RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20917/israel-protests-embolden-hamas

Hamas leaders, who are closely observing the protests, are likely to harden their stance in the hope that the Israeli government will give in to the demonstrators’ demands, including an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has the Israeli public pressuring their government to allow Hamas to “live to fight another day”: to rearm, regroup and continue attacking Israelis – as Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed.

Hamas leaders are banking on the Biden administration to compel the Israeli government to give in to the terror group’s demands…. It has long been the dream of Hamas and many Palestinians to see the US turn its back on Israel.

Hamas’s primary goal is to remain in power and return to the pre-October 7 era, when it built a large terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Hamas knows it will not be able to accomplish its aims without a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and an official end of the war.

That is why Hamas is insisting that Israel withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Israel’s presence there obstructs Hamas’s efforts to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip through cross-border tunnels, as it has been doing for the past two decades.

Hamas is reportedly demanding US and international guarantees that Israel will not target the terror group anytime in the future. Until then, Hamas will continue to hold on to many of the hostages as an “insurance policy.”

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 atrocities, will not release all the hostages at once. He will continue to physically surround himself with many of them to ensure that Israel does not kill him. Sinwar does not care how many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip perish, as long as he is permitted to stay alive.

Even if Hamas were to initially release 10 or 20 hostages as part of any agreement, who could ensure that the remaining captives would be released? Are we supposed to take Hamas’s word for it? Are we supposed to believe that the Americans, Egyptians and Qataris would be able to force Hamas to comply with the terms of any agreement?

Hamas is only interested in a deal that would keep it in power and make Israel lose the war. Hamas does not feel under pressure, at all, to reach any deal. Why should it? If US President Joe Biden were serious about reaching a deal, all he has to do is phone the leader of Qatar and tell him, as he allegedly told Netanyahu a few weeks ago, to “stop bullshitting me!”

The hostages-ceasefire negotiations have broken down because of insufficient pressure from the Biden administration on Hamas’s patrons in Qatar. The failure of the negotiations should be attributed to Qatar’s lack of action against the Hamas leaders who are living in luxury in Doha. Qatar is not doing anything because it is not under any serious pressure from the Biden administration. Has the Biden administration considered using the threat of withdrawing the US Central Command from Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base from to pressure the Gulf state’s rulers into convincing their friends in Hamas to free all the hostages?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/01/the-deaths-of-these-hostages-shames-the-western-conscience/

The discovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Rafah confirms what many of us knew about Hamas – that it is a Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement. That it has no purpose beyond the persecution and slaughter of the Jewish people. That its aim, for all the crowing of its useful idiots in the West about ‘resistance’ and ‘decolonisation’, is nothing more and nothing less than the fascistic terrorising of the inhabitants of the Jewish State. The ‘brutal murder’ of these six people, their only crime their Jewishness, is the bloodiest proof yet that in Hamas Israel faces not only a military foe, but also a virulently racist, existential threat.

But the discovery of the slain Jews shines a harsh light on other people, too. Not just Hamas, but also us, the West, and especially that portion of it that calls itself ‘progressive’. When I saw the photos of the four men and two women killed by their captors in a dank lair in Rafah, I thought to myself: there are people in my community here in the UK who have defaced posters of these people. There are people on my streets who scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ on their faces. There are people in my profession who described the day they were kidnapped as a ‘day of celebration’. There are people in London – and New York, Berlin, Sydney – who expressed solidarity not with these six seized Jews, but with the racists who seized them.

And it made me think: it is not enough today to condemn Hamas. We must also ask how so many in the West came to share in Hamas’s twisted, bigoted hatred for these six human beings. Why so many in the West made excuses for their abduction, vandalised their likenesses and falsely called their persecution ‘resistance’. The barbarism uncovered in Rafah is on Hamas. But the Western conscience is not wholly innocent of this depraved crime.

Let us be clear: the horror in Rafah is what some progressives in the West felt ‘exhilarated’ by, it’s what they ‘celebrated’. This is Hamas, this is its ‘resistance’. All six, according to the IDF, were ‘brutally murdered’ a ‘short time’ before being found. They were: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an Israeli-American; Alexander Lobanov, a 32-year-old father of two; Carmel Gat, a 40-year-old from Tel Aviv who was visiting her parents in the Be’eri kibbutz on the day of the 7 October pogrom; Almog Sarusi, a 27-year-old who loved ‘travelling around Israel in his white SUV with his guitar’; Eden Yerushalmi, a 24-year-old who was bartending at the Nova music festival; and Ori Danino, 25, who was about to embark on an electrical-engineering course when he was seized.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20916/gaza-ceasefire-hostages

The Biden-Harris administration apparently sees no problem with a Palestinian state being yet another terrorist state, committed to annihilating Israel — as both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force commander General Esmail Qaani (“Israel is a cancer that must be eliminated”), and senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad have straightforwardly vowed.

A ceasefire might sound as if it is a “good thing” that benefits everyone — understandably if a friend or family member is a hostage. The problem seems to be the Hamas demand that Israel should leave the “Philadelphi corridor” on the border between Gaza and Egypt, so that Hamas, backed by its patrons Qatar and Iran, can resume smuggling weapons and ammunition into Gaza, rearm, rebuild and attack again.

It is probably more convenient, for all those trying to overthrow Netanyahu, to look at him rather than at the real perpetrators: Hamas, Iran and Qatar.

Qatar, “the Trojan Horse in Washington D.C.,” has long been financing Islamic terrorist organizations, as well as bestowing more than $6 billion on US universities to teach American youths whatever Qatar’s leaders decide. Nevertheless, the Biden-Harris administration decided that these qualifications made Qatar perfect to negotiate the Gaza war on America’s behalf, the same way the administration unfathomably decided to have Russia negotiate on America’s behalf with Iran over restarting the nuclear deal.

The Biden-Harris administration seems to want Netanyahu gone to be able to work with “their” prime minister: one who presumably would be delighted not only to have a terrorist Palestinian state on his borders — a state sworn to Israel’s destruction — and who would also be delighted if Iran — also sworn to Israel’s destruction — had nuclear weapons. It is the policy embraced by Obama, so long as Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons “on his watch.” Down the road, however, would be an altogether different story.

What many Israelis seem unwilling or unable to see is, sadly, that even with a ceasefire, the hostages will not be released. Hamas will hold on to as many of them as they can for as long as they can, to keep them in play as a weapon.

With a ceasefire, Israel unfortunately will not get peace and will not get the hostages. The Israelis might see a few hostages at a time dribbled out, the living ones first, they hope, each one exchanged for hundreds, if not more, of convicted Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli prisons, whose first job would be to go right back to terrorizing.

Meanwhile, the negotiations over every hostage would allow plenty of time for Iran and Hamas to bring more weapons in through the unguarded border from Egypt into Gaza, in order to rearm. The current leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, is himself a convicted terrorist who confessed to murdering four people with his own hands. Sinwar was serving four life sentences in an Israeli prison when he was released, among more than 1,000 terrorists, in exchange for one Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit, in 2011.

There is at least one way to get the hostages back quickly…. “Many Americans believe that they owe Qatar for its hosting of the U.S. CENTCOM base. The truth is precisely the opposite: It is Qatar that owes the U.S., for locating this base there. Without this base’s presence in the country, Qatar would disappear within less than a week – its neighbors would eat it up.” — Yigal Carmon, MEMRI, June 10, 2024.

Instead of saying, as the propagandists no doubt like, “Bring them Home,” meant to sound as if Netanyahu is hiding the hostages under the Knesset, Israelis would be better off saying, “Release the Hostages” — directed at Hamas, Qatar and Iran.

A ceasefire deal unfortunately will not bring back the hostages any time soon. Hamas will drag out each negotiation, continue attacking Israel and try to make Israelis miserable enough to give up the fight, as many seem to be doing even now.

The murder of six more Israeli hostages — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino — captured by the terrorist group Hamas appears to be leading many Israelis, along with most of their ever-gullible media (remember the Oslo Accords?) to think that if only their government would agree to a ceasefire, they would get their hostages back. Most people, at least in the West, would desperately like that — not just the American ones — all 120 of them, especially before Hamas finishes murdering them. If the Israelis really want their hostages back, however, they had better think again.