On Saturday, the Washington Post reported in “Outside the White House, ravaged by hunger, protesters strike for Gaza” that 20 pro-Hamas supporters were on a five-day hunger strike “to force the Biden administration to demand a permanent cease-fire at a time when Israel and Hamas had paused fighting to allow more aid to enter Gaza and more hostages to be released.” According to one participant of the hunger strike, Sumaya Awad, the hunger strike “is the only way for the violence to stop.”

What Awad does not seem to grasp is that there was a ceasefire on Oct. 6, the day before the terrorist group Hamas viciously launched a raid slaughtering 1,200 Israeli men, women, children, toddlers, babies, and Holocaust survivors, taking 240 hostages. Calls for a ceasefire and leaving the Hamas government intact will only ensure that the attacks on Israel reoccur. That is the promise of Hamas leaders, who have no qualms admitting their true intentions to repeat this again and again until all of Israel is destroyed. What Awad should be protesting is for the Biden administration to do more to irradicate Hamas from Gaza for the sake of all parties involved. Otherwise, there will be more and more casualties on both sides as Israel responds to thwart future attacks.

To the Washington Post’s credit, it gives some background on the origins of the conflict. When in 1948 “Israel declared independence,” the Post explains, “a coalition of Arab states, allied with Palestinian factions, attacked Israeli forces in what became the first of several Arab-Israeli wars.” Palestinians were displaced in that war, as were Jews, though the latter are conveniently left out of most conversations — because while Jews were immediately repatriated in the nascent Jewish state, Palestinians were cynically left living in squalor in camps by neighboring Arab countries festering in hatred of Jews and Israel. (RELATED: INTERVIEW: Islamic Expert Analyzes Rising Threat of Hezbollah)

Interestingly enough, in the 1948 war, though few seem to know, the Palestinians lost the U.N. partitioned land allotted for them in the West Bank to Jordan and the land in Gaza to Egypt. In other words, they lost it not to Israel but to their land-grabbing brethren! Of course, in the famous Six-Day War of 1967, Arab aggression lost both remaining territories to Israel, causing the land to be disputed to this day.

Needless to say, the conflict has been poorly explained by our educators and the media, with the common argument being that the poorer, weaker side of the conflict must be in the right — despite the facts on the ground. This clearly explains why so many Americans can shockingly align with the side that takes babies as hostages, the side that would have allied with the worst tyrants in history — Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post, in its inimitable style, sides with the Palestinians — lockstep — in claiming that the recent war merely “erupted.” The brutal surprise attack and slaughter of Israeli citizens and visiting worldwide civilians was not an eruption — it was a pogrom, a massacre of unprecedented proportions and one committed by the Palestinians. It was the largest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For the Post to minimize it and cloud it up with misrepresentation is reprehensible.