RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20729/hezbollah-beirut-airport

Hezbollah is storing massive amounts of Iranian armaments at Rafic Hariri International Airport, Lebanon’s main civilian airport, staff say.

Hezbollah has been accused of using the Beirut airport for weapon storage in the past, but whistleblowers say it has ramped up the practice since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel.

“This is extremely serious, mysterious large boxes arriving on direct flights from Iran are a sign that things got worse,” an airport worker told The Telegraph. “When they started to come through the airport, my friends and I were scared because we knew that there was something strange going on.”

He feared that an explosion, or an attack on the airport to destroy the weapons, could cause major damage to Beirut, similar to the 2020 port blast that devastated much of downtown. That explosion was blamed on a weapons warehouse belonging to Hezbollah.

“Beirut will be cut off from the world, not to mention the number of casualties and damage,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before a disaster also happens at the airport.”

Stored weapons include Iranian-made Falaq artillery rockets, Fateh-110 short-range missiles, mobile ballistic missiles and M-600 missiles with ranges of more than 150 miles, The Telegraph reported.

AT-14 Kornet, laser-guided anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM), Burkan short-range ballistic missile and RDX, a widely used explosive, are also stored at the airport.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20726/netanyahu-reject-vassal-state

As far as the White House and Democrats are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing it again. Similar to multiple occasions during the presidency of Barack Obama, Netanyahu is not playing by the rules Washington and the foreign-policy establishment believe are laid down to govern the behavior of client states.

Rather than assume the role of the loyal and pliant vassal to his nation’s superpower ally, there have been several times when Netanyahu has talked back in public to Obama and now President Joe Biden. Washington’s angry response to the video the prime minister released last week, in which he spoke of the way the administration has been slow-walking arms deliveries, made it clear that—assurances of goodwill from both sides notwithstanding—U.S.-Israel relations have reached a crisis point.

In the 49-second video posted on the YouTube page of the prime minister’s office on June 18, Netanyahu said the following:

“When Secretary Blinken was recently here in Israel, we had a candid conversation. I said I deeply appreciated the support the U.S. has given Israel from the beginning of the war. But I also said something else. I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition to Israel. Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies. Secretary Blinken assured me that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the case. During World War II, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”

Washington’s anger

In reaction, Washington expressed shock and anger. According to U.S. officials, Netanyahu’s claims were both fictional and a sign of ingratitude after all that Biden had done for him and Israel since Oct. 7, and throughout the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Their story is that despite Biden’s talk of potentially refusing to continue to send arms and ammunition to Israel if it doesn’t obey him and not attack the last Hamas strongholds in Rafah, there have been no such cutoffs. The only exception, they assert, is a review of whether the United States should send a special kind of 2,000-pound bomb that might cause too many civilian casualties in urban areas.

https://www.jns.org/smotrich-details-mega-dramatic-shift-to-tighten-control-of-judea-and-samaria/

Israel’s government is implementing a seismic shift in the way it manages the civil administration of Judea and Samaria by transferring authority from military to civilian hands.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads the Religious Zionism Party, described the advances that had been made, and their significance, to a gathering of leaders from Judea and Samaria at Shacharit Farm, an Israeli community in western Samaria, on June 9.

Smotrich said it was critical that control of civilian matters in Judea and Samaria be taken out of military hands to energize the growth of Jewish communities and block a carefully laid Palestinian Authority plan to establish facts on the ground via illegal construction, part of its quest for a state.

“We are in the middle of a huge job right now to implement a completely new enforcement system in the Civil Administration,” Smotrich said.

“If everywhere else in the State of Israel there are certain goals for enforcement, in Judea and Samaria there is one big consideration. And in the end, it is what to do geopolitically, strategically and security-wise,” he said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20725/palestinian-plan-gaza-day-after

The Palestinians, meanwhile, appear to have their own ideas about what should happen the day after the war in Gaza: they want to murder even more Jews and carry on the Jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel. Rebuilding the Gaza Strip is not a top priority for many Palestinians. Their primary focus lies in providing support to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations that aim to destroy the sole homeland of the Jewish people.

Hamas says its plan is to “keep the flame of resistance burning…. the [resistance] will not end and will not be extinguished until the comprehensive liberation and the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Hamas refers to a variety of terrorist actions as “resistance.” These include suicide bombings, stabbings, car-rammings, shootings, firing rockets, gang rapes, and beheadings. This is the only form of “resistance” Hamas has known and practiced since its founding 36 years ago. As far as Hamas is concerned…[a]ll Jews are “settlers” who need to be killed or expelled from their state.

As Hamas openly states in its charter… “There is no solution for the Palestinian question expect through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Hamas… is, not surprisingly, also opposed to any plan that seeks to remove it from power in the Gaza Strip. As long as Hamas’s military capabilities are not totally eliminated, neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Arab countries will take over administration of the Gaza Strip.

The only plan Hamas (and many Palestinians) believes in is one that calls on all Muslims to undertake Jihad against Israel. For this reason, the Biden administration is misguided in thinking that Hamas, which enjoys broad support among the Palestinians, would approve of any plan for the day after in the Gaza Strip that does not view terrorism as the only means of eradicating Israel and ethnically cleansing the Jewish people.

The [Palestinian Center For Policy and Survey Research] poll also found that satisfaction with Hamas’s performance has increased to 75%.

Any strategy the Biden administration proposes for the day after the war in the Gaza Strip is bound to fail…. Any legitimate discussion about what the day after looks like in the Gaza Strip must address the radical and Islamist elements in Palestinian society.

“The possibility of defeating Israel is very real…and the possibility of liberating Palestine is very great… Any other option will certainly be rejected, especially if it is accompanied by any non-Palestinian security presence. The Palestinians will consider it a new form of occupation, regardless of the identity of these forces.” — Bassam Naim, senior Hamas official, to Al-Jazeera.

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land…. We must remove it because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation…. We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth….” – Ghazi Hamad, senior Hamas official, Lebanese TV channel LBC, October 24, 2023.