When terrorists tell you who they are, believe them.

Hamas’ terror-symps and useful idiots have spent four weeks marching through college campuses and city centers demanding a cease-fire. Meanwhile, Hamas tells the New York Times they want “permanent” war for their political purposes, and designed the October 7 massacres to get one. They envision a state of total war with Israel that will force other Arab nations to join them to destroy Israel and slaughter its Jews, and the weeks since have only brought them closer to that goal.

Or at least, they think so:

But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.

It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Well, they certainly got the war they wanted, that’s for sure. The rest of their plan has not unfolded as they envisioned, however. While Hezbollah has launched a few probing attacks in the north, they have not committed to a large-scale second front — and neither has Syria, even more notably, despite the fact that Bashar al-Assad owes his life to Iran and Russia. The other Arab states in the region despise Hamas and the Palestinians far more than they do Israel, largely because they can do business with Israel on a rational basis — and they fear the Iranian mullahs more than they do the Jews.

As Seth Frantzman wrote yesterday at Long War Journal, Hamas also underestimated the Israelis’ ability to adapt to their tactics in Gaza. As a result, the IDF has rapidly succeeded in dismantling Hamas’ infrastructure and killing its top commanders with surprisingly low losses for urban combat:

Battles continued in Gaza as IDF ground forces dig in and methodically clear terrorist infrastructure. The IDF’s advancement continued to shed light on Hamas using civilian areas to place rocket launchers and dig tunnels. Israel IDF spokesperson Read Admiral Daniel Hagari said Israel has struck 14,000 targets in Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack which killed 1,400 people in Israel. More than 100 tunnels have also been destroyed.

Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday that Gaza has been revealed to be the world’s largest “man-made terror base.” He portrayed current Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar as stuck in a bunker somewhere in Gaza, cut off from other Hamas commanders. Netanyahu has also hinted at the depth of Israel’s strikes saying “Hamas is finding out that we’re getting to places it didn’t think we’d reach. And the campaign is still underway.”

In Gaza, the IDF said troops had identified a terrorist cell hiding inside a mosque. On Monday, IDF reservists from the Negev Brigade of the 551st Brigade, and soldiers from the Yahalom combat engineers located tunnels inside a residence in a civilian neighborhood in the Beit Hanoun area. They then destroyed the tunnels after an IDF Oketz unit, which uses dogs, examined the area.

This is after only a couple of weeks of ground combat. Hamas expected to take Israel apart in a traditional invasion and urban combat, apparently convinced that international pressure would force Israel to fight too cautiously. Hamas changed that calculation with its ferocious response and rapid mobilization. Their hostaging strategy hasn’t worked either, which Hamas has used with great effect in the past. They wanted total war — and that’s exactly what they got.

Was this an unnecessary gamble? Maybe not. Hamas’ radical leadership may have needed a total war for more than just the external political goals, as the NYT reports. Before October 7, their Hamas contacts claim, the organization was going through an identity crisis. Were they a terrorist army bent on annihilation, or a political party with war aims but more interested in governance? The massacres turned out to be their Rubicon for the former:

The assault was so devastating that it served one of the plotters’ main objectives: It broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?

With the attack, the group’s leaders in Gaza — including Yahya Sinwar, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons, and Mohammed Deif, a shadowy military commander whom Israel had repeatedly tried to assassinate — answered that question. They doubled down on military confrontation.

If this is who Hamas is, and what Hamas wants, why bother suggesting a cease-fire at all? Israel doesn’t want one, and Hamas only wants it for tactical advantage for more terror attacks. We didn’t need this NYT article to know that, either; the history of such cease-fires with Hamas is perfectly instructive on that point.

When terrorists tell you who they are, believe them. And then act accordingly.

Addendum: Their bad bet may backfire in more ways than one. The rank and file are not impressed with the leadership’s commitment to jihad this month, apparently:

A senior Hamas commander told the UK’s Daily Mail that Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar had “destroyed” the lower levels of the terrorist movement by ordering the October 7 attack, according to a report by the British newspaper on Sunday. …

The commander pointed to the fact that Haniyeh and other leaders live in splendor abroad while he’s sustaining himself on some dates and olive oil.

Abu Mohammed also accused Sinwar of “acting like a street fighter,” saying Hamas terrorists were told to “do what they like” when attacking Israel.

The commander additionally stated that contact had been lost with Hamas’s political bureau, saying “We don’t know what direction to go in next. We don’t know which path to take. They destroyed us.”

If that’s the case, then the Hamas forces on the ground should surrender to Israel and humiliate Haniyeh and Sinwar.