RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/choose-life-and-fight-for-it?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Already numb with grief over the flower of Israel’s youth falling in the war in Gaza, Israelis have been further shattered by the killing on Monday of no fewer than 21 reservists in one deadly incident and three other soldiers the same day.

Not surprisingly, this has increased calls from the public for an end to the war. Even more understandably, the families of the Israeli hostages are becoming ever more desperate about the captives’ likely horrific fate in the dungeons of Hamas, and are stepping up demonstrations calling for a deal to end the war and secure the hostages’ release.

Would that it were that simple. Israel faces a horrific binary choice: to end the threat from Hamas, or end the ordeal of the hostages. It almost certainly can’t achieve both.

Hamas will not give up all the hostages without a guaranteed end to Israeli hostilities and a pledge not to assassinate the Hamas leaders. If Israel were to agree to that, a revitalised Hamas would remain a mortal threat to Israeli lives, more hostages would be taken in future and more Israelis murdered.  

The residents of Israel’s communities near the border with Gaza would be unable to return safely to their homes; nor would the families that have been evacuated from communities near the border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah’s 150,000 missiles are embedded in the civilian population ready for the signal to strike the entire Jewish state and where Hezbollah’s Radwan force remains poised to invade Israel to order to murder and abduct more Jews.

There is hardly an Israeli family that isn’t personally affected by this war. In such a tiny country, almost everyone has family members on the front lines, has relatives or friends who have been murdered or been abducted into Gaza, or knows people in such situations. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/egyptian-analyst-looks-forward-to-end-of-hamas-the-main-obstacle-to-peace/

Magdi Khalil does not mention a “right of return” for Palestinians. Nor does he mention the Palestinian insistence that its future capital must be in east Jerusalem. He thinks it must be left up to the parties to figure out what kind of modus vivendi will be possible. “Egyptian analyst sanity on Lebanese TV: ‘Hamas is the problem, Arabs have to stop thinking Israel will disappear, Hezbollah hijacked Lebanon,’” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2024:

He expressed his optimism that a solution would be reached immediately after the end of the war and after the end of Hamas, the main obstacle to peace, “since serious peace talks will begin to reach a demilitarized Palestinian state under security supervision by Israel for years, but there is not yet a qualified party [on the Palestinian side] to enter into these negotiations.”

Magdi Khalil looks forward to the “end of Hamas,” which he describes as the “main obstacle to peace,” and fully accepts the Israeli demand that any Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarized,” with Israel in charge of security “for years.” He recognizes,too, that Israel does not have a partner for peace; the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is not the “moderate’” political force that the Western world seems to think it is. Abbas on only one occasion, during a phone call with Venezuela’s President Maduro, criticized Hamas for the October 7 attack, and then had that criticism promptly taken down. This shows just how “moderate” this corrupt leader, whom 90% of Palestinians want to resign at once, really is. His quarrel with Hamas is not over morality, but over power and money.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20337/october-7-hundred-days

History has the form of a double helix: history is indeed the DNA of living memory. There is what actually happened and there is what people believe happened. They are not the same but they are inseparable….

Hamas had told Israel that it intended to focus on helping its people in Gaza and that it did not want war. Israel, to show good faith, had even provided work permits for thousands of Palestinians to enter Israel every day for better wages than in Gaza. What Israel did not know was that many of them were spies who would tell Hamas exactly where in the villages to attack.

An elated youth called Mahmoud called home to his father and mother in Gaza using a murdered Israeli woman’s phone to boast about how he had just killed ten Jews with his own hands (“oh my son God bless you”… “Mom, your son is a hero”). Part of the recording was played to the judges of the ICJ as part of the State of Israel’s must-see rebuttal of South Africa’s accusations.

Jeffrey Gettleman, in The New York Times on 28th December, published details of the unimaginable mass depravity committed by Gazan men on Israeli women….

Many of the first responses to these events, as with the Holocaust, were denials that such savageries had ever taken place.

Almost four months to the day, and not in a good way, the world has turned upside down.

In a risibly threadbare case, the victim of a depraved genocidal attack was accused at the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague of committing genocide. Lacking evidence of mens rea (criminal intention) that is prerequisite, or indeed any vestige of substantive evidence, South Africa sought to invert the object and purpose of the Genocide Convention of December 1948, which is specific to the “crime of crimes”. The accused is not just any victim, but the Jewish state, whose re-establishment in the May of the same year that the Convention was brought into effect was no coincidence.

https://www.jns.org/hamas-denies-it-slaughtered-civilians-on-oct-7/

Hamas on Sunday released a statement denying its members committed atrocities on Oct. 7.

The denial is a complete reversal for the terrorist group and a total disavowal of its own footage, after it supplied GoPro cameras to its operatives so that they could capture for posterity their horrific deeds on that day.

“Avoiding harm to civilians, especially children, women and elderly people, is a religious and moral commitment by all the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters,” Hamas stated in the 16-page document, claiming it only targeted Israeli military sites. (The Al-Qassam Brigades is Hamas’s so-called military wing.)

“We reiterate that the Palestinian resistance was fully disciplined and committed to the Islamic values during the operation and that the Palestinian fighters only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons against our people,” it added, saying that its members were “keen to avoid harming civilians” and that any such targeting was by accident.

The claim is astonishing given the hours of footage taken by the organization’s members in which they’re seen shooting innocent Israelis throughout Oct. 7.

Around 1,200 persons, mostly civilians, were killed that day and 253 were forcibly taken to Gaza to be held in abysmal conditions, living on starvation diets and denied medical care.

(The first batch of medicine destined for the remaining hostages entered the Gaza Strip last week. Israel is still waiting for proof that the medicines reached the captives.)

Hamas continues to hold 136 hostages, although a few dozen of them are believed to have died.

Avi Hyman, spokesman for Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, remarking on Hamas’s recent denial, told JNS on Monday that “Hamas is only fooling themselves, if anyone at all.

“What we saw on October 7 was, in the words of the German chancellor [Olaf Scholz], a new type of Nazi. But the thing about the Nazis is the Nazis tried to cover up their crimes at the end of the war, whereas Hamas were Nazis with GoPros. They were filming the whole thing,” Hyman said.

“Why they would think that today, 108 days later, we would believe this nonsense is absurd. But again, we know who Hamas is. We know that they butcher babies and we know they butcher the truth,” he said.