Hamas -- those terrorists who run Gaza, did not get what they wanted, so, after getting pounded in retaliation, they cried uncle and begged for a ceasefire.

Two days of unprovoked rocket fire into Israel did not get them the PR mileage they expected. Usually the media come to their aid, but this time, not so much.

In fact, the New York Post, in its print edition, labelled them “monsters.”

The New York Times, always reliably favorable to Israel’s enemies, in war and peace, did not materialize, not this time.

The paper is still red-faced and smarting from its cartoon debacle. The editors need to give it a rest. So, for the time being at least, there won’t be much coming from the Times that hints, tastes or smells like anti-Semitism, rendering it out of the game, a game the jihadists play precisely to win over the media, starting with the Times.

Sorry, not for this round, with the Times mending its wounds, and nobody watching CNN anymore; zapped by the Mueller report.

For Hamas…likewise Fatah and all the rest of them…the battlefield is the press. They don’t count miles won, but column inches gained.

Plus, the pictures. Somewhere, a grandmother is crying, and she is ready for her close-up…. written, produced and directed by jihad central. (Read this.)

The temptation to have the IDF go in and take care of business once and for all is so easy to ponder but so difficult to achieve. This enemy nests among the civilian population, placing any Israeli government in a terrible moral quandary.
Yes, for Palestinian Arab jihadists, wartime is show-time. Without a compliant media, it’s like playing to an empty room.

The best they could do, over the weekend, was mention something about a pregnant woman getting hit. (The same woman and she is always pregnant.) Except that then Islamic Jihad admitted that the baby and pregnant woman were killed by their own rockets.

Not much traction anyway, since by this time everybody knows the score, that women and children are what the Islamists use for their human shields… (which is why the temptation to have the IDF go in and take care of business once and for all is so easy to ponder but so difficult to achieve. This enemy nests among the civilian population, placing any Israeli government in a terrible moral quandary. How cleverly these jihadists use their cowardice to their advantage.)

Yes, the media gave it the “cycle of violence” treatment, but that’s an improvement over the usual coverage, which finds only protesters in Gaza, never terrorists.

Hamas’s weekly rioters at the border were once referred to at the Times as picnickers.

There was no way to deny this weekend’s barrage of 700 rockets as anything but one-sided aggression, and to say otherwise is to leave yourself open to ridicule.  

Recite, therefore, our two House Islamists, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, as ridiculous.

Good enough, so far as the media, at least this once, refusing to party with Hamas and its fellow revelers, like Abbas and his PA/Fatah/PLO.

All these factions, including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, can’t get along with one another, but it falls on Israel to share the Land and live with them in peace. Hardly.

To tell it boldly would be too much, that it’s been one way violence from 2005 when Ariel Sharon threw out the Israelis and gave up Gaza to the Arabs, who handed it over to Hamas. Perhaps it’s too late to mention, that the Gaza/Gush Katif blunder, courtesy of the Left, equals the Golden Calf and the Sin of the Spies in the book of Ninth of Av consequences.    

The price for that Leftist doozy is still being paid…with no end in sight. That was an error…a whopper of biblical proportions.

Gaza was handed over to the Palestinian Arabs as a gift-wrapped invitation to a Two-State Solution. The result? A million-plus Israelis who get 10 seconds to rush for a bomb shelter.

A true friend of Israel, President Trump gets it, and when he stiffs Hamas, the show can’t go on…not as it did under Iran’s patsy, Obama.   

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His latest is the newsroom drama “News Anchor Sweetheart.”  His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com