(American Thought Leaders) Maj. (ret.) John Spencer interviewed by Yanya Kellick - Maj. (ret.) John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point's Modern War Institute, said in a podcast on Saturday: "Hamas has a very unique version of human sacrifice, as their goal is to actually get their people killed. They need civilian deaths to achieve their political goals." They say "they need the blood of their women, children, and elderly to achieve their goals. They said they not only want it, they need it to achieve this goal of theirs in the afterlife, martyrdom and everything. So it's a really sick political strategy." "Even the Japanese, the Nazis, while they accepted civilian casualties, that wasn't their strategy to get their own population killed in order to achieve this political goal....It's [in Hamas's] public statements that anybody can reference that they have this human sacrifice strategy." "There's 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza....There's 2.2 million people there. All of them could fit in their tunnels with ease and escape what's going on on the surface. But Hamas actually makes written and public statements saying these are not for the civilians and civilians are not allowed....If I go to Ukraine, where I've been many times, the civilians go into the subways to seek refuge from the bombings that are happening on the surface." "I've seen mountains of evidence, literally fields of food and [Israeli] soldiers doing the opposite of genocide, but the world spreads it....Israel has implemented more of these civilian harm mitigation measures, trying to prevent civilians from getting hurt, like evacuations, phone calls, flyers, all of that, but also daily pauses to allow civilians to get out of harm's way, giving out maps, tracking civilians by their cell phones, not taking airstrikes. They've actually done more of these than any military has ever tried in war, but then are accused of targeting civilians when all of the evidence, real evidence, actually there's no cases of Israel targeting civilians." "Egypt wouldn't allow the civilians out, which I've never seen in a war that I've ever studied, where one country could save thousands by just creating a humanitarian zone outside of the main combat area." "Early in 2024, the IPC (one of the groups that would determine famine around the world) did this study of nutrition in Gaza and reported that it was nearing famine conditions because they had changed their own metrics of the number of deaths related to starvation that would equate to famine. And now that same organization provides the data showing that none of it was true. There weren't cases of death by malnutrition and starvation that would equate to the famine marker." "Everybody thought there were just awful things [happening], despite the actual amount of food that was going in and the lack of deaths from malnutrition and starvation that were happening. Of course, now it's too late. A year later the actual data provided from Gaza [showed that] during the war [Gaza] had nutrition higher than other parts of the Middle East where there is no war. Everybody could have gone and seen the amount of food that was going in."