Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas, was the bluntest, telling Qatar’s Al Jazeera network on Sunday that Hamas was “deceiving the public” when it called for “peaceful resistance” against Israel. Zahar, who remains a part of the terror group’s leadership said that the term was meant as a “clear terminological deception.”

On April 7, The New York Times called the Hamas-led weekly riots at Israel’s border fence “a tentative experiment with nonviolent protest.”

A week later, the Times noted the incongruity of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, a terrorist group known for using “suicide bombs, rockets and attack tunnels” to attack Israel, standing “before portraits of the giants of nonviolent resistance — Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.”

But it wasn’t just the appearance of a terrorist standing underneath champions of non-violence. The Times also noted that while the organizers of the so-called “Great March of Return,” as Hamas called the riots, asked that participants engage only in “peaceful disobedience,” rioters were, in fact, throwing “Molotov cocktails and other explosive.” This sent “mixed messages” as to whether these were peaceful protests as Hamas had advertised.

After this week, there are no more mixed messages. And it came not from Israel, but from the leader of Hamas. The surprising candor of some of Hamas’s top leaders dispelled any notion that the riots were peaceful, and that it was simply a tactic to cover for violent attacks against Israel.

Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas, was the bluntest, telling Qatar’s Al Jazeera network on Sunday that Hamas was “deceiving the public” when it called for “peaceful resistance” against Israel. Zahar, who remains a part of the terror group’s leadership said that the term was meant as a “clear terminological deception.”

Perhaps it was just bluster, but it wasn’t just Zahar. On Monday, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claimed that 62 people were killed during the riots.

In a televised interview following Monday’s riots, a Hamas official, Salah Bardawil,  said that“62 people martyred, 50 were Hamas.” Additionally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Gaza-based terrorist group, separately claimed membership of three others who were killed. So of the 62 people killed during Monday’s, 53 were admitted members of terrorist groups. In other words, 85% of those killed by the IDF were combatants.

Read More: The Tower