The old man surveys his difficult situation. He is a famous man in a hot place. Through the blasted walls of the typically middle class Arab apartment where he is he sees a ruined city which he himself ruined: dust, rubble, fires.

He made a calculated bet a few years ago – badly – that it would work out and victory against the “pigs and monkeys” (Koran), the unbelievers was at hand. Jerusalem – Al Quds – would be his and he’d be the new messiah himself. The Jews would – as promised by his forefathers for nearly a century – be thrown into the sea.

Lately though, after months in tunnels, he’s just been in a pretty hot firefight against some unbelievers, against kids a third his age. His fellow warriors are dead, maybe in front of his eyes. Loss has been part of his psychic makeup for decades now, ever since he started on this path.

It has been a long trek here. Growing up a third worlder and a religious fanatic he learned that force, god and spectacular public violence is rewarded with power. And with his machete he became the feared “Butcher of Khan Younis”. In these hierarchies psychopaths flourish and rule.

The pigs/monkeys canned him for nearly two decades for killing his own Palestinians, mostly “collaborators” and a gay or two. He even had an aggressive brain tumor in prison and the Jews… amazingly, saved his life but he saw it as rough justice when the very doctor who saved his life years earlier had his own nephew kidnapped to Gaza years later on October 7th. Allah’s will, presumably.

But now here he is. And he’s wounded, hurt badly. A blown apart knee is a terrible situation: the pain is unimaginable as is the horror of suddenly, for the first time, not being able to walk. It is a miracle he escaped up to this blasted out apartment.

Funnily enough, this now wrecked neighborhood was built in an area the hatred Jews abandoned so his people could flourish. He and his billionaire thieving buddies spent all that political and financial capital – more charity than any other group in a century on tunnels, rockets, propaganda. On hate (and into their own pockets). On kindergartens where the children learn to slaughter the Jews, (See my article about early childhood education in Palestinian/UNWRA schools), throw them into the sea, and retake some stones or something.

The key is the killing of the Jews and the cleansing of the Islamosphere of this wealthy, free, democratic and thus deeply embarrassing “Zionist Entity”. It isn’t about land at all.

For real! In Gaza in 2005 all Jews were forcibly, screaming, removed – ethnically cleansed if you will – from their homes a few blocks from where our hero is now, to give Gaza back to the Palestinians, the non-historical owners, for peace.

Tens of billions of western taxpayer dollars and “money flowing like rice” from the Gulf States subsidised this naive plan. No people have been so internationally indulged as the “poor Palestinians” despite their genocidal intent and the fact that no Arab land within the British Mandate of Palestine was ever actually “stolen” ….. if you check sources better than TikTok’s Middle East politics department or craven, idiot American celebrities.

But the man in the dusty couch “got up in the morning and chose violence“. So from early this century until now and left alone to run a Jew-free Gaza, he became feared, dreaded and adored in a way that only works in societies where the dictatorship/terrorists have a monopoly of information. Like how in Pyongyang the North Koreans do really love the Kims.

BACK TO RAFFAH

This particular suburb was centered by unread lefty politicians, DEI apparachicks and once hot 1990s TV starlets who promoted quite recently: “ALL EYES ON RAFFAH!”.

Europeans and the White House chimed in. Sinwar, Deif and friends probably all had a chuckle about leftist thought leaders like Susan Sarandon et al. in the tunnels. “You bet, Susie, we’re sure opwessed…Thanks!”

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Urgent. He has no phone – obviously – and no friends and no way out. Like normal (I assume) after short firefights he’s guessing the troops just moved on. He can lay low and wait. Some kid will come along and he’ll get the message out to bring him back underground to safety.

But the Israeli squadron don’t move on. They’ve got drones. So while in agony nursing a blown out knee and other injuries he hears the unmistakable low whirl, the slight whine of a drone inside this dusty loungeroom shelter. A drone is the last thing many terrorists notice (Anwar Al Alaki, Yemen), if they see it at all, but he sees this one.

The drone. He can’t fight it (damn knee!) so he throws a stick. Futile, panicked, loser move. In his mind that’s the exact moment when he realizes it is the end, that this is his moment of doom.

Things get quick then. In any warzone anywhere troops spying a combatant in a depopulated broken building will just take the building down. That said, the well aimed headshot – possibly from a high precision Israeli made Merkava tank – suggests that he might have been moving or dragging his broken body away. Israeli heroes downstairs see movement and shoot and the lights go out forever for our friend here.

Moments earlier, through the terrible pain and sitting in that dusty armchair, before his personal cataclysm, he certainly had one last, stupid delusion: that if they get him he’d be instantly transported to the Playboy Mansion Club Med rivers of honey paradise he’s been promised and promised others his entire six decade life. “The virgins await and I’m sure I’ll get my knees back then…”

Only magical thinking, only religion, can fill a man’s head with such nonsense. And one religion is based on it.

In reality of course he was destined, in a few moments, to oblivion. To not be, all consciousness gone and no afterlife, no Club Med, no virgins. And… not that he’d know.. but he leaves a world who will curse his name, Palestinians particularly though they’ll be scared to admit it.

He’ll never know his actions personally destroyed the possibility, hoped for by peacenik Israelis and too comfortable and too secular Europeans and Americans, of any form of Palestinian state. Ever. He made all that.

Trump would say “He died like a dawg!” but that doesn’t cut it. Dogs have dignity, they go out peacefully, they are mourned. Dogs can’t leave a trail of ruin and death like this contemptible human garbage, this misery maker and ruiner at scale.

Hamas will continue, sort of or some facsimile of it because Palestinian “nationalism” is built around its genocidal and specifically Islamist precepts. But when you build a movement around a charismatic leader and that leader meets his just rewards, the whole intellectual and psychological tower falls. How much do we fear the PLO, Al Qaida or ISIS now?