More food aid flows into Gaza after Israel authorizes new United Nations aid transit routes. This is a welcome development amid a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territory. International organizations, the United States intelligence community, and many other nations assess that the civilians are going hungry, some of them dangerously so. The most sympathetic people, the elderly, infirm, and children, are the most vulnerable as they are the least capable of using force, the way young men and Hamas terrorists do. President Donald Trump and Vice President Vance have recently emphasized as much.

Most blame goes to Hamas. It’s terrorists intercepted aid convoys, threatened security, and ensured that its fighters hijacked supplies from aid collection points, which they then use to feed themselves and illegally sell to civilians for whom the world provides it for free. Hamas lines its pockets on the black market for future attacks on Israel. It is also true that the U.N. has tolerated too many Hamas infiltrators in its ranks.

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But Israel shares a smaller proportion of the blame. It has imposed excessive bureaucratic restrictions on aid convoys and transit routes to put pressure on Hamas. This is understandable, but nevertheless prevents as much food as necessary from getting to the population. Israel points to large aid supplies being held undistributed inside Gaza depots, but it is also not allowing the U.N. to deliver what it could. This has done marginal damage to Hamas but at an outsize cost to civilians and, we’d argue, to Israel’s reputation. Trump is right to push Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ensure more aid is delivered across Gaza faster and sustainably.

All that being said, however, it is vital that the world, in general, and Washington, in particular, do not lose sight of who caused this disaster.

It arises out of the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s wholly justifiable response, which was the attempted destruction of Hamas so it could never threaten such barbarities again. That dark day nearly two years ago saw more than 1,000 Israelis raped, tortured, murdered, and kidnapped. An additional 79 foreign citizens, including several Americans, were murdered. Israel’s robust military response to this grievous and genocidal attack was necessary and inevitable, indeed, sadly, it is what Hamas wanted. Israel Defense Forces could have relied less on overwhelming air power and more on ground force operations, but this would have saved Palestinian lives at the cost of more Israeli lives. After Oct. 7, Israel did not owe the Gazan people that. Hamas bears direct responsibility for the widespread suffering of Gazan civilians.

Too many commentators and governments willfully or ignorantly excuse Hamas and treat Israel as evil. Hamas is a terrorist group explicitly genocidal in intent and exerts authoritarian and abusive power over Gaza. It strives for the elimination of Israel in its entirety. There was murderous mob mayhem among Palestinian civilians on Oct. 7, some of them followed the fighters across the border into Israel to participate gleefully in the pogrom, but the attack was first and foremost a planned, antisemitic massacre by a cult that celebrates death almost as much among its people as among Jews.

Hamas’ founding charter embraces the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th-century document produced to advance antisemitic hate by using the fraudulent method of pretending to come from a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. The Hamas charter endorses an Islamic Hadith, questioned by many Islamic scholars, which states that “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘Oh Muslims… there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”

Hamas’s logo shows the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem encompassed by two swords. It paints Israel in Islamic Green. This formalizes Hamas’s desire to seize all of Israel for its caliphate, including all of Jerusalem’s holy sites regardless of faith. Arab antipathy toward Jews in Palestine does not suggest an ancient or even a vaguely historical Palestinian people; it has always been the product of Islamist extremism.

Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields is as defining of Hamas as courage is of the U.S. Marine Corps. It hides command networks underneath hospitals, arms factories in apartment blocks, arms depots in schools, and rocket units in parks and playgrounds. It does so partly to deter IDF strikes, knowing that Israel is reluctant to kill innocent civilians. And it does it, too, knowing that Palestinian deaths will redound to Israel’s discredit even though they are not Israel’s fault.

The strategy is perverse, loathsome, and objectively evil, but it works.

In the last couple of weeks, sensing international concern over the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Hamas withdrew from ceasefire talks with Israel. It banked that it could bide its time and wait for international pressure on Israel to grow and force the Jewish state into further concessions.

Galloping to Hamas’s aid, first came French President Emmanuel Macron announcing that this once proud, now groveling European nation will recognize Palestine’s statehood. They, Keir Starmer, prime minister of the equally morally lost Britain, did the same thing and promised to recognize Palestinian statehood in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire. What kind of incentive is that for Hamas, other than an incentive to hold out, let its people suffer more, and then watch statehood fall into its unworthy lap? Notably, the Europeans did not mention Hamas releasing Israeli hostages as a requirement for either France or the United Kingdom’s recognition. There is no recognition that statehood has always been viewed as something for a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, not a cadeaux to be given as reward for barbarism.

This is sick stuff from America’s respective oldest and closest allies.

Israel can and should allow more aid deliveries in Gaza, even if Hamas accrues some benefit. Israel should do so because it is a great democracy, a far more admirable country than its despicable enemies. It should do so because food will save innocent lives. But at the same time, no one should forget that Israel is fighting a defensive war against an attacker. 

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Gaza lies in ruins not because Israel went crazy but because of Hamas’s fanaticism, rape, murder, and extermination of Jews.

Those who would condemn Israel while simultaneously rewarding Hamas with moral cover and political beneficence should hold their heads in shame.