On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that Hamas “has been a large cause of the trouble,” and the media underplays their role in the tragic situation in Palestine.
On “CBS Mornings,” Schumer said, “[T]he second round of the ceasefire is important because, first, it says Hamas, which I believe has been a large cause of the trouble, would disarm and Israel would remove its soldiers from Gaza. So, they were close. It fell apart. I don’t know the exact details, it happened overnight. But I think our government has to work really hard to bring them back to the table and get those hostages home. And I think it’s possible, because they were close at one point.”
Later, on MSNBC’s “All In,” Schumer stated that the situation in Palestine is tragic, but “what’s underplayed, totally, is the role of Hamas in that tragedy, even afterwards. Hamas uses, by doctrine, the innocent Palestinians as human shields. They put rockets in hospitals, they put schools there. … [T]he late head of Hamas said, these Palestinians who are killed are necessary sacrifices, his words. The media doesn’t play it up and the world doesn’t realize the difficult position Israel is in, trying to make sure that Hamas doesn’t come back, because we know what Hamas would do again.”
He added that “the media, they showed, every day, pictures of Palestinians being hurt, and we ache for that, they almost never mentioned that a lot of these were human shields…a good amount of the blame for the tragedy here, which we hate — I think Israel didn’t have the right policies in certain areas, and I…criticized them regularly, as you know, but no one seems to mention, when I see these protesters, I say, well, what about Hamas? They ignore them, ignore them. So, there’s only one side to this, and that’s not fair.”
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