The most barbaric and widescale terror attack in decades took place on October 7, when Hamas Nazis invaded southern Israel and embarked on a killing spree, massacring 1,400 Israelis and taking over 220 hostages.
I will never forget the unfathomable images of death and destruction.
Hamas is a jihadi terror group and the atrocities they committed were exactly like those of ISIS and al Qaeda. It deliberately targets civilians and children. It is savage.
And these terrorists are solely responsible for the situation in Gaza.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, removing all Israeli civilians and soldiers from the territory. Instead of becoming a peaceful entity alongside Israel, Gaza became a terror machine.
Hamas is internationally recognized as a terror organization by Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and many other countries.
In 2007, after it was voted into power by the people of Gaza, Hamas brutally took over, throwing Palestinian Authority representatives off buildings and beginning its reign of terror. In the 16 years since, Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip with an iron fist, seeking to impose sharia law on the population.
Hamas is sworn to the destruction of the state of Israel and the murder of Jews. Its charter, written in 1988, explicitly states so. These terrorists do not want dialogue! They want dead Jews, and they have been saying so for 35 years.
Nonetheless, the international community attempted to moderate Hamas' behavior by offering economic incentives. Billions of dollars in donations, supplies, and building materials from Europe, Qatar, the United Nations, and other donors have come pouring into the Gaza Strip.
But here is the dirty little secret: economic incentives cannot change a genocidal, jihadi, terror group.
The aid money and materials designed for civilian infrastructure have never benefited the people of Gaza. They have been, time and again, stolen from Gazans by Hamas, whether for the salaries of Hamas leaders or for terror tunnels and rocket manufacturing facilities throughout the strip.
These facilities and their launchers are found in and under hospitals, schools, mosques and residential buildings, turning the people of Gaza into human shields for the terrorists.
While Israel seeks to mitigate civilian casualties in its military operations, Hamas seeks to increase civilian casualties – of both Israelis and Palestinians. How else can one rationally explain indiscriminately firing rockets at a civilian population from locations embedded within a civilian population?
The people of Gaza, after voting for Hamas, live within a terror war machine and sadly, we must recognize that they continue to support Hamas and its atrocities.
And Iran, the No. 1 global state sponsor of terror which funds much of Hamas' terror budget, provides a lifeline of support.
The immoral and false comparisons between Israel, a law-abiding democracy, and Hamas, an internationally designated terror group, that we are seeing at the UN and in the media now is exactly what the terrorists want.
There is no clearer example of this deranged reality than the tragedy of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. The proof is indisputable: the hospital was struck by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
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However, Hamas blatantly lied, leading many in the media and the UN to immediately blame Israel without verifying the facts.
Massacring Israelis is one part of Hamas' heinous strategy. The second part is to exploit public opinion and international bodies to pressure Israel into limiting its ability to defend itself. And they are playing right into Hamas' script.
If Israel's hands are tied when fighting Hamas, terror organizations around the world will be emboldened to attack civilized states. For the sake of our collective future, we cannot allow this to happen. The future of the free world and our way of life is at stake.
This is a battle between the forces of civilization and the forces of evil. Civilization must win.
