Last Thursday, Hamas staged a ghoulish spectacle in which it paraded the coffins of four Israelis – among them an infant and a four-year-old child – as Gazan onlookers, including mothers and children, cheered.
On Friday, it became clear that one of the bodies returned was not that of Shiri Bibas, the mother of the two little boys in the other coffins.
On Saturday, it was revealed that Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered the two little boys.
That same day, Hamas staged two more grotesque displays. As it released the final six living hostages in the first phase of the current ceasefire, it forced one of them to kiss the heads of two of his captors. Meanwhile, two other hostages, Eviatar David and Guy Gilboa Dalal, were made to watch the ceremony from a van before being dragged back down into Hamas’s dungeons.
One of the most striking aspects of those three days was how many of us – both in Israel and the West – were still shocked by Hamas’s cruelty. Many people asked, incredulously, how they could be so disrespectful to the dead. Many were stunned at the glee with which Hamas tormented both the hostages they freed and those they still hold.
Many decent people asked: Who could do such a thing? Who is capable of such monstrous barbarism? But after Hamas’s atrocities during the October 7 massacre – murdering, raping, mutilating, kidnapping, burning entire families alive, and then boasting of it in videos back home – should anyone still be surprised?
And yet, time and again, we are. This speaks more to our own decency – our minds struggle to imagine such cruelty, because it is not in our nature to behave this way, making it difficult for us to comprehend that others could – than to our naivety.
We are continuously shocked that such people exist. But we shouldn’t be.
This brutality will not go unanswered. A price will be exacted. A reckoning will come.
Hamas, with its grotesque parades and ceremonies, seems to believe time is on its side. But it isn’t.
At some point in time – it is not exactly clear when or even how – Hamas will no longer be holding hostages. At some point, it will have played its last card. This could be in a month or three months, or even a year or three years. But that day will come. And when it does, Israel will act against it with all its current pent-up wrath.
Not out of revenge, though there are those demanding it. Not out of outrage, though that is certainly justified. But out of the realization that it is impossible – simply impossible – to live alongside such evil.
Evil neighbors cannot be tolerated
Bad neighbors are one thing. But evil neighbors who seek and work toward your destruction are something else entirely. That cannot be tolerated.
As US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said in a US media interview on Thursday: “Hamas has got to go. We stand with Israel in that Hamas, which is no different than ISIS, al-Qaeda, or any of the other of the world’s worst terrorist organizations, cannot be allowed to rule Gaza, cannot be allowed to do another October 7.”
When reminded in the interview that Gazans, young and old, cheered Hamas’s macabre parade, Waltz said: “To be objective, not all Palestinians are Hamas. However, you are speaking to the radicalization that has occurred.”
While all Palestinians may not be Hamas, Waltz certainly understands that a large percentage of them are, and that even more Palestinians inside Gaza and Judea and Samaria – if not card-carrying members – support Hamas’s ideology and methodology. Hamas’s ideology has millions of supporters across the Arab and Muslim world – and millions more in the West.
What is shattering is not Hamas’s depravity; we are used to that. What is shocking – and disheartening – is that this inhumanity has cheerleaders in major cities and at elite universities in the US and around the world.
Hamas’s cruelty no longer surprises us – we know it all too well. But what we do hope is that the organization’s recent grotesqueries will, at the very least, open the eyes of some around the world to reality: that when people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they are not calling for justice, but encouraging a baby-killing organization to continue slaughtering innocents – like Shiri Bibas and her two small sons.
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