Eman Badah, 31, gave birth a few days ago and while her premature son lies in an intensive care unit, she and her husband live in a bombed-out Gaza building with an insect-infested tent for a toilet.

Reem Saleha, 40, spent 14 hours walking with her seven children from Gaza City to Khan Younis to escape the violence enfolding her family.

Rozian Hwaila, 29, lives in a tent on land her family must rent just to have shelter over their heads.

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The trio of women are among the Palestinians that Wall Street Journal reporter Abeer Ayoub interviewed on this second anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 butchery that unleashed 24 months of almost unrelenting war. As negotiations began this week on U.S. President Trump’s plan for peace, they are of one voice.

“For me, anything that ends the war is good,” Badah is quoted. “I don’t care about Hamas’ weapons, its leaders, the fate of (their) prisoners. My husband, my son, and I – we are the ones paying the price.”

“Disarming Hamas is the last thing on my mind. I want this war to stop – at any cost,” Hwaila says even more bluntly.

“All I want is an end to the war, rebuilding, and for my kids to go back to school. All we want is safety,” Saleha emphasizes.

Ayoub, who has herself been accused by the pro-Israeli website HonestReporting of fomenting Hamas propaganda, makes clear her vox populi report is no unimpeachable survey of Palestinian opinion. But she goes to the core of that people’s unbearable plight with just one paraphrase of Eman Badah.

Badah wonders, she writes, “what Hamas thought would happen when it launched the 2023 attacks, why it didn’t prepare, and what it thinks could be gained from further fighting.”

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And she gives the 31-year-old new mother the essential summary quote: “What are we waiting for?” (Badah) said. “At the end of the day, we are suffering.”

We must pray that the world itself is nearing the end of the 730 days of this horrible, pointless, poisonous conflict. Its two years have reduced Gaza to rubble, cost approximately 75,000 lives, and set off a tsunami of antisemitic evil around the globe, including a devastating flood of Jew-hatred in our Canadian streets and institutions.

As if that were not sufficient cause to beg God to end it yesterday, whenever and however peace is finally secured, Badah’s question will reverberate indefinitely: What did Hamas think would happen?

From the first hours of this vile moment in world history, we at the Register have been editorially asking variations of that question premised on our unshakeable insistence that Hamas as a blood-stained politico-terrorist entity must be treated as distinct from justice for the Palestinian people.

For calling out the tactical insanity as well as the moral repulsiveness of Hamas’ orgy of rape, murder, throat-slitting and baby killing on Oct. 7, 2023, we’ve been chided and then derided by some of our fellow Catholics. For refusing to conflate Hamas’ wanton Jew-killing with the creation of a functional political and social jurisdiction for Palestinians, we’ve been accused of disservice to Catholic journalism.

The women’s voices cited above in no way serve to prove we were right all along. They do suggest that our critics, motivated by the best of Catholic charity and simply human empathy for a long-suffering people, might not have perceived the whole picture.

A final piece of that picture falls into place with a report from London’s Telegraph newspaper that as this week’s negotiations begin, the Hamas delegation insists it will free the remaining hostages only if the very criminals who led and participated in the Oct. 7 massacres are released from Israeli jails.

If that is not the essence of evil, then the Devil does not exist.

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But we as Catholics know from an early age that the wickedness and snares of the Devil are real, that Satan and his evil spirits do prowl through the world seeking the ruin of cities, families, lives, and souls. We are also taught to distinguish the smell of sulphur from the temptations and frailties of fallen humanity even in its pursuit of justice and peace.

It’s why we pray to St. Michael to defend us in battle, and to God to give us the clarity to discern, or at least ask, what those who perpetrated the violence thought would happen.