In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom earlier today, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) strongly denounced the tactics of the terror group Hamas in instigating the recent “protests” at the Gaza border fence.

“Hamas is driving this whole thing,” said Rubio, correctly pointing out that these were not peaceful protests but a violent attack on Israel’s border. “Peaceful protests” involve signs, picket lines, chants, and loudspeakers — not Molotov cocktails and bombs attached to kites.

Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border is up in flames from a kite with an explosive attached to it, launched from Gaza https://t.co/znyX7FZggi

— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) May 17, 2018

A nonviolent, peaceful explosive, of course

— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) May 17, 2018

“Ask yourself this, what are elderly women and small children and disabled people doing trying to cross into Israel through Gaza?” continued Rubio. “It’s all being instigated by Hamas. Hamas is finding people that they believe the media will turn into sympathetic victims and putting them out there to be hurt.”

“They know what they are doing. They have done this over again and many in the media fall for it. This is 100% the fault of Hamas, and to some extent of course, the Palestinian Authority.”

Hamas has deployed this type of tactic for years, deliberately sacrificing their own people to be hurt or killed to create sympathetic images for the international media. They launch rockets from residential neighborhoods, recruit civilians as suicide bombers, store weapons in hospitals, and put women, children, and other vulnerable people on the front lines of “protests” like the recent attempted Gaza border breach.

Instead of investing money in schools and agriculture, they buy guns and bombs. Instead of building street lights and roads, they dig tunnels under the border wall to kill Israeli civilians.

The media’s lamenting cries for Israel to “negotiate” and “compromise” with the Palestinians is a dangerously indulgent fantasy that the issue is a mere property rights dispute. The Palestinian Authority has publicly declared that Israel does not have a right to exist. That is a fact.

If your enemy declares they want to murder all of your people, what is the compromise? Let them murder half of your people? Murder a quarter of them and injure another quarter of them? That’s patently absurd.

There can be no compromise unless and until the Palestinians agree that the Israelis have a right to be alive, and Israel has every right to defend the integrity of their borders. Rubio is correct to place the blame for these deaths on the terrorists who are the true culprits.

#Hamas hides behind human shields, including women and children, as they attack Israel. These “protests,” are not peaceful. Yet Israel wrongly remains the target of international condemnation for simply protecting its citizens from terrorists who seek their destruction.

— Senator Rubio Press (@SenRubioPress) May 17, 2018

Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter: @rumpfshaker.

[Cross-posted at The Capitolist.]