The Battle of Gaza City: it’s time to take sides

‘I judge a man by one thing’, said the early 20th-century English Liberal MP Isaac Foot: ‘Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?’ He was referring to the Battle of Marston Moor of 1644, during the English Civil War, in which the Parliamentarian side under the command of the radical Lord Fairfax roundly defeated the Royalist side. It was the military victory that propelled these isles towards democracy. I’m starting to feel similarly about the Battle of Gaza City – that you can judge a person by which side they’re taking in this clash between the army of Israel and the neo-fascists of Hamas.

As the 98th and 162nd divisions of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) roll into Gaza City to confront the 3,000 armed anti-Semites of Hamas, a burning question confronts us all: which side are we on? You can say ‘I just want the war to stop’ until you’re blue in the face. You can carry a handbag saying ‘Cease Fire!’ like one of the turbo-smug celebs at the Emmys did. You can call the IDF ‘reckless and appalling’, as did Britain’s new foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, in an act of snivelling moral perfidy that heaps shame on our nation. None of it will make a blind bit of difference. This battle is as unstoppable as the sunrise tomorrow. Neither the IDF nor Hamas is backing down. So only one question remains: whose victory do you wish for?

The Battle of Gaza City is already one of the most maligned clashes of modern times. Much of the media coverage leaves one with the wholly post-truth impression that the IDF is raiding Gaza City for sport. Or for land. Or in further, feverish pursuit of its curiously unsuccessful ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian people. The other side in the battle – Hamas’s army of apocalyptic Jew-haters – has been virtually invisibilised. We rarely hear of them. It’s as bizarre as if newspapers had reported on the Battle of Raqqa without mentioning ISIS, or the Battle of Berlin without ever saying the word ‘Nazi’.

Anyone who writes, tweets or talks about the Battle of Gaza City without referencing the numerous cells of tooled-up guerrilla fighters lying in wait for the soldiers of the Jewish State is flat-out engaging in misinformation. It’s a kind of wartime censorship to erase one side in a battle – worse, the side that started the war in the first place with its pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. The truth about the Battle of Gaza City is that on one side there are tens of thousands of soldiers from two divisions of the IDF, and on the other an estimated 3,000 Hamas gunmen and their Islamist allies under the command of Izz El-Din al-Haddad.

Haddad is called ‘the last Hamas commander’. He’s believed to have been commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, since May 2025, following the IDF’s assassination of Yahya Sinwar and then his brother, Mohammed. Earlier this month, the Saudis reported that Haddad had sent an internal communique to Hamas cells in Gaza City telling them to prepare for a ‘fierce battle that could last for months’. All available forces will be mobilised to inflict ‘severe blows’ on the IDF, he said. He is coordinating with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, too. As a result of his military conspiring, Gaza City is overrun with ‘small cells of well-prepared guerrilla fighters’, refortified with ‘more explosives, more anti-tank missiles and more sniper fire’.

If you’re reading a media report about Gaza City and it doesn’t mention any of this, stop reading. You’re being fed half-truths. And when you hear about scores of people dying in Gaza City – a horrendous inevitability of war – remember that some of them will be these fanatics that Haddad has rallied to deliver ‘severe blows’ against the Jewish nation. So many canards and one-sided claims swirl through the media coverage of the war in Gaza that it falls to serious-thinking citizens to fill in the gaps. To remember that Hamas exists, that it continues to fight the IDF, and that its leaders dream of the further fascistic slaughter of Jews – ‘We will do this again and again’, as they’ve said of 7 October.

What the Israelophobes of the West falsely call ‘genocide’ is war. The thinness of their ‘genocide’ accusation, the sheer defamatory cynicism of it, was summed up in that report published this week by a UN commission of inquiry. Israel is committing genocide, it said. Its proof? That ‘Israeli security forces were aware that their military operations since 7 October 2023 would cause the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza’. They ‘knew of the high numbers of casualties’, but they did not ‘intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed’. Am I going mad or is that just war? By this infantile definition – basically, your military action caused casualties – every war in history has been a genocide. Remember this historical illiteracy and moral treachery with which the genocide lie is weaponised against the Jewish State when you hear that the Battle of Gaza City is ‘genocidal’ too, which you will.

To be clear, the Battle of Gaza City does represent a new and dangerous turn in the Israel-Hamas War. As Haaretz says, so far in 2025 the IDF has ‘operated in areas with few civilians’, focussing on ‘destroying Hamas’s tunnels and other terror infrastructure’. Its targets had mostly been ‘mapped before the troops entered’. Gaza City is a more daunting prospect. Hamas militants have decamped there in their thousands. They’ve rebuilt their tunnels. Not all civilians have evacuated. And of course there are the Israeli hostages. Chillingly, it is reported that Hamas is starting to move some hostages above ground, in an effort to ‘hinder [the] IDF offensive’. Using Jews as human shields against the Jewish army – a new low in savagery for this army of anti-Semites.

And yet the battle is happening. It’s underway. And sides must be taken. Here’s the thing: some people have taken a side without realising it. For if you tell only one side in an existential war to cease fire, then you’re objectively aligning with the other side. Imagine two men are having a duel and you tell just one of them to put away his gun. That isn’t peacenik behaviour – it’s an implicit statement that one man’s life is worth less than the other’s. That’s what I hear when the opinion-forming classes squawk ‘Stop Israel’ – that they’ve decided, however witlessly, that the security of the Jewish nation is of less moral worth than the deranged ambitions of those Hamas cells in Gaza City. That’s what was so unforgivable about Yvette Cooper’s slamming of Israel’s ‘reckless and appalling’ incursion into Gaza City – she will have inadvertently boosted Hamas and confirmed it in its sick belief that the IDF is a marauding gang deserving of punishment.

The Battle of Gaza City will be bloody and awful. Palestinians will suffer and young Israeli soldiers will die. Yet that should not detract from the moral truth that this is a battle between the army of a democratic nation and a terrorist militia that loathes the infidel West as much as it does the Jews. Sitting this clash out might be a luxury the lost souls of our cushioned, faux-virtuous elites can afford. But it’s too risky for the rest of us. So what do you want: the victory of the Jewish nation or the victory of radical Islamists who slit the throats of Jews? A win for our ally in Enlightenment or a win for the regressive forces of violent medieval intolerance? Quit your performative angst and pick a side.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy