EDITORIAL: Hamas’ goal is to kill and create ‘permanent’ conflict

Former President Barack Obama has shamefully come down on the side of moral equivalence in the Middle East. He should know better.

In an interview released Saturday, Mr. Obama implied that Israel and Hamas are both to blame for the ongoing fighting. “Nobody’s hands are clean,” he said, adding, “All of us are complicit to some degree.”

This helps explain why America’s relationship with Israel was fraught with tensions during Mr. Obama’s eight years in the White House. The Obama administration’s preferred diplomatic approach was to appease Iran with pallets of cash in hopes it would rein in its terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Meanwhile, “The Obama strategy of pressuring Israel and indulging the Palestinians made no progress toward peace,” The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman noted this week.

Mr. Obama’s policies were utter failures. And his implication that bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists and Israel are equally at fault for stoking the flames of war is as dangerous as it is naive.

On Wednesday, The New York Times published interviews with various Hamas officials who are reveling in the carnage — even the deaths of their own people.

The Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent bloodshed are necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’ top leadership body, told the newspaper from Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Far from seeking peace, another Hamas higher-up told the Times that the group wants a “permanent” conflict with Israel in hopes of uniting various Arab nations against the Jewish state. The goal is to wipe Israel off the map and establish a Palestinian-Islamist state in its place.

As for those living in Gaza, the territory that Hamas runs? The group could not care less about bettering conditions for its own people or minimizing civilian deaths during war. Quite the opposite.

“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” Mr. al-Hayya said to the Times. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”

Indeed, Israel Defense Forces have released photos of Hamas rocket launchers located near mosques, nurseries and schools. The group not only seeks to kill innocent Israelis, it purposely puts its own citizens at risk in order to use their deaths for propaganda purposes.

This is whom Mr. Obama puts on equal moral footing with Israel, a functioning democracy fighting for its existence? Shameful.