https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57xdV_mIsA
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20356/unrwa-jihad-against-israel
“Hamas is involved in everything. Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. Hamas manages UNRWA. They are those in charge in the agency. From the day Hamas came to power, they took control of everything. The UNRWA employees are from Hamas. The heads of the departments and the senior staff are Hamas members.” —Palestinian from the Gaza Strip to an Israeli officer in a recorded call, X (Twitter) December 27, 2023.
It is now clear that the UN heads were lying when they said they were unaware of the involvement of their employees with terror groups. In fact, they knew but did their utmost to appease Hamas.
In a moment of rare honesty, in 2021 the UN acknowledged that UNRWA’s school curriculum referred to Israel as “the enemy,” taught children mathematics by counting “martyred terrorists,” and included the phrase “Jihad is one of the doors to paradise” in Arabic grammar lessons.
“Before UNRWA, this terrorist accomplice [Abdallah Mehjez] worked for the BBC…” — Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.
“Now is the time for reform. Reform for rehabilitation – so that the minds of Palestinian children can no longer be poisoned. So that there can be a shared vision of peace in this land.” — Lt. Col. (res.) Peter Lerner, X (Twitter), January 27, 2024.
Western taxpayers should not be funding terror groups disguised as humanitarian organizations.
UNRWA was established to support the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees, not to support the development of terrorism.
It is time to dismantle UNRWA and end the farce of Palestinian “refugees.” There are no real refugees. There are millions of Palestinians living — often in unspeakable conditions (so that Israel can be blamed) — under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
It is the UN that enables and perpetuates this human rights abuse. These Palestinians live under Palestinian and Arab regimes that should long ago have absorbed them instead of keeping them in “refugee camps” with the cheery “humanitarian” promise that they will one day flood Israel, turn the Jews into a persecuted minority in their own country, then bring about its demise.
https://www.jns.org/israeli-defense-conference-paints-day-after-scenario-with-israel-firmly-in-control/
While the world pressures Israel, even before its war against Hamas has ended, to turn the Gaza Strip over to the Palestinian Authority, Israeli security experts delivered the opposite message at a security conference Thursday, saying Israel must remain in Gaza for a long time.
The Israel Defense Conference 2024, which took place in Ashkelon on Jan. 25, was organized by the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF). Thursday’s conference was the third held by the organization, and the most successful, with 500 attending.
The IDSF has grown in reputation following Oct. 7 as it has been warning for years that Israel needs to reevaluate its security posture. The group, comprising thousands of former security officers, was founded in 2020 by senior retired IDF personnel concerned that Israel was entering a dangerous period.
“For two years now, we have warned that the State of Israel has been on the road to war,” said Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, co-founder and chairman of IDSF, in his opening remarks.
“We predicted that Israel was going to face a Six-Day War scenario, or a Yom Kippur scenario, in which we would find ourselves completely surprised.”
In the 1967 SixDay War Israel struck first, quickly defeating its enemies. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War Israel was taken by surprise, hesitated to carry out a last-minute preemptive strike, and suffered heavy losses.
“Unfortunately, we found ourselves in the Yom Kippur reality that we so feared, a surprise scenario that caught Israel off guard,” he said, referring to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas invasion.
Read this episode of pluck and fairness in the American spirit:
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA )waves Israeli flag from his roof after pro-Hamas protesters gather outside his Pa. home: https://nypost.com/2024/01/27/news/john-fetterman-mocks-pro-hamas-protesters-with-israeli-flag/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app
And here is a fact of ironic truth:
Among the protesters and Congressional legislators and journalists who harbor and promote anti-Israel bias, you can bet that the majority, whether in diagnosis, illness and cure, or in their cameras, cellphones and computers, or in general security technology, profit from Israeli research and development in some form every single day.
Michael Ordman’s catalogs of the foregoing are essential reading. rsk
www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
Druze woman saved Jewish town. On Oct 7, Druze IDF Sgt Maj Iyyad Yousef captured two Hamas terrorists who invaded the Jewish town of Yated where he lived. His wife Nasreen then interrogated them in Arabic and extracted vital information that helped IDF forces to eliminate the threat to their town.
https://worldisraelnews.com/how-a-druze-woman-saved-her-jewish-town-on-october-7/
Foreign students maintain Gaza border dairies. (TY Hazel) Dairy farms near Israel’s Gaza border have been supplying milk uninterruptedly since the outbreak of the Oct 7 war thanks to a few staff that remained behind while most residents were evacuated. Among those who stayed are university students from Africa and Asia.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/undeterred-by-oct-7-massacre-foreign-interns-keep-gaza-periphery-dairy-farms-afloat/
Good news from Bet Shemesh. (TY Yanky) Journalist Hanoch Daum offered to pay a Tel Aviv restaurant owner for the meals of the IDF soldiers sitting at a table. The owner replied, “you’ll have to get in line, six other people have offered to do the same thing before you!” (more articles below)
https://www.shemesh.co.il/en/highlights/good-news-corner-11th-january-2024/about
Read all about it. Don’t miss these: A wallet lost in Gaza 10 years ago returned to its owner. A record 39,000 ADI organ donor cards were issued in 2023. 31,000 Jewish Israeli babies were born since Oct 7. Volunteers present soldiers with gift packages for them to give to their wives on returning from Gaza. And more…
https://www.shemesh.co.il/en/highlights/good-news-corner-11th-january-2024/about
In Gaza together, re-united in maternity ward. IDF reservists Eliya Rosen and Daniel Novogrotzky fought together for six weeks in Gaza. They were drafted on Oct 7, to join the same IDF unit. They were astonished to meet up again when they discovered that their wives were sharing a maternity room at the same hospital.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/383577
IFCJ donates $19 million in 100 days. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) provided $19 million in aid and assistance to thousands of Israelis in the first 100 days of the war with Hamas. IFCJ will continue to support evacuees and displaced war victims with basic needs and other essentials throughout 2024.
https://www.jns.org/wire/ifcj-provides-19-million-in-aid-in-first-100-days-of-war/
https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-782687
14 ambulances donated. North Carolina based Samaritan’s Purse has donated 14 new MDA ambulances to replace those destroyed by Hamas on Oct 7. In addition, the organization is donating seven armored ambulances to MDA, which are still in production and will be dedicated this spring.
https://www.jns.org/samaritans-purse-replaces-14-mda-ambulances-lost-on-oct-7/
Something is afoot. There are a great many happy feet in the IDF due to the thousands of pairs of US-certified military-grade boots being delivered each week. 10,000 pairs of boots have been distributed to Israeli soldiers, thanks to some $850,000 of donations, raised mainly from individuals in the US at private funding events.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/something-is-afoot-volunteers-fit-idf-soldiers-with-us-military-boots-amid-hamas-war/
Asylum seekers cook for IDF soldiers. Dozens of Eritrean migrant workers hosted hundreds of IDF soldiers serving on the border with Gaza to a festive barbecue dinner. The Christian Orthodox Eritreans self-funded the cost of all the steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, kebabs, and salads.
https://www.jns.org/eritrean-migrants-barbecue-for-israeli-soldiers-near-gaza-border/
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Finland gives $1 million to MDA. (TY Hazel) The Finnish government is to donate $1 million to Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency medical service. Finland’s ambassador to Israel Dr. Nina Nordström signed the agreement after she toured the MDA 101 Emergency Call Center in Kiryat Ono.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/finland-to-donate-1-million-to-magen-david-adom/
US approval for ultrasound software. Israel’s Techsomed Medical Technologies (see here previously) has received US FDA approval for its BioTraceIO groundbreaking ultrasound-based liver ablation software. It helps surgeons to see the real-time status of liver tumors while they use thermal ablation therapy to destroy them.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/techsomeds-biotrace-solution-achieves-de-novo-clearance-from-fda-as-the-first-ultrasound-based-software-for-tissue-response-prediction-in-liver-tumor-ablation-302028369.html https://nocamels.com/2024/01/israeli-company-gets-fda-clearance-for-liver-tumor-software/
A sensor to guide the endoscope. Israel’s SwiftDuct has developed a smart endoscope for navigating the complex and dangerous route needed to check the condition of the bile duct. 20% of the 2 million annual ERCP procedures cause damage to the nearby pancreatic duct. SwiftDuct’s sensor and guidewire solve this problem.
https://nocamels.com/2024/01/unique-sensor-offers-safe-solution-for-tricky-intestinal-procedure/
https://swiftduct.com/
Boosting survival rates for wounded IDF soldiers. The current 6.7% mortality rate for wounded IDF personnel is half of that during the 2006 2nd Lebanon war. This can be attributed to faster evacuations, better protective equipment, and medical tech from Israeli founded companies such as Mazor Robots and Aidoc.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-cutting-edge-israeli-med-tech-is-boosting-survival-rates-of-war-wounded/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaEdmYrNAO0
DNA sequencing to combat pathogens. (TY OurCrowd) Israel’s Sequentify (see here previously) was awarded a grant by the Israel Innovation Authority to help develop a targeted DNA sequencing panel for infectious disease research, focusing on pathogen diagnosis and antibiotic resistance surveillance.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sequentify-awarded-grant-by-israel-innovation-authority-for-infectious-disease-sequencing-panel-302031466.html
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20343/gaza-civilian-deaths
Critics of Israel almost never cite comparable data from other military encounters. This omission creates the false impression that the civilian death tolls in Gaza are among the highest in history, when they are in fact among the lowest.
The New York Times’ conclusion that the new data suggests that it is “wrong to accuse [Israel] of wanting to maximize civilian deaths” is highly relevant to the false charges of genocide that are being considered by the International Court of Justice.
The decreasing civilian death rate among Gazans should also end the campaign to impose a ceasefire on Israel before the IDF completes its legitimate mission to destroy Hamas’ military capacity. Successfully completing that mission will save civilian lives in the long run, by reducing Hamas’ capacity to keep its promise of repeating the barbarism of October 7 and also by reducing its use of civilian shields.
The time has come, indeed it is long overdue, for the world to stop imposing a double standard on the nation-state of the Jewish people. Double standards are a form of bigotry, and when bigotry is addressed to the only nation-state of the Jewish people, it becomes a form of international anti-Semitism against the Jew among nations. It must stop.
Israel’s military actions have produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare. This is especially significant considering the reality that Hamas deliberately increases civilian deaths by using women and children as human shields and by hiding its military personnel and equipment among civilians.
You wouldn’t know it from the hectoring decision just rendered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel, but the death toll among civilians in Gaza — even including children and women — is among the lowest in the history of comparable warfare. Over the past several months, it has become even lower.
According to The New York Times, “The daily death toll in Gaza has more than halved in the past month,” and has fallen almost two-thirds since late October. Moreover, the percentage of civilian to combatant causalities has gone down considerably as well.
In a massive understatement, The New York Times also reported that these considerable reductions in civilian deaths have been “somewhat overlooked” by the media and critics. “Somewhat”! They have been totally buried and ignored. The New York Times also opined that Israel’s “harshest critics are wrong to accuse it of wanting to maximize civilian deaths.”
It is no accident that this reduced civilian death toll has been “somewhat overlooked” by the media and by Israel’s critics, including previously by The New York Times itself. Israel is subject to a discernible double standard when it comes to covering its military actions.
Even before the recent dramatic reduction in civilian deaths, Israel’s military actions produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare. This is especially significant considering the reality that Hamas deliberately increases civilian deaths by using women and children as human shields and by hiding its military personnel and equipment among civilians. The current ratio of civilian-to-combatant is well below two-to-one, which compares extremely favorably with ratios achieved by other Western democracies in urban warfare.
Critics of Israel almost never cite comparable data from other military encounters. This omission creates the false impression that the civilian death tolls in Gaza are among the highest in history, when they are in fact among the lowest.
Every actual death of an innocent civilian — especially among babies and very young children — is a tragedy. It is these deaths that are always highlighted by Hamas to the media, but no one knows how many such deaths are actually among this most vulnerable segment of the population, and how many of those are the result of Hamas deliberately using young children as shields.
The Hamas figures for total deaths do not purport to distinguish combatants from what they consider civilian deaths. They never give the ages of the “children” they claim have been killed, although they regard anyone under the age of 19 as a child, even if they are active combatants. Hamas has recruited fighters as young as 13 to 19. The Hamas figures also do not count the Gazans who were killed by errant rockets launched by terrorists, or Gazans who were killed by Hamas for refusing its orders not to move to safer locations.
The New York Times’ conclusion that the new data suggests that it is “wrong to accuse [Israel] of wanting to maximize civilian deaths” is highly relevant to the false charges of genocide that are being considered by the International Court of Justice.
Nations engaged in genocide do not go to such great lengths trying to reduce civilian casualties, including placing its own soldiers at heightened risk by employing focused ground forces instead of relying exclusively on air and sea bombardments. The ICJ should immediately reject the genocide charges against Israel and initiate war crime charges against Hamas and Iran, both of which willfully try to increase civilian deaths.
The decreasing civilian death rate among Gazans should also end the campaign to impose a ceasefire on Israel before the IDF completes its legitimate mission to destroy Hamas’ military capacity. Successfully completing that mission will save civilian lives in the long run, by reducing Hamas’ capacity to keep its promise of repeating the barbarism of October 7 and also by reducing its use of civilian shields.
Israel’s conduct in its defensive war, started by Hamas, has been exemplary. It satisfies all international standards, and its effort to minimize civilian deaths while accomplishing its legitimate goals has generally been successful. There is always a tradeoff between reducing enemy civilian deaths and increasing risks to one’s own soldiers and civilians. Israel has struck a better balance than most, following the unprecedented Hamas barbarisms.
The time has come, indeed it is long overdue, for the world to stop imposing a double standard on the nation-state of the Jewish people. Double standards are a form of bigotry, and when bigotry is addressed to the only nation-state of the Jewish people, it becomes a form of international anti-Semitism against the Jew among nations. It must stop.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of “The Dershow” podcast.
Follow Alan M. Dershowitz on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/international-court-of-justice-has-deemed-zionism-a-form-of-genocide/?utm_source=recirc-
On November 10, 1975, the United Nations declared, “Zionism is a form of racism.”
The U.S. ambassador, Daniel P. Moynihan, responded, “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” Moynihan concluded, “The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not.”
That resolution was the lowest moment in the history of the United Nations — until now. Now, the so-called International Court of Justice has in effect found that Zionism can be a form of genocide. For what the court found is that Israel’s defense against Hamas may violate the genocide convention.
It remains to be seen if the Biden administration can rise to this occasion as Moynihan did in 1975. This ruling is as great a crime. The court relied on “facts” from sickeningly biased U.N. officials, from the irredeemably compromised UNRWA whose complicity with Hamas is crystal clear, and from the Hamas ministry of health in Gaza. With these “facts” in hand, it rolled on to conclude that Israel’s defense of itself and its war to defeat Hamas may amount to the crime of genocide.
This turns justice on its head. Killing Jews is not found to be genocide, but it is a crime for Jews to try to defend themselves. Not since the days of Nazi Germany has such a moral inversion of international law been propounded.
As in 1975, the U.N. system is being weaponized — in fact, is willfully turning itself into a weapon — to delegitimize the Jewish state. It may be attacked, but it may not try to defeat its attackers without facing United Nations’ efforts to tie its hands — just as Jews could be attacked in Nazi Germany but were arrested if they fought back.
It will be said that all the court’s rulings are provisional. More proceedings are to come — years of them. But that is the point: Israel will be in the dock now for years to come. Not China for its mass murder of Uyghurs. Not Syria for massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Not Russia for deliberate bombing of civilians in Ukraine. Only Israel, for its efforts to destroy a terrorist group that killed a thousand civilians in the most brutal ways imaginable on October 7, 2023.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20338/ss-einsatzgruppen-to-hamas
The BBC has used UNRWA voices — preferably, it seems, antipodean ones — as purportedly objective third-party commentators. That is deeply irresponsible journalism, and the BBC most likely knows why that is so.
Thus, according to the Covenant and echoing the Mufti in 1943… there is not, and cannot anywhere be a Jewish state in this world. It is what is written: here we are told that Jews in Palestine are incompatible with ‘true statehood’ and the Mufti will tell us that it is Allah’s will that Jews shall be forever stateless.
It is important to remember [GP1] that these are thrice legitimate Jewish lands: once from original patrimony; once by international mandate and the third time by force of arms after successfully countering assaults in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Anti-Semitic exceptionalism, however, means that only the Jewish state is not allowed to enjoy the peace of victory that winning wars brings to other nations.
Ever since the Abraham Accords were adopted on 15th September 2020, many regional states have shown that they would prefer to skirt around the ever-rejectionist “Palestinians” and to normalise relations with the amazing mighty midget Israel, which is the region’s creative powerhouse in every cultural and technological domain, as well as, by necessity, its dominant military power. Most significantly that includes the Saudis, whom the Ayatollahs have declared their sworn enemies.
In his platform speech, [the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin] al-Husseini responded by stating that Germany “… understood the Jews perfectly and decided to find a final solution to the Jewish menace,” and… “…Allah has determined that there never will be a stable arrangement for the Jews, and that no state should be established for them.”
Thus, in anti-Semitic ideology…the inconvenient history which can be traced in evidence from the SS liquidation task forces –- the Einsatzgruppen — to Hamas, is detailed, documented and direct.
https://www.thefp.com/p/nyu-prof-tells-students-hamas-atrocities-untrueu?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
An adjunct NYU professor denied reports that the terrorist group Hamas beheaded babies and raped women in Israel on October 7, telling a group of students last month: “We know it’s not true.”
“We live in a Zionist city,” Amin Husain added at the December 5 “teach-in” organized by Students for Justice in Palestine at The New School, according to a video obtained by The Free Press. “No, let’s be real about this, let’s be fucking real.”
He went on to joke about his reputation for being antisemitic, citing a petition launched by an NYU alumnus on October 17, 2023, calling for his dismissal: “I have a petition going around, right, because I’m antisemitic. I won the honors of antisemitic multiple times.”
In the video, taken from the livestream of the event, Husain sits behind a table, wearing a keffiyeh and woolly hat while speaking to a classroom of students who remain quietly attentive as he comments on what he calls the “Palestinian liberation struggle.” A former finance lawyer, Husain jokes that his profile on the site Canary Mission, which documents people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel, and Jews, “is one of the best biographies I have.”
Husain’s Canary Mission bio states that he has “organized multiple violent New York City disruptions, promoted hatred of America and the police and incited hatred against pro-Israel supporters with Within Our Lifetime (WOL), an anti-Israel activist group in New York.”
https://victorhanson.com/the-crazy-story-behind-the-disturbing-news-part-one/
The Unspeakable Precivilizational Barbarity of Hamas
A recent report from Israel chronicles the tragic, more than two-months-long hunt of a bereaved father, David Tahar, for the head of his slain son, Adir—a young Israeli soldier murdered by terrorists on October 7.
Tahar had been warned by Israeli authorities not to view the remains of his son. But he insisted, and thus discovered the mutilation perpetrated by Hamas killers and then sought to find the missing remains of his son.
Israelis, however, recently captured two terrorists who knew firsthand of the incident—given one was the perpetrator. And then the story descended further into barbarism.
Or in the words of the news report from The Times of Israel:
“Two terrorists who were captured by Israeli forces and interrogated by the Shin Bet security service revealed that one of them had tried to sell an IDF soldier’s head for $10,000 and gave details on where it could be found.”
Further macabre questions arise: is there a market for severed Israeli heads? Does the $10,000 dovetail with the earlier reports that Hamas was offering $10,000 bounties to Gaza “civilians” who tagged along opportunistically as soon as word spread that the wall was breached, Israeli civilians were being robbed, raped, and murdered—and bounties offered for ad hoc killing and hostage-taking?
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-benjamin-netanyahu-rejects-palestinian-statehood-208847
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of a post-Gaza War Palestinian state spurred a predictable global response—with UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres calling it “unacceptable,” President Joe Biden reiterating support for the “two-state solution,” and the European Union threatening “consequences” if Netanyahu’s government doesn’t change its course.
But the back and forth between Jerusalem (which is fighting a gruesome war with a genocidal terrorist group) and the world (which watches it peacefully from afar) masks a far more complicated reality.
The question is not whether Netanyahu is wrong to reject the two-state solution for the foreseeable future. The question is whether he’s wrong to say publicly what many in his position would think privately.
To be sure, Netanyahu can’t seem to resist the temptation to portray himself as a Jewish “Horatius at the bridge”—the only thing standing between his people and their destruction. With Israelis outraged by intelligence failures that enabled the slaughter of October 7, a weakened Netanyahu will likely try to reinforce that image at home and not worry about the consequences abroad.
But set aside that it’s the controversial Netanyahu who’s presiding in Jerusalem. And set aside the conventional wisdom that hails the two-state solution as the obvious path to Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Let’s consider the two-state solution through the eyes of a generic Israeli leader—one elected by the people and responsible for their safety.
The two-state solution is predicated on Israel and a new Palestine “living side by side in peace.” True peace, however, must not only emerge from the negotiating table but also infuse the hearts of the populace. Otherwise, pursuing the two-state solution is misguided and potentially dangerous.
