Since Friday, Hamas murdered six leaders of the demonstrations against its rule. According to his family, one of the key members, Odai Nasser Saadi, was tortured for several hours before his body was dumped in front of their house. While protests, which according to some reports had drawn thousands, have petered out since the crackdown, scores of Gazans attended Saadi’s funeral procession yelling “Hamas out!” and firing guns into the air. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian critic of Hamas living in the West, has suggested that Hamas has begun floating cease-fire proposals (involving the release of a mere five hostages) so that it can focus on suppressing internal opposition. At present, Hamas fighters have trouble operating in the open without becoming targets of the IDF. It would seem, therefore, that the protests might be aided by continued Israeli military pressure.

Moumen Al Natour, who was arrested and tortured by the terrorist group for his involvement in similar demonstrations in 2019, writes:

The message of our movement is clear: the people of Gaza want to live, so Hamas must go, the hostages taken from Israel must be released, and this war must then finally come to an end.

Some in the West will doubtless be confused to see Palestinians taking to the streets in Gaza and openly calling Hamas terrorists, after nearly eighteen months of many protesters in Western cities openly supporting not just Palestinians, but Hamas as well. Take it from someone who has lived under Hamas since age eleven: to support Hamas is to be for Palestinian death, not Palestinian freedom. Hamas is killing us—through war, poverty, and extortion—not liberating us.

On top of its oft-employed strategy of using civilians to shield its fighters and launching rockets next to our shelters, Hamas has, throughout this war, systematically stolen and resold humanitarian aid, profiting from our hunger.

Hamas’s cruelty over the past eighteen months is merely the culmination of eighteen years of its brutal regime. . . . If our movement succeeds, not only will it end this war—but it will also prevent the next one.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.