The first thing is the script of what is not, tragically, a movie. The second is part of the ongoing battle between Israel and Hamas that invites comparisons to Imperial Japanese fanaticism.

On Tuesday the IDF recovered a phone call placed October 7 that captures a Hamas terrorist boasting of the murders he claimed to have just committed. Also on Tuesday, Hamas terrorists tried to infiltrate the Zikim area, just outside the Gaza Strip, by sea. The Israeli navy repelled the attack, neutralizing eight terrorists. 

These are two sides of the same coin of Palestinian Arab extremism. To understand how Hamas could have attempted another infiltration of Israeli territory more than two weeks after its murderous rampage into southern Israel claimed 1,400 Israeli lives and plunged the region into war, it helps to review the transcript of what the IDF uncovered in that phone call. 

It is not easy listening. The conversation capture is between a terrorist who had infiltrated southern Israel on October 7 as part of the surprise Hamas onslaught and his father in Gaza. It was extracted from the mobile phone of a murdered Israeli woman and posted by the IDF spokesman’s office on X. 

The terrorist had infiltrated Mefalsim, a kibbutz in southern Israel near the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. In Arabic, the terrorist says, “Dad, I am speaking to you from a Jew’s phone, I killed her and her husband, I killed 10 with my own hands.” He repeats that  number — 10 — while the murderer’s father cries with joy. “Their blood is on my hands, let me talk to Mom,” he added. The mother’s response was recorded as well: “I wish I was there with you,” she said.

“I was the first to enter under the guidance and with the help of Allah,” the assailant goes on, before shouting, apparently at fellow terrorists, “Kill, kill, kill! Kill them!”

Such was the  boastful message of a card-carrying member of Hamas’s Nukhba forces to his Gazan parents. It was not immediately clear whether the terrorist managed to flee back to Gaza or was dealt with by Israeli security forces before doing so. 

The Nukhba forces also include highly trained naval commando units. Some of those units participated in the October 7 onslaught, and it can be understood that others were on the offensive in today’s attempt to secure a beachhead close to Zikim, just north of the Gaza Strip.

During the attack, alarms sounded at Zikim and nearby Karmiya, another border community. Israeli fighter jets attacked a terrorist compound in the Strip from which the assailants had fled. As of Tuesday night an infiltration alert was in place at those communities, which had already been mostly evacuated since the Hamas attacks of October 7. 

While the Nukhba goons clearly caught Israelis off guard on that black day, that window has closed. What on earth could drive them to try it again, particularly when the IAF’s ongoing bombardment of terrorist targets in the northern section of the Strip point to an equation of rapidly diminishing returns for the terrorists?

In a word, the explanation is fanaticism. 

Think of that phone call, which is just as harrowing as the raw video footage of the October 7 massacres released by the Israeli government, if not more so. The parents of the terrorist are so overcome with pride for the crimes their son feverishly tells them he has committed that they can barely contain themselves. 

While the parents themselves may not be members of Hamas, the conversation is one that repeats itself with variations in details and intensity throughout Gaza. What it speaks to is a culture of death that is  absolutely bereft of any human or political sensibility or, for that matter, any grip on reality. 

That might sound overly familiar to anyone who recalls the warped culture of Imperial Japan that spawned kamikaze pilots and an insistence on doing battle even after an atomic bomb served as a fiery memo that the Rising Sun was, one way or another, going to set pretty fast.

Hamas clearly has not gotten the memo that it is now part of history. It still holds hostages. Israel has the edge back, but the terrorists could hold yet more surprises.

Ordinary Gazans appear to have the backs of these depraved individuals, who are wrongly and toxically painted as martyrs in their communities. This underpins the reality that more Israeli military muscle may not be enough to stamp out the scourge of Hamas.