Last week, demonstrations spread throughout the Gaza Strip demanding improved living conditions and an end to gas and electricity shortages. Crowds chanted “Let us live!” and some even called for an end to Hamas rule. The terrorist group responded by sending hundreds of armed men into the streets on Friday, successfully bringing the protests to an end. Bassam Tawil writes:

At the same time as the Palestinians were demonstrating in the Gaza Strip, armed clashes erupted in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, where at least eleven people were killed, including a senior Palestinian security official, and several others were injured. . . . . According to Palestinian sources, several protesters were wounded, some critically, when Hamas security officers used force to disperse the protests in the Gaza Strip.

Reports from the Gaza Strip—almost completely ignored by the international media—said that Hamas security officers stormed the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah and abducted three Palestinian men who were wounded during the protests. . . . Hamas officers also physically assaulted the Palestinian journalist Walid Abdel Rahman, a correspondent for the Palestinian Authority’s Palestine TV, while he was covering the demonstrations in Jabalya. Abdel Rahman said he was beaten by officers who identified themselves as members of Hamas’s Internal Security force.

It is no secret that Hamas has been investing millions of dollars in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons to attack Israel, while ignoring the dire economic crisis in the Gaza Strip.

The voices of the anti-Israel activists around the world who regularly rush to condemn Israel for seeking to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism have gone silent when it really comes to protecting Palestinians. The activists, who describe themselves as “pro-Palestinian,” do not actually care about Palestinians, especially those living in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon’s refugee camps. If Israel cannot be blamed, the world does not care.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].