[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Hamas terrorists thumb their noses at all norms of civilized behavior by beheading babies, burning families alive, slaughtering young people attending a peace rally, taking civilians hostages, and celebrating the terrorists’ carnage on social media.

Hamas values death over life, even of its own people. Mohammed Deif, who is one of the masterminds behind Hamas’s brutal invasion and attacks in Israel on October 7th, said several year ago to Israelis that they are “fighting divine soldiers, who love death for Allah like you love life, and who compete among themselves for Martyrdom like you flee from death.”

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who reportedly ordered the barbaric assault on Israeli civilians from his perch in Doha, said several years ago that “We love death like our enemies love life! We love Martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died.”

In short, Hamas is an evil death cult.

When Israel unilaterally withdrew all its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 as a good faith gesture of peace, there was relative calm at first. Then Hamas won the only election held in Gaza in 2006 and a year later vanquished its rival Fatah to seize complete control of Gaza. After executing, imprisoning, and expelling Fatah officials, its fellow Palestinians, Hamas turned Gaza into a base for launching successive terrorist attacks against civilians in Israel.

If Hamas had concentrated on serving the needs of the people it has ruled exclusively for 16 years instead of prosecuting its genocidal war against the Jews in Israel, it could have promoted Gazans’ welfare and economic self-sufficiency. Instead, Hamas’s obsession with destroying Israel has ended up destroying the lives of its own people.

Israelis had adapted the best they could to the various barrages of rocket fire and other terrorist acts over the years since Hamas took control of Gaza. But they were not prepared for the killing fields that Hamas terrorists left behind on October 7^th. Life can never be the same for the Israeli people until Hamas and its comrades in terrorism are liquidated.

Hamas has been planning its mayhem against Israeli civilians for months, no doubt with Iranian support. According to NBC News, it obtained documents showing that “Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad, to ‘kill as many people as possible,’ seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.” The documents, NBC reported, were “labeled ‘top secret’ in Arabic” and “appear to be orders for two highly trained Hamas units to surround and infiltrate villages and target places where civilians, including children, gather.”

Yet in the twisted minds of Hamas’s cheerleaders worldwide who protest in the streets and on college campuses, Israel is portrayed as the colonialist oppressor deserving annihilation while Hamas terrorists are hailed as heroic freedom fighters.

Hamas and its supporters claim that Israel is deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. That is a blatant lie, reminiscent of the lies spread by the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists in Gaza are solely responsible for the loss of life and suffering of Gazan civilians under Hamas’s rule whom the terrorists use as human shields. Not Israel.

Indeed, Israel’s military is scrupulously following the international rules of war in the course of its counterattacks against the Palestinian terrorists, their bases of operation, and infrastructure in Gaza. Israel chooses its targets based on military necessity, while warning Palestinian civilians in advance of its strikes on buildings where they may live but which are also suspected of housing Hamas terrorists and facilities.

Prior to Israel’s planned launch of its main ground offensive, it advised Palestinian civilians to evacuate northern Gaza where the most intense fighting is expected to take place and head south to safer and less dense areas. Once Hamas is defeated, Palestinian civilians uprooted from their homes will hopefully be able to return if they wish.

Israel’s military, the IDF, said that the evacuees could travel safely via two main roads. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have managed to heed this advice. But Hamas is doing what it can to impede civilians’ evacuation to safer areas. “Hamas has attempted to block Palestinians from evacuating the northern Gaza Strip, placing roadblocks on evacuation routes designated by the IDF, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said,” the Jerusalem Post reported.

The notion that the evacuees are trapped in Gaza with no place to go solely because of Israel is patently false. Egypt could have allowed Gazan civilians who evacuate to southern Gaza to cross the Egyptian border with Gaza into Sinai and live there temporarily until it is safe for them to return to Gaza. But Egypt has to date refused to do so, turning its back on its fellow Arabs and violating its obligations as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.

Israel bashers claim that Israel’s temporary cut off of electricity to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip and blockage of food, water (which Israel has now restored), and fuel into Gaza amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are accusing the wrong party. Hamas has it within its power to bring an end to the siege immediately by releasing all the hostages it abducted in violation of international law.

One of Israel’s urgent military goals is to free these hostages from the Hamas captors before they all die in Hamas’s tunnels or dungeons. Israel’s siege is aimed at putting maximum pressure on Hamas to give up the hostages by immediately depriving the enemy of vital resources it needs to hold on to the hostages against forcible attempts to free them. The more dangerous outcome for Gazan civilians would ensue if the IDF were to engage in urban warfare to locate and rescue the hostages by force, jeopardizing the lives of civilians with whom the terrorists deliberately commingle. Imposing a temporary siege to accomplish the reasonable military objective, with the minimum force necessary, of freeing the hostages held illegally by Hamas is consistent with international law, even if there is unavoidable collateral harm to civilians.

No matter what, Israel is determined not to leave the hostages behind in the enemy’s hands.

Ilan Benjamin is a progressive Jew whose cousin Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal journalist, was beheaded by ISIS in 2002, but had still empathized with the Palestinian cause for years despite their violent tactics. That changed completely after Hamas terrorists slaughtered at least 1300 Jews, including massacring over 100 people at Kibbutz Be’eri where he had once lived. Mr. Benjamin wrote that he “saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil.”

Mr. Benjamin also laid bare his disgust with the leftists who protested in support of Hamas after their horrific rampage. “Why did the left—who supposedly stood up for human rights—put child-murdering Hamas terrorists on a pedestal?” he asked.

The answer is that they are part of the unholy alliance of Islamist jihadists and anti-Semitic leftists who hate everything that Western civilization stands for and want to destroy it. They are revolutionaries of the worst kind.

Israel has made it abundantly clear that it will not relent in achieving its ultimate military objective to end the Palestinian terrorist threat from Gaza. Nothing short of complete victory will suffice this time.

Hamas sealed its own fate when its monsters slaughtered more Jews in one day on October 7^th than on any single day since the Holocaust. The terrorists deserve a special place in hell for beheading babies, shooting defenseless women and children to death at close range, mutilating bodies, dragging more than 100 civilians to Gaza, and gleefully displaying their bloody conquests on social media.

Now the Palestinian terrorists are experiencing Israel’s righteous resolve to eliminate Hamas and its murderous cohorts in Gaza root and branch.

Former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman said it best when he described the terrorists as “wild beasts” and declared, during a Fox News interview, his belief that Israel’s military operation will go “all the way until we obliterate and demolish Hamas.” The operation should “not stop until the last Hamas terrorist and the last leader has met the 72 virgins,” he added.

At least two of Hamas’s leaders are already on their way to hell to meet the 72 virgins a week after their involvement in commanding the invasion of Israel and the horrific massacres and abductions that followed.

The IDF announced on October 14^th that it had killed a Hamas commander, Ali Qadhi, who led the carnage that Hamas inflicted in southern Israel. The IDF dispatched Ali Qadhi in a successful air strike on a Hamas base in Gaza. Ali Qadhi had been released from an Israeli prison in 2011 as part of a hostage release deal in which Hamas’s captive Gilad Shalit was exchanged for 1,027 prisoners in Israeli custody. Qadhi may have been planning to use the more than 100 hostages that Hamas abducted to Gaza as bargaining chips for the release of all Palestinian terrorists and their collaborators from Israeli prison. Fortunately, he will never get a chance to personally move forward with such a sinister plan.

The IDF also said on October 14^th that it eliminated another high-ranking Hamas leader who oversaw Hamas’s aerial operations, Murad Abu Murad. Quoting the IDF, the Times of Israel reported that Abu Murad “‘took a significant part in directing terrorists during the massacre.’” This included Hamas’s aerial assault using hang gliders to invade Israel.

In addition, IDF struck dozens of Hamas’s commando forces sites, as it prepares the way for a full-scale ground attack.

Civilians are bound to be caught in the crossfire, but that is entirely Hamas’s fault. Pleas for a ceasefire from the United Nations, Arab countries, or America’s allies in Europe and Asia must be ignored until Israel is victorious.

As Israel ramps up its military response to Hamas’s barbarism, President Biden must not waver in his total support for the Jewish state as it strives to eliminate an existential threat to its survival. He needs to remember that Hamas killed at least 30 American citizens and abducted other Americans. They must not be left behind as some Americans were when the Taliban took over Afghanistan following President Biden’s disastrous retreat from that Islamic country.