A senior Hamas official stormed out of an interview Thursday after a BBC correspondent pressed him on the terror group's killing of hundreds of civilians in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
"I want to stop this interview," said Ghazi Hamad, the terror group's top spokesman, after BBC's Hugo Bachega questioned him on the massacre that took place earlier this month.
Bachega repeatedly challenged Hamad's claims that the attack was a military operation.
"How do you justify killing people as they sleep—you know, families? How do you justify killing hundreds of people?" asked Bachega just before Hamad ended the interview.
Earlier in the interview, Hamad had claimed that "there was no command—no command—to kill any civilians" and attributed civilian deaths to the fact that "that area is very wide, and there are many people there, and there [were] clashes and confrontation."
Bachega responded by citing the fact that Hamas terrorists invaded houses, leading Hamad to reiterate his claim that leadership did not order the killings of civilians. Bachega then asked why Hamas does not release the civilian hostages it took if the civilians were not the target.
"We are ready to deal positively with the point of these hostages," said Hamad. "We are not planning from the first moment to have the hostages or the—as you say—the civilians. I think that it is a military operation."
Hamad then expressed his displeasure with the premise of Bachega's followup question on how killing civilians advances the Palestinian cause.
"This is a shame for you to do that," said Hamad. "It is not a question. It is a shame for you to do that. We are fighter[s] for dignity and for freedoms."
Bachega's interview with Hamad comes after many media outlets have unquestioningly reported the terror group's claims about the war.
This trend was most apparent in the response to an Oct. 17 explosion at a hospital in Gaza, when outlets repeated the Hamas-controlled health ministry's now-discredited claim that Israel was responsible for it.