Nearly two years have passed since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in southern Israel that saw 1,200 Israelis brutally murdered, scores of innocents maimed, raped and tortutred and over 250 kidnapped into Gaza by Hamas terrorists.

And while some Canadians have excused, rationalized and even justified Hamas’s atrocities, the reality is that Hamas has always pursued a single objective: the complete destruction of Israel.

On August 27, HRC Assistant Director Rob Walker was published in Postmedia newspapers the Belleville Intelligencer, the Kingston Whig Standard and The Trentonian, where he laid out a simple truth for Canadians: lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis will remain impossible until Hamas is fully defeated.

The footage from early August featured an emaciated man, being forced to dig his grave while his torturers filmed him.

It depicted Israeli hostage Evyatar David, filmed by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, as a propaganda piece meant to demoralize Israelis.

Even as Hamas went out of its way to advertise its depravity, it barely registered in the Canadian media. The depravity remains at the core of the current Gaza war.

Almost two years earlier, the day the current war began, on Oct. 7, 2023, a Palestinian man’s voice could barely contain his excitement.

“Your son killed Jews,” the man from Gaza said in a WhatApp call to his father.

“I killed 10 with my bare hands,” he said, before asking to have his mother put on the phone.

His father, beaming with pride, responded with “Oh, my son, God bless you,” and his mother joined in, saying “I wish I was with you.”

That recorded call, of a Hamas terrorist who purportedly murdered 10 Israelis that morning, is a testament to the chilling massacres that took place that morning across southern Israel, as thousands of Palestinian terrorists from the Hamas group from Gaza invaded.

They were also joined by large numbers of civilians from Gaza, who joined the melee and engaged in widespread looting from Israeli homes.

The attacks were not simply an invasion of Israel; it was an exhibition of wanton savagery including rape, murder, torture, and kidnapping. Many of the terrorists, proud of their actions, actively filmed themselves murdering and mutilating innocent people, and the raw videos are widely available online. Much of the footage is also a testament to the joy that accompanied the killing.

To Canadian audiences, such actions are horrific, but also perplexing. What could motivate Palestinians – among them former workers in the Israeli villages that were attacked – to commit such acts of inhuman brutality?

For Canadians looking for a rationale, it is incomprehensible to imagine what possibly could have driven Hamas that day, given it knew what would be the inevitable response from Israel. Arguments blaming Israeli policy fail to explain the Palestinian savagery or the glee in butchering innocents. It also fails to explain the short-sighted nature of the attack, given that it was doomed to spur an inevitable war.

Canadians need not be baffled. Though rarely reported, Hamas officials have long made their goals clear.

In an interview with Lebanese television barely two weeks after Oct. 7, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad had no qualms about saying that Israel “must be finished.”

He specified that “the Al-Aqsa Flood,” the Hamas code name for the massacres, “is just the first time. There will be a second, a third, a fourth,” adding, “will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

Hamad laid out the brutally simple worldview of Hamas, already written in its founding charter: that Hamas did not sadistically murder scores of Israelis because of a political or territorial dispute with Israel, but because it saw it as the opening salvo in a quest to ultimately annihilate the Jewish state, and wipe it off the face of the Earth.

Hamas is above all a fundamentalist Islamic movement that sees the eradication of Israel as a supremely religious duty. In place of Israel, Hamas envisions the establishment of an Islamic state-style caliphate.

The war Hamas started could end if it freed hostages and laid down arms. Unless it is defeated, it will never stop seeking to murder Israelis, and Palestinians will continue to suffer under its bloodthirsty rule by bringing war upon it.

There can be no peace without a defeated Hamas.

Seeking anything but the group’s defeat is akin to putting a Band-Aid on a tumour.

Robert Walker
Assistant Director
HonestReporting Canada