Meet the Liberators

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

 

The war between Israel and Hamas has ceased. That means Hamas can come out of hiding and start killing Gazans to reassert its grip on the population. It’s wasted no time doing so. While Israel rejoices in the return of its loved ones and the resumption of prewar life, here’s what’s going on in Gaza, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

 

Clashes around a hospital in Gaza City on Sunday left dozens dead, according to the Hamas unit that conducted the raid and members of the family it was fighting. Videos that emerged Monday—verified by Storyful, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp—show Hamas fighters dragging a number of men from the family into a public square in broad daylight, forcing them to kneel and executing them in front of a crowd of onlookers.

 

That’s just a snapshot of one incident among many. In Gaza, the absence of war doesn’t mean peace.

 

To the anti-Israel fanatics who marched through Western streets and campuses for two years, I say this: These are the men whose side you’ve been on. It is their cause you took up, not the cause of those they now murder. You echoed Hamas’s rallying cries for Jewish extermination. You dressed up like Hamas soldiers, waved their banners, legitimized their sadism, and sustained their spirit while they waited for the day when they could go back to openly killing their own.

 

Of course, many of the pro-Hamas activists understood perfectly well that they were supporting a murderous terrorist organization. How could they not, given that Hamas recorded their bloody rampage for the world to see? But for the protesters, the massacre of Jews was an expression of resistance, and that’s all that counted. Once Israel was defeated, so their thinking went, there would be no need for terrorism.

 

There is another, not insignificant, portion of the anti-Israel protesters who were even more out of touch with reality. I know this because they eagerly flaunted their ignorance online. These are people who rarely if ever thought about Hamas before their friends and classmates put on keffiyehs and headed down to the local tentifada. Such ignoramuses dismissed claims of Hamas brutality as Zionist propaganda. They were told, and accepted, that October 7 was an Israeli false-flag operation. Hamas, they genuinely believed, wanted Gazans to enjoy freedom.

 

This level of cluelessness even extended to some anti-Israel media figures. Last year, Briahna Joy Gray, who then hosted a show for the Hill, defended Hamas against charges of both Jew-hatred and theocratic authoritarianism: “It’s about eliminating the idea of a Jewish state,” she said, “ending a Jewish state, ending an ethno-nationalist state and having a state more like what we have in the United States of America.”

 

Gray, Bernie Sanders’s former press secretary, is free to imagine that Hamas just wants a pluralistic democratic republic of Palestine. Gazans are not.

 

The point is that all these people wanted the war to stop, and now that it has, they have an opportunity to see their heroes by the light of day. The terrorists have crawled out of their tunnels, so take a good look. They’re doing what they’ve always done: torturing Gaza and choking the life out of any hope for the future.

 

It’s a tragedy. But it’s not Israel’s problem, and it’s not ours either. It’s a problem for Gazans. And if you’ve been supporting their tormentors for two years, I hope you like what you see.