Let's put it this way: this may be the only statement Hamas has issued with which the Israelis will agree 100%. In fact, it's the main reason Iran has seen its strategic position crumble so badly over the last two years, and perhaps especially the past eight months. 

They chose their cause -- or really just their cover -- poorly.

Of course, Hamas means this as a compliment, but it reads more like an epitaph:

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said Iran, its strategic ally, was "paying the price" for supporting terrorist groups in Gaza in their decades-long struggle against Israel, after Israel launched large-scale attacks on Friday against Iran.

Hamas leaders have repeatedly thanked Iran for its military and financial support to the group in its fight against Israel, including during the ongoing war that erupted in October 2023.

"Iran is today paying the price for its steadfast positions in support of Palestine and its resistance, and its adherence to its independent national decision," Hamas said in a statement.

That is certainly true as far as it goes, but the truth of that statement goes much farther. Iran didn't just offer rhetorical support or even diplomatic support for the two-state solution, as do Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab nations now in the Abraham Accords partnership with Israel. The IDF didn't bomb Iran yesterday and won't continue to do so because Iran wanted Palestinian statehood. Iran wanted a genocide of the Jews and the destruction of Israel, and has funded the terror operations and proxies in the region that carry out that mission.

Including Hamas, of course, as is hardly necessary to add. And that's where the fatal error occurred. Hamas launched its October 7 atrocities with the expectation that it would prompt either a limited exchange with Israel or a united battle of Iranian proxies if Israel truly escalated. Thanks to that rash decision, Iran opened the door to the strategic catastrophe that followed. 

First, Israel made clear that they would conduct a full-scale war against Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah then tried to enter the war, which Israel pushed to a stalemate for almost a year to deal with Gaza. When Israel decided to deal with Hezbollah, they rapidly collapsed its leadership structure so badly that it couldn't function in its main mission to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. Assad had to flee within weeks of Israel's demolition of Hezbollah, and Iran lost all of the forward defenses against the exact kind of attack that Israel is now conducting in Iran, seemingly at will so far. 

But that's not the only way in which the regime chose poorly. They used the Palestinian cause as a cover for their tyrannical rule over the Iranian people, and the Iranians hate the Palestinians for that reason. Perhaps especially after October 7, Iranians worried more about getting destroyed by Israel because of Hamas rather than the need for a Palestinian state. And in that context, the ability of Israel to get precise intel on the leaders of the Iranian military might be a bit easier to understand, as Katie Pavlich pointed out earlier:

Israel being able to eliminate the Iranian regime’s top tier commanders, in a matter of hours, speaks volumes about how much the Iranian people hate the Ayatollahs. pic.twitter.com/TAmQEseteG

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 13, 2025

How does Israel get such precise and actionable intelligence? It's not by infiltrating Iran with Israeli spies, although that did happen in this instance, but those operators were targeting Iranian defense systems. For instance, this is just one of the ways that the Mossad attempted to disable Iran's ballistic-missile operations:

A convoy of ballistic missiles was attacked using anti-tank missiles launched from the ground