Filled with pride, a Hamas terrorist called home on October 7 to tell his parents: “I killed 10 with my bare hands! Dad, 10 with my own hands!
A month after Hamas caused the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, it’s worth remembering that its mission is wickedly simple: kill Jews.
Just listen to the terrorists themselves.
Hamas leaders intended to use the October 7 massacre to “trigger a sustained conflict that would end any pretense of coexistence between Israel, Gaza and the countries around them,” The New York Times reported after interviewing them.
“I hope that the state of war with Israel becomes permanent on all borders and that the Arab world supports us,” declared Taher El-Nounou, Hamas media advisor.
As the Times put it, the attack put an end to the idea that Hamas is “a governing body”: “it remains fundamentally an armed force, relentlessly committed to the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamist Palestinian state.”
But we already knew this.
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Hamas’s 1988 charter “rejects any alternative to the total and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” and says that “the Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”
In other words, Hamas’ goal is to annihilate Israel and murder the Jews.
For more than 30 years, Hamas has kept its word.
Less than a year after the signing of the first Oslo Accord, a Hamas suicide bomber attacked a bus station in the Israeli city of Afula on April 6, 1994, killing seven civilians.
A week later, an attack on a Hamas bus in Hadera claimed five lives.
The group carried out a third suicide bombing in October, killing 21 Israelis and a Dutch national on a public bus in Tel Aviv.
This murderous campaign continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when Hamas and other members of the Palestinian terrorist group strapped themselves to suicide belts with nails dipped in rat poison for maximum carnage and murdered and maimed hundreds of Israelis.
After Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas took the opportunity to gain political legitimacy.
Hamas swept the 2006 elections in the enclave and proceeded to wage a bloody civil war with its Palestinian rivals for political dominance.
In some cases, Hamas members murdered their Palestinian opponents by throwing them off buildings and shooting them in the kneecaps.
Hamas emerged victorious in 2007 and has ruled the Gaza Strip with an iron fist ever since.
Needless to say – although the group ultimately says it – that Hamas has decided to abdicate its responsibility to care for the people of Gaza, opting instead to develop its military capabilities and launch attacks against Israel.
Israel and Hamas have fought five wars in 15 years: in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now 2023.
On each occasion, Hamas has used Gazan civilians as human shields.
Hamas operates a command center inside and below Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital.
And the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the body tasked with providing aid to Palestinians, has repeatedly found Hamas rockets hidden under their schools.
Hiding military assets beneath civilian infrastructure is a practice known as human shields and is prohibited by international law.
Hamas maintains an extensive network of tunnels that it uses to transport weapons and personnel.
The Israeli defense establishment dubbed the labyrinth the Gaza “subway.”
Hamas diverts concrete intended for civil construction projects to reinforce the tunnel system.
A senior Hamas official said last month that it is the U.N.’s responsibility to build bomb shelters in Gaza because the group is focused on building terrorist tunnels to protect its fighters and their weapons.
Meanwhile, Hamas leaders live like kings in Qatar, while more than 2 million Palestinians under their rule remain in abject poverty.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, is worth $4 billion, like his predecessor Khaled Mashal.
Hamas has been killing Israelis for more than three decades and Palestinians for almost two decades.
We didn’t need a Times interview to inform us.
It is time to destroy this evil.
Mark Dubowitz is the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Natalie Ecanow is a research analyst.
