Commentary
According to Reuters (Dec. 31, 2023), “Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, said two years before the current conflict erupted that it had installed a network of more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) of tunnels—roughly equivalent to half the length of the New York subway system.”
No one knows exactly how much this all cost, although, also in December 2023, Douglas Murray wrote the following for the New York Post in “Hamas terror tunnels were built with your money”:
“Since 2007, the US has sent over $400 million in taxpayers’ money to Gaza. That is all after the coup where Hamas seized power. These are the official figures released by USAID (United States Agency for International Development). USAID also says that it has paid more than $500 million between 2021 and the end of this year.”
Other countries, such as EU members, gave $100 million here and there that, instead of doing anything substantial to aid the immiserated citizens of the territory, helped to build the so-called Gaza Metro, whose only intention could be the destruction of Israel.
But most disturbing of all, and unreported until quite recently, is China’s growing involvement with Hamas.
An article in Newsweek, “China Is Waging a Proxy War in Israel” by Pesach Wolicki, states that “Chinese tunnel warfare specialists helped design and build the Hamas tunnels.”
Mr. Wolicki, a host on Real America’s Voice, is relying on information from Guermantes Lailari, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, now a scholar at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University. Mr. Wolicki further reports:
“Lailari also told me that two tunnel engineers from China’s People’s Liberation Army were discovered by the IDF, meaning that China helped Hamas significantly in its construction of the massive tunnel networks under the Gaza Strip. (The engineers were returned to China after pressure on Israel.)”
Where that pressure came from is not entirely clear—there are several possibilities—but it is not surprising since Israel has little interest in getting into a fight with the behemoth China, despite the communist nation’s recent formation of what The Economist calls an “anti-Western axis” with Russia and Iran. Iran, its present government anyway, is sworn to the destruction of Israel as much as Hamas is.
Whether Mr. Wolicki’s article is entirely accurate is difficult to say, but it is evident that Hamas now has an ally in a China that once pretended to be neutral in the Middle East.
The communist nation is apparently arming Hamas not just with small arms, as has been reported for some time, but with advanced weaponry. The YouTube channel CRUX has a video titled “Israeli Armour ‘Bursts Into Flames’ as Hamas Uses Chinese ‘Red Arrow’ in First ATGM Strike in Rafah.” (An ATGM is an anti-tank guided missile.)
Such videos must always be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, but it is unlikely that Hamas would broadcast its use of advanced Chinese weaponry without at least tacit concurrence from the source.
So what is going on? Has atheist China, the persecutor of the Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners and virtually any other religious or spiritual group it can find on its territory, suddenly become the advocate of the most Islamist of terror organizations, equivalent to ISIS?
Not likely. This is for the advancement exclusively of the Chinese Communist Party’s own imperial power and world-dominating aspirations, as is its growing situational alliance with North Korea, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and possibly (alas) Brazil and a few other countries. Hamas is just a step along the way.
China’s relationship with Hamas’s patron Iran may be the nub of much of this. Iran has promised China discounted oil that it sorely needs to continue its expansion or even to maintain itself. In exchange, help for Iran’s violent clients is the least China can do. Equally importantly, that help is another blow against its principal enemy, the United States.
Interest in relations with Israel that China once had because of the Jewish states’ high-tech expertise had to be terminated. If that meant teaching Hamas how to build terror tunnels or selling them ATGMs, well, c’est la vie.
Award-winning novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Roger L. Simon and his wife, screenwriter Sheryl Longin, are creating their own Substack “American Refugees” to appear later this summer. If you would like to be kept up to date, you can subscribe for free here.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
