No one can deny Hamas’ aim is to kill Jews — it fully admits it

Gushing with pride, a Hamas terrorist phoned home Oct. 7 to tell his parents: “I killed 10 with my own hands! Dad, 10 with my own hands!”

One month after Hamas exacted the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, it is worth remembering its mission is wickedly simple: kill Jews.

Just listen to the terrorists themselves.

Hamas leaders aimed to use the Oct. 7 massacre to “set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them,” The New York Times reported after interviewing them.

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, declared.

As the Times put it, the attack put an end to the idea Hamas is “a governing body” — it’s “still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state.”

But we already knew this.

Hamas’ 1988 charter “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” and says “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.”

In other words, Hamas’ goal is to annihilate Israel and murder Jews.

For more than 30 years, Hamas has acted on its word.

Not a year after the first Oslo Accord was signed, a Hamas suicide bomber attacked a bus station in the Israeli city of Afula on April 6, 1994, killing seven civilians.

A week later, a Hamas bus bombing in Hadera took five lives.

The group carried out a third suicide bombing in October, killing 21 Israelis and one Dutch citizen on a public bus in Tel Aviv.

This murderous campaign continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s as Hamas and other Palestinian terror group members strapped on 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 seized the opportunity to gain political legitimacy.

Hamas swept 2006 elections in the enclave and proceeded to fight 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 their kneecaps.

Hamas emerged victorious in 2007 and has ruled the Gaza Strip with an iron fist ever since.

Needless to say — though the group finally is saying it — Hamas has chosen to forgo its responsibility to take care of Gazans, opting instead to build up its military capabilities and wage attacks on Israel. 

Israel and Hamas have fought five wars in 15 years: in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now 2023. 

Each time, Hamas has used Gazan civilians as human shields. 

Hamas operates a command center inside and underneath Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza. 

And the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the body tasked with providing aid to Palestinians, has repeatedly found Hamas rockets hidden beneath their schools.

Hiding military assets underneath civilian infrastructure is a practice known as human shields, and international law prohibits it.

Hamas maintains a sprawling tunnel network it uses to transport weapons and personnel.

The Israeli defense establishment dubbed the labyrinth the Gaza “metro.”

Hamas diverts concrete meant for civilian construction projects to reinforce the tunnel system.

A senior Hamas official said just last month it’s the UN’s responsibility to build bomb shelters in Gaza because the group is focused on building terror tunnels to protect its fighters and weapons.

Hamas leaders, meanwhile, live as kings in Qatar as more than 2 million Palestinians under their rule remain in abject poverty.

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, is worth $4 billion, as is 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’s long past the time to destroy this evil. 

Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Natalie Ecanow is a research analyst.