TEHRAN (Iran News) –As Western leaders and media react to the current cycle of violence in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli settlements near Gaza, the focus has been widely pinned on the Palestinian resistance and the alleged crimes it has committed.

Some Western leaders have gone as far as rebuking countries who have declined to condemn Hamas for the latest bout of violence.

The approach appears to be aimed at implying that the oppressed is the real monster, and the oppressor is being categorized as the victim of the latest conflict.

This is most likely because the Palestinian resistance got the upper hand militarily in scenes not seen in modern history that have dealt a major blow to Israeli security and intelligence apparatus that has been boasted about by the West as being the most sophisticated of all in the region.

This psychological warfare has been aimed at derailing any attempts by anti-Israel resistance groups to bring any justice to Israel for its acts of war crimes in occupied Palestine and beyond.

Israel has claimed that Hamas is operating like Daesh despite the fact that the regime is being accused of supporting Daesh against Syrian government forces.

The comparison is a massive insult to the victims of Daesh terrorism, who are within their right to ask for an apology as Daesh showed no mercy toward their captives.

An official belonging to Hamas told British media that the Israeli hostages taken by the group were being treated in a “humane way,” and they would not be harmed.

History has proven that Israel has shown no mercy either when dealing with Palestinians in its violent ethnic cleansing campaign.

The Israeli army has committed 15 massacres against Palestinian families in Gaza over the last two days alone, a Palestinian official in Gaza’s administration said on Monday.

Hamas did not infiltrate Israeli settlements to create a so-called “caliphate”. The operation was a response to a long list of Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians, in particular, over the past two decades.

Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians are, in fact, too long to list, stretching back to 1948 until today; along with its direct complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, where more than 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered in three days under the regime’s watch.

Neither did Israel show any mercy toward Palestinian civilians during the al-Aqsa Intifada (the second uprising) in 2001, when Palestinian stones were met with Israeli snipers, tanks, and warplanes in the occupied West Bank and then occupied Gaza Strip.

Israel has waged dozens of wars against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since 2001, and some of them have lasted for a matter of days, whilst others have been prolonged.

One theme in common amongst them all is that women, children, and the elderly, the most vulnerable in society, have been killed or injured.

From late December 2008 to mid-January 2009, Israel waged what is widely referred to in West Asia as the Gaza massacre. Nearly 1,500 Palestinians were slaughtered as Israel turned the Gaza Strip into rubble, among them 288 children and 103 women, and 85% of those were not combatants.

Nearly 10,000 Palestinians were also wounded in direct conflict-related incidents. The majority of them were again civilians.

On January 3, Israel began a ground invasion, committing numerous war crimes. The UN agencies called on Israel to rebuild the civilian homes it reduced to rubble, but the demands fell on deaf ears.

In 2014, Israel bombarded the Gaza Strip again between July 8 and August 24. This time, the regime killed 2,310 Palestinians, with 70% of them civilians.

Another 10,626 Palestinians were injured as a direct result of Israeli airstrikes as well as ground and naval shelling.

The majority of the casualties were civilians, including 3,374 children, of whom more than 1,000 were left disabled for life.

The United Nations estimated that the damage caused to civilian infrastructure, including residential homes and hospitals, etc. would require up to $6 billion dollars to rebuild.

More than 7,000 homes for 10,000 families were razed, together with an additional 89,000 homes damaged, of which roughly 10,000 were severely affected by the Israeli bombing campaign.

Amid the U.S. presidential primary race of 2016, Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders condemned Israeli authorities for their treatment of Gaza, and in particular denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “overreacting” and causing unnecessary civilian deaths.

For around ten days in May 2021, Israel once again bombed Gaza indiscriminately during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, killing 66 children and 40 women.

In the bombing raids around 2,000 Palestinians were injured, among them at least 610 children, and 400 women. In a timeframe of three days in August last year, Israel bombed Gaza?, this time killing at least 49 Palestinians, including 17 children. Amnesty International called on the International Criminal Court to open a probe into war crimes committed by Israel, in particular a drone strike that killed 5 children at a cemetery.

Over the past two years, Israeli forces have been conducting almost daily raids into the occupied West Bank, killing a record number of Palestinians, whilst demolishing a record number of Palestinian homes and widely expanding its illegal settlement activity.

Israel’s violent kidnapping of Palestinian youth and their family members has been unprecedented this year. The roughly 5,000 Palestinians languishing today in Israeli dungeons were kidnapped at gunpoint.

The collective punishment of Palestinians has been ignored, and amid all these Israeli crimes, the West wants the Palestinians to avoid taking retaliatory measures.

Throughout this time, the West has not only kept silent but failed to single out Israel for any criticism whatsoever, despite human rights groups documenting endless war crimes and terrorism.

Instead, Western media is branding Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip as “retaliation” as if the war started on October 15, 2023. “Contrary to (Israeli) occupation claims of targeting resistance capabilities, the (Israeli) occupation army committed 15 massacres by bombing their homes directly without any warning,” Salama Marouf, chairman of the media office in Gaza, said in a statement.

Marouf added that the Israeli army is entirely to blame for these massacres of civilians. “This difficult reality (…) necessitates an urgent action by the international community’s relevant organizations to curb the (Israeli) occupation, which is following the scorched-earth policy within densely residential areas,” he added.

Now that Israel has tasted a sample of what it has dished out for decades against the Palestinians, the double standards of the West have been shamefully placed on full display. History will judge which side was the terrorist and which side was under oppression and had every right enshrined under international law to resist a brutal occupation.