On Friday, Hamas and Israel stopped hostilities as per an agreed-upon ceasefire. Though Israel’s agreeing to the cessation of hostilities was expected as their supply of compressed air for their sirens was running out, many were surprised at Hamas, and Gazans were disappointed. Their charter explicitly calls for ‘death to all Zionists no matter what’ and Gazans have come to rely on this as the pathway to improving their lives.

“Some people are accusing us of running out of rockets. Not true,” Awana Shahid the spokesman for Hamas, said from his office in Qatar. “We learned from our friends in Hezbollah that when you go to war against Israel, you can never have too many rockets. Sooner or later, you will get to use them, no matter what international law says. No one really cares about that particular law. Shooting rockets at Israel is like going 60 miles per hour in a 55 miles per hour zone. Sure, it’s illegal and people die, but no one is going to stop you.”

Shahid explained the real reason for the ceasefire.

“We ran out of virgins,” said Shahid, more than a bit chagrined. “We started digging out the collapsed tunnels and the count is up over 200. They were all good men and the contracts are pretty clear on this point. That means we are in the hole for over 1,400 virgins and we only had about one thousand virgins in stock. Fortunately, we are getting lots of support from our friends in Jordan and Syria. They have plenty of dead Palestinians, way more than us, but they were killed by Arabs and not martyred so they don’t need any of their virgins. Iran has a big stockpile of virgins but they said they may need them very soon so we aren’t taking any from them.”

“Everyone thinks it is simple to kill zionists,” Shahid said. “We don’t have to invest much in rockets since they don’t have to go very far or be very accurate. We don’t really care where they land as long as some of them land inside Israeli cities. And since the Iron Dome is so expensive, we believe in a strategy of quantity over quality, even if a lot fall on our own people. Our fan club in the US is working on that problem as well. They love Palestinians so much that they want us to succeed in our national endeavor; death to all Jews. They are working on making the Iron Dome illegal. But we need the virgins and our supporters in the US just can’t supply them. We had a problem last year and we turned to California’s Free Palestine Club.” They sent us a list of virgins but half were lesbians and half were men in abayas. When our shahids took off the hijabs to gaze at the California virgins, they were so disappointed they wanted to leave paradise and come back to Gaza. You can’t run a decent Jihad with fake virgins.”

Shahid was asked about Hamas’ plans for the future.

“Our charter is all about killing the Jews,” Shahid said. “We thought that would be easy. We could bust it out in a year or two and then go home to wherever we came from. It is taking a bit longer than we expected but we are making new friends in the US. We should do it this time around and after we kill the Jews, I am sure Allah will send us some other goal to aspire to. We just met with a delegation of ‘Gays for Palestine’ and that gave us some great ideas for future projects.”