The Western politicians who seem to have made their peace with the survival of Hamas’s rule in Gaza should read more about life under the regime. That’s true of Hezbollah in Lebanon as well, and other Iranian expansionist satrapies.

These parties’ responsibility for the deaths of Palestinian civilians is obviously important. But so are the details of civilian existence in an enclave run by totalitarian fanatics.

Today’s New York Times has a pretty expansive look into Hamas’s governance-by-terror. Unfortunately, you have to work a bit to get there: While the article is ostensibly about Hamas, the group of reporters begin with a droning monologue about supposed Israeli misdeeds in order to satisfy what appears to be the paper’s moral-equivalence quota.

But eventually we get to the point. “The government in Gaza is living through a time of challenges,” said Ismail Thawabteh, the director general of the Hamas-run government media office. “But it’s still in place carrying out its duties every day.”

When applied to Palestinian civilians, those “duties” are deeply unpleasant. The piece first recounts the experience of Amin Abed, a critic of Hamas who was warned with mafia-style threats and then beaten nearly to death with hammers and pipes. He was saved by bystanders, otherwise he would probably not have been alive to tell his story to the Times from his hospital bed.

He has no kind words to say about Israel or Hamas; regarding the latter, he told the paper: “They almost killed me, those killers and criminals.”

Abed’s fellow Gazans “have been attacked or threatened for criticizing the group. Some Palestinians have been shot, accused of looting or hoarding aid.” Ehab Fasfous’s home was raided at gunpoint after he criticized Hamas.

Everything in Gaza is touched by Hamas. If aid convoys want their humanitarian aid to get to anyone, they first “must coordinate their efforts with local Hamas leaders.” Hamas has been known to shoot “looters,” but that can apply to any non-Hamas-affiliated Palestinian disbursing aid.

Beyond that, the story notes plainly Hamas’s strategy of firing at Israeli troops from civilian homes, hiding hostages among civilian neighborhoods, freely using “humanitarian” zones in a bid to draw Israeli fire, and pockmarking residential blocks with entrances to terror tunnels inside private homes.

Yes, we already knew that, but the scale of the tunnel system is a reminder that during peacetime, when Hamasniks aren’t using your house as a rocket launching pad, they might commandeer it to drill a tunnel through your kid’s bedroom floor.

“There’s no such thing as being outside residential areas in Gaza,” senior Hamas official Husam Badran told the Times. “These pretexts, primarily made by the Israeli occupation army, are meaningless.”

While there doesn’t seem to be anything in the region quite as miserable as life under Hamas, Lebanese civilians aren’t having much of a picnic these days thanks to Hezbollah. In South Lebanon, during wartime, civilians face many similar challenges from Hezbollah that Gazans do from Hamas: namely, the terror groups’ raison d’etre is to kill and be killed. So they fire in order to draw fire.

But even during lulls in the conflict, parts of the country, including Beirut, appear to be somewhat frozen in place. That is largely because Iran has promised retaliation on Israel for Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader in Tehran this summer. Everyone knows Hezbollah is Iran’s chosen tool to deliver that retaliation, so airlines have been canceling service to and from Beirut, according to reporting from last month in the Times. Five weeks later, we’re still waiting for the retaliation.

Hezbollah has so fully conquered South Lebanon that the Lebanese army apparently won’t allow journalists into the area without approval from “the group.” Many residents have fled from “Hezbollah and their war,” as one civilian put it—a mirror reflection of northern Israel, which has seen the prolonged displacement of entire towns because of Hezbollah and its war.

This is life under the thumb of the “revolutionary liberation” movements that are essentially Iranian colonies living under tyranny not merely supported by Tehran but enabled by the West, sometimes with money and sometimes with the kind of diplomatic cowardice we are witnessing from Washington and from the capitals of Europe, who don’t consider defeating their enemies a particularly high priority at this time.