Since late March, Palestinian Authority (PA) spokesmen and official news outlets have been claiming that Jerusalem has deliberately spread COVID-19 in the West Bank, and that it has interfered with Palestinian efforts to contain the spread of the virus and treat those infected. Officials in the Gaza Strip have made similar assertions. These claims are patently false. But, though Israel is not at fault, Sander Gerber writes, both the Hamas regime and, to a lesser extent, the PA, are woefully unprepared to deal with the burgeoning health crisis:

The Palestinians have received more development and humanitarian assistance over the last 30 years than any other group of people in history. Yet they completely lack the organization and infrastructure needed to combat this pandemic. The PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza have both squandered billions of dollars of aid that was meant to build a public-health system, spending the money instead on corruption, incitement, and terrorism.

[Gaza’s] critical shortages [of medical supplies] are not the result of any action or inaction taken by Israel. Medical supplies pass through Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt every day. The West Bank has virtually no restrictions on medical imports from Israel or Jordan. The real story is a shortage of leadership. In the West Bank, the PA steals foreign-aid money for its own enrichment and is widely considered among the most corrupt governing entities in the world. In Gaza, Hamas uses it to build rockets and terror tunnels. The result is the same. Both groups fund hatred of Israel and steal the people’s money, rather than make investments in healthcare and welfare. The Palestinian people pay the price.

As the world economy braces for tough times ahead, the PA already announced it will prioritize payments to terrorists ahead of salaries for teachers and public servants. They spend $350 million per year on a “pay-for-slay” program, which provides generous monthly stipends to terrorists who murder Jews. . . . In Gaza, Hamas spends at least $100 million per year on terrorist activities.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.