A senior Hamas official in exile admitted that Hamas’s armed wing, Qassam Brigades, was responsible for abducting and killing the three Jewish teens in June. The murders were followed by the killing of a Palestinian boy, leading to riots and triggering the ongoing war in Gaza. The founding member of Hamas’s military wing, Saleh al-Arouri, boasted of the group’s direct responsibility in the attack at a conference in Turkey organized by the World Association of Muslim Scholars on August 20.

Israel has always accused Hamas for the crime, but, until now, the Gaza terrorists neither admitted nor denied involvement—they only cheered and praised “the hands that captured them.”

“There was much speculation about this operation; some said it was [an Israeli] conspiracy,” al-Arouri clarified. “The popular will was exercised throughout our occupied land, and culminated in the heroic operation by the Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron. This was an operation from your brothers in Qassam undertaken to aid their brothers on hunger strike in [Israeli] prisons.”

This admission further proves that “Hamas has no qualms whatsoever about targeting innocent civilians,” as Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said in response.

The admission also shows, given media coverage of the conflict, that Hamas can get away with almost anything. Saleh al-Arouri declared that “Allah has chosen and willed that a large battle would be ignited.” Yet Israel is portrayed as the genocidal aggressor. In his article “The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times in Israel-Hamas War,” investigative journalist Richard Behar revealed the bias the media—particularly the New York Times—has against Israel. Quoting his colleague Gary Weiss, he wrote, “We’re not just talking bad journalism. We’re talking about journalism that functions as a tool of a terrorist organization, Hamas: breathlessly pushing its narrative, whether cowed by its threats, sympathetic to its cause, or simply ignorant.”

Thanks to the media, Hamas officials can get away with using ambulances as getaway vehicles, hiding weapons and militants in hospitals and schools, and digging tunnels under mosques. Hamas militants are tolerated for executing Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel in an operation they code-named “Strangling the Necks.” They can get away with 11 ceasefire violations and still receive invitations for more negotiations. Hamas authorities can trigger a war that kills 2,092 of its own people and 68 Israelis.

They can do all these things and brag about it.

With such hostility against Israel—from Hamas, the media and even Britain and the United States—the Jewish nation is in dire straits. These problems are fulfilling Bible prophecy, which says violent events will actually culminate in Jerusalem becoming a “city of peace.” For more insight, read Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s article “Watch Jerusalem!”