The last of the party guests left hours ago, and now it's just you and your spouse stuck with the cleanup. There are bottles and glasses stashed almost everywhere, the one ashtray you still have is out on the deck, overflowing with butts, and there are at least two loads worth of dishes to do.
The sudden shock of the doorbell almost jolts you out of the headache you feel coming on.
You make your way to the door and open it to find a nicely dressed man holding a bottle of wine. He says, "I'm here for the party."
"Who the hell are you?" you ask, annoyed that anyone would show up at this time of night.
"I'm the Wall Street Journal."
There's being late to the party, and then there's the latest big WSJ scoop about Hamas.
As it turns out, Hamas actually likes it when its civilians get killed in the war Hamas started.
On the off chance you've spent the last eight months in a cave with no WiFi — or have religiously avoided news from the Middle East for the last 25 years — Hamas is a Gaza-based terrorist organization posing as a legitimate government, dedicated to the destruction of Israel in particular, Jews wherever they can be found, and eventually, the West in general.
In pursuit of those aims — and lavishly funded with money and material, particularly from Iran — Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities while remaining hidden amongst civilians whose every death it celebrates on international TV. Even when the "dead" are play actors in yet another macabre "Pallywood" production.
You know — the same Hamas that has refused every ceasefire offer, no matter how generous, just to bring more death and destruction down on its people.
Hamas does it all with political-propaganda cover provided by governments and press outlets that are either fellow travelers, useful idiots, or just on the payroll. Perhaps the worst offenders are the non-profits and NGOs like the UN organization tasked with providing "relief" to the Arabs of Palestine.
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Every dead Gazan is a political win for Hamas, and today's WSJ story repeats Hamas's ridiculous claims about the number of dead civilians without question. It's genuinely sickening.
To their credit, however, WSJ's Summer Said and Rory Jones did obtain messages confirmed sent by Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwa to negotiating partners and Hamas senior leadership in Egypt and Qatar:
In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”
Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel. But the scale of the collateral damage in this war—civilians killed and destruction wrought—is unprecedented between Israelis and Palestinians.
"We have the Israelis right where we want them," Sinwa wrote in another message, and also referred to civilian casualties as "necessary sacrifices."
“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist in 2018.
These are all good things to have confirmed, and we know them thanks to some solid investigative reporting. But, in terms of news value, the WSJ's exclusive reveal is like catching Darth Vader on tape admitting, "I sometimes like to use the Force to choke officers who disappoint me."
We get it, Darth. We've seen this movie before.
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