RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/after-the-hamas-deluge/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

On 7 October Hamas jihadis launched Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge, entering Israel to kill over 1,000 people, and take more than a hundred captives, many of them women and children, as well as an unknown number of male IDF soldiers.

In scenes reminiscent of Isis atrocities, one video shows a room full of young Jewish women being held captive. Another displays the semi-naked body of a young woman – a German citizen, identified from her tattoos by her relatives – being paraded through the streets of Gaza, and spat upon by passers-by, to cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’. Another video shows a jihadi hacking a man’s head off using a hoe. Yet another video shows a young Jewish boy, around five years old, who had been taken captive to Gaza, being tormented by Muslim children. Israeli soldiers have reported horrific scenes in the villages where the attacks took place; young families slaughtered, babies beheaded and mutilated corpses.

Hamas has called on Muslims all over the world to come out in support, and in the light of all this horror, it is disturbing just how many voices have been raised in support of the 7 October attacks, including in Australia.

Support can take many forms, ranging from direct praise, through to indirect assertions of Palestinians’ right to ‘resistance’, and objections that too much is being made of Jewish victimhood.

Al-Azhar University in Cairo is considered the premier Sunni center of learning in the world. Its head, Sheikh Al-Tayyeb, was quick to issue a statement to celebrate the attacks: ‘The honorable Al-Azhar salutes with utmost pride the resistance efforts of the Palestinian people.’

At a Muslim street rally held in western Sydney on Sunday night after the attacks, Imam Ibrahim Dadoun, a prominent Australian-born preacher affiliated with the United Muslims of Australia, was shouting with joy, his phrases punctuated by roars of ‘Allahu Akbar’ from the enthusiastic crowd around him: ‘I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated. It’s a day of courage. It’s a day of happiness. It’s a day of pride. It’s a day of victory! This is the day we’ve been waiting for!’

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-israel-will-attack/

There is an old saying, that professional militaries tend to fight the last war.

But Israel has learned its lesson, in particular, the lessons of the failed 2006 war against Hezbollah. This time there will be no pinprick attacks. Israeli will go big and hard and heavy. This will be Fallujah on steroids.

I reported on the 2006 war along the border zone for Newsmax and NBC News. After nearly two weeks of air strikes in response to thousands of Hezbollah rockets smashing into Israeli towns and villages, then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered elite IDF units to launch small probing cross-border strikes, in the hope of disrupting Hezbollah supply lines.

One of those units was Battalion 51 of the famed Golani brigade, which was ordered to take Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah stronghold and the birthplace of fabled Hezbollah terror mastermind, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh.

The operation had been a total michal, or fawda, Israeli terms which have many unprintable equivalents in U.S. military slang. This is how I described the survivors in an forthcoming book, The Iran House:

The Golani troops carried enough food, water and ammo for a forty-eight-hour mission – and wound up staying five and a half days.

They humped fifteen kilometers in the dead of night to the outskirts of the village, then in the pre-dawn hours received the order to move into the town itself. And that’s where everything fell apart. They entered a narrow alleyway between houses when Hezbollah fighters appeared on all sides and opened fire. Eight soldiers were killed in less than a minute, and twenty-two more were wounded. Even more would have died, one of the survivors told me, if the deputy commander of their unit, Major Ro’i Klein, hadn’t spotted a grenade rolling toward them and jumped on it.