Witkoff first came onto the world stage with his role in securing the release of 38 hostages held by Hamas—in exchange for a cease-fire and Israel’s freeing of hundreds of jailed terrorists. Negotiations for the release of the remaining 28 hostages possibly still alive continue, but so far have not produced results. One of the outcomes of the previous deal was the perverse public spectacles that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad put on during the releases. And then there was the confirmation of the deaths of the Bibas children, the revelation of some of the details of their murder, and Hamas’s even more perverse use of their bodies.

To make sense of these sense-defying scenes, Gary Saul Morson turns to Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Russian progressives of Dostoevsky’s day routinely argued that crime is always a rational response to unjust social conditions. Since people are rational agents, all one has to do is change social conditions for crime to disappear. Dostoevsky never tired of mocking such naiveté. What had these Turks to gain from tossing those babies on their bayonets except the sheer pleasure that sadistic cruelty can provide—pleasure that has nothing to do with social conditions? By the same token, even when terrorists kill for what they take to be a just cause, there is almost always an element of sadistic pleasure.

Why kill babies before their mother’s eyes? Why make the killing a spectacle with an audience? One reason is that the cruelty is all the greater: the babies, after all, do not understand what is happening to them and can at most feel brief physical pain, but a mother will never forget the image and sound of her baby’s flesh being impaled. Forced witness multiplies horror.

Was something of this sort involved when Hamas fighters filmed their crimes or when Hamas recently created a spectacle by humiliating the hostages they were returning? That is something even the KGB did not do when trading prisoners with the West.

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.