It tells you all you need to know about Hamas that its biggest victory to date against Israel–one that is no doubt being celebrated in the fortified bunkers that house its leadership–was the death of four young Palestinian boys on a Gaza City beach on Wednesday. The boys were apparently killed by an Israeli bomb or missile.

Needless to say, the Israel Defense Forces do not deliberately target children–any more than do the armed forces of the United States or other civilized powers. That is both morally abhorrent and strategically stupid: What possible purpose can be served in killing children? But while deeply harmful and counterproductive for Israel, this inadvertent strike was a big win for Hamas. It produced the most coveted of victories in modern warfare: a front-page picture, taken by the storied New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks, of one dead boy lying on the Gaza sand and another being carried in a man’s arms.

There is no surer or better way for Hamas to make its propaganda point, which is the only point of this entire exercise from its standpoint. Hamas, like other terrorist groups, knows it cannot win a military victory against a much more powerful enemy, but it can win a public-relations victory by fostering the illusion that Israel is the aggressor and the Palestinians its victims.

Such an image is as powerful as it is misleading. All informed observers know the facts.

They know that Israel accepted a cease-fire to end this conflict while Hamas rejected it.

They know that Israel gave up all of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in 2005 in the hope that peace would break out but that the result has only been an unending series of attacks on Israel that no nation could possibly tolerate.

They know that the IDF is careful to keep civilian casualties to a minimum but this is hard to do because Hamas deliberately places its headquarters and rocket-launching sites in the midst of civilian neighborhoods in the knowledge that this will either deter Israeli strikes or, if Israeli strikes occur nevertheless, they will result in collateral damage which Palestinian propagandists can use against Israel.

They know, finally, that it is Hamas, not Israel, that indiscriminately targets civilians by firing hundreds of rockets into Israel seemingly at random.

Israel is, in some ways, a victim of its own success because its Iron Dome anti-rocket system has shot down so many of the Hamas rockets that only one Israeli has been killed in the entire war–and he was a victim of a mortar shell, not a rocket. In the battle of victims, Israel is losing–there are more dead Palestinians than dead Israelis. But that does not make the Hamas cause just, any more than the fact that, in World War II, the U.S. armed forces inflicted a lot more casualties on Germany and Japan than they themselves suffered made the cause of the Nazis and Japanese militarists a just one.

Those are the incontrovertible facts. But what are facts before the power of an image?