On Sunday night, an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Hamas official named Ismail Barhoum with a precision missile. Barhoum was at a hospital at the time, a fact that generated predictable outrage and condemnation from the media. Avraham Shalev explains how the World Health Organization (WHO) abets Hamas’s efforts to shield itself in medical facilities:

The WHO clings to a narrative that casts Gaza’s hospitals as innocent civilian sanctuaries unjustly targeted by Israeli forces. The WHO went even further and delivered supplies to terrorist headquarters. This isn’t mere oversight or diplomatic tiptoeing; it’s active complicity in a deadly charade.

Hamas’s exploitation of hospitals isn’t new—it’s a long-standing, grim reality. During the 2009 Israel–Hamas war, the Israel Defense Forces discovered that Hamas had shuttered entire sections of al-Shifa Hospital, repurposing them as its operational headquarters. Dave Harden, who served as the U.S. Agency for International Development mission director in the Palestinian territories, posted in November 2023 that during his tenure in 2014, it was “broadly suspected/understood” that al-Shifa functioned as Hamas’s base of operations.

On April 6, 2024, the WHO spearheaded a multiagency UN mission to survey al-Shifa’s devastation, [after it was site of a battle between the IDF and Hamas fighters], producing a report that described it as “an empty shell.” Strikingly, the word “Hamas” is absent from the document. Readers are left with no clue as to whom Israel was fighting or why the hospital had been besieged in the first place.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.