On Monday, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint against six senior Hamas leaders—three of whom have been killed by Israel—on charges of terrorism, participation in the murder of Americans, and so forth. Of the three who are alive, Yahya Sinwar is hidden in the tunnels beneath Gaza, Khaled Meshal is in Qatar (or possibly Turkey), and Ali Baraka in Beirut. Neither Lebanon nor Qatar has an extradition treaty with the U.S. Andrew C. McCarthy isn’t impressed:

It is obvious that prosecutors have been working on the Hamas complaint for weeks—presumably since well before [the lead defendant] Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated. It’s telling that the Justice Department chose to proceed by criminal complaint rather than an indictment. . . . To get an indictment, the Justice Department has to present the case to a grand jury—which might ask nettlesome questions, like: “Why are we charging a dead guy?” Because an indictment is a necessary step before a defendant can be tried, it usually conveys a seriousness of purpose, a readiness to proceed with prosecution.

By contrast, a criminal complaint is just a sworn affidavit by a law-enforcement officer (here, as in most federal cases, it’s an FBI agent assigned to the investigation) attesting that there is probable cause to charge various offenses.

In a follow-up article, McCarthy explains that the what the Justice Department is now involved in “is not a criminal case,” but “theater.”

A powerful nation that takes its defense seriously never responds to a foreign military enemy’s mass-murder attacks by filing a lawsuit. This one is even more unserious than that suggests because (a) as the Biden–Harris administration well knows, none of these . . . defendants will ever be arrested and extradited to the United States; . . . (b) if the administration were serious about charging Hamas, it could have done so at any time over the past four years; and (c) astonishingly, this impotent administration pose as counterterrorist tough-guy is timed as a response to Hamas’s cold-blooded murder last week of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a twenty-three-year-old American hostage for whom, through his eleven months of captivity by a terrorist organization designated as such under U.S. law for almost 30 years, the Biden–Harris administration took no meaningful action against Hamas.

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].