Of the Battle of Shujaiya in July 2014 in "51 Days War", Blumenthal wrote of the Al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas) who ambushed IDF soldiers, that although they "had not vanquished the vaunted Israeli Army", "they delivered a bloody nose to its most elite units." Sonali Kolhatkar wrote in the "Los Angeles Review of Books" that "Blumenthal’s casting of the Al-Qassam Brigades as an army of resistance against a brutal aggressor is an essential transgression from the standard narrative of the Middle East conflict." In a video recording of an event at the London School of Economics in March 2016, Blumenthal described the Al-Qassam commandos as having "burst into the Oz Israeli base and killevery soldier they encountered in hand-to-hand combat. [... The message it sent to young Palestinians in the West Bank, in Jerusalem and abroad, was incredible ... You see your people in commando uniforms, bursting into a military base and showing up the occupier."