hamas rule

I wonder why they're fractured in their demands... maybe it's that all the high level leaders are dead.

Someone is in charge. The person who could release the hostages?

It's entirely possible there's no longer any single person in charge in practice, but rather a bunch of more or less individually operating cells - each with their own leader.

Imagine you are a 19 year old in charge of some Hamas survivors. Let’s say you want to surrender.

1. Would it even mean anything? It’s not like you or anyone else has the control to stop everyone else. And Israel will use any attack as a sign of bad faith and ignore the surrender.

2. Would it improve anything for your people? If Israelis are intentionally starving babies, there is no reason to think they will stop the genocide just because the militarized part has given up. Have you even heard any news of Hamas even fighting back recently or has it all just been killing civilians?

All a surrender would do is get you tortured for information and executed for no gain.

ironically only indian and pakistani news really report on the IDF casualties / hamas attacks, make of that what you will (IDF journalism blackout backfiring, news bias, maybe south asians love telegram war footage, etc)

ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opD3hg0B8sM

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