In a sharply worded commentary published by American Thinker on September 19, 2026, author Michael Berenhaus argues that defenders of Hamas around the world will be remembered as “terrorist-enablers” and that responsibility for every death in the Israel-Hamas war rests solely with Hamas.
The piece, which the outlet classified under its foreign policy and Hamas categories, centers on a moral claim: that those who blame Israel — and, by extension, Jews with no connection to Israel — for the deaths of Hamas fighters and Gazan civilians in the war are defending “pure evil.” Berenhaus writes that “100 percent of those killed in the war between Israel and Hamas are the direct responsibility of Hamas,” and that anyone unable to accept that premise has “no sense of right and wrong.”
The October 7 attack and the conduct of the war
Berenhaus opens his account of the conflict with the October 7 attack, in which he says Hamas and civilians who joined the massacre stormed into Israel and targeted women, children, babies, and festival-goers. He writes that they murdered 1,200 people and dragged 250 hostages, including infants, into Gaza, and he describes that attack as the origin of the war.
From there, the column turns to how Hamas has conducted the fighting since. Berenhaus asserts that when Israel struck back, Hamas fired from behind its own people and from tunnels under hospitals and mosques, and that Hamas built no shelters for civilians while its fighters hid underground. He argues that no army in modern urban warfare has faced an enemy that so deliberately used its own women and children as human shields, and he credits Israel with fighting with restraint under those conditions. In one of the column’s more pointed lines, he writes that “animals protect their young” while Hamas does the opposite.
The central accusation is that Hamas placed its own civilians in the line of fire and then used the resulting carnage to generate international outrage against Israel. Berenhaus poses that as a question about leadership — what kind of leaders do this to their own people as a tactic to gain world attention and support — and then asks who would fall for it. His answer is that many did and still do, and he predicts that historians will condemn that gullibility.
A critique of casualty figures and their consumers
A significant portion of the commentary focuses on how casualty numbers from the war are reported and received. Berenhaus faults what he calls “naïve newsreaders” for accepting Hamas’s casualty figures, noting that those figures are collected by a regime designated as a terrorist organization by virtually all of the world’s democracies and one that carried out an attack directly aimed at civilians. He lists what he says Hamas’s numbers do not break out: the share of the dead who were Hamas fighters, Gazans who died of natural causes, and those killed by Hamas’s own inaccurate rocket fire or by the group targeting members of rival factions it brands as collaborators with Israel.
His conclusion about the audience for those numbers is that many supporters seemed remarkably uninterested in examining them beyond their usefulness in condemning Israel. He also raises a counterfactual that he describes as an “astonishing reality” — that Hamas would have murdered every one of Israel’s roughly seven million Jews had it not been stopped, which he notes would amount to almost half the world’s Jewish population. He urges Hamas supporters to consider that before criticizing “the most discriminated people in world history.”
The call for Hamas’s defeat
Berenhaus points to Hamas leaders’ vows to repeat the October 7 atrocities again and again, and to the fact that the group has not fully disarmed. Israel, he writes, cannot pretend that the organization responsible for the massacre no longer poses a threat. His prescription is unambiguous: Hamas must be fully defeated and disarmed, and Israel must be able to protect its citizens from another October 7.
He closes on a note of confidence, writing that Israel will survive this fight as it has so many times before and will thrive, and returning to his opening theme — that those who denounce Israel’s “defensive military operation with righteous indignation” will be forever remembered as terrorist-enablers.
A voice in an ongoing debate
The column is part of a wider and continuing argument over how responsibility for civilian deaths in Gaza should be assigned, how casualty data should be treated when it originates with a party to the conflict, and whether international criticism of Israel’s campaign amounts to enabling Hamas. The American Thinker piece takes a firm position on all three, framing the war as one in which the moral accounting is already settled and the only remaining failure is that of outside observers to see it that way.
Berenhaus also alludes to the protesters, academics, and others worldwide whom he says are attacking Jews in defense of Hamas, and he ties the question back to free expression, writing that the ability to speak one’s mind is more crucial than ever. The commentary ends with a brief note inviting readers who find the outlet’s work resonant to support it with a donation.
For readers tracking the debate, the value of the column lies less in new information than in a clearly stated position: that Hamas bears sole responsibility for the war’s dead, that its figures and its supporters should be treated with suspicion, and that anything short of its full defeat leaves Israel exposed to another attack like the one on October 7.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-world-should-stop-siding-with-hamas-terrorists/