RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the reasons the Palestinian Authority (PA) is reluctant to crack down on the “battalions” is because PA officials are aware that the terrorists enjoy widespread support among the Palestinian public.

The Palestinian Authority eventually fell victim to its own passivity. In 2007, Hamas staged a violent and brutal coup against the PA in Gaza, killing dozens of PA loyalists. According to a Human Rights Watch report: “Hamas military forces captured 28-year-old Mohammed Swairki, a cook for [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard, and executed him by throwing him to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City.”

The Israeli operation aims to prevent Iran and its Palestinian proxies from opening a new front against Israel from the West Bank.

The PA, however, has constantly violated the terms of the Oslo Accords by, among other things, failing to stop armed groups from operating in its territory and from attacking Israelis. The PA has therefore become part of the problem, not the solution.

If anyone is upset with Israel for its counterterrorism operation, they need to be more upset with the PA for not standing up to the armed groups and preventing Iran from establishing a terror base in the West Bank.

One of the reasons the Palestinian Authority (PA) is reluctant to crack down on armed terrorist groups, is because PA officials are aware that the terrorists enjoy widespread support among the Palestinian public. Pictured: Gunmen from a number of terrorist groups, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Izaddin al-Qassam Brigades, Al-Quds Brigades, and Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, hold what they called a “joint press conference” in Jenin refugee camp on February 25, 2023. (Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images)

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has condemned Israel for initiating a large-scale military operation in the northern West Bank, near Jordan, but it has purposely chosen to overlook the reason behind the Israeli security’s operation. Israel’s counterterrorism operation, called Summer Camps, targets numerous Iran-backed armed terrorist groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), that have been operating freely in PA-controlled territories in the past few years.

The main objective of Israel’s operation is to thwart Iran’s intention, with the help of the armed groups, to turn not only Gaza, but also the West Bank into another terror base to be used as part of the Islamists’ Jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel.

The PA should applaud Israel’s security forces for pursuing the terrorists, rather than criticizing them. These armed groups, which refer to themselves to as “battalions,” pose a direct threat not only to Israel, but the PA as well. The gunmen have created their own state within a state in the areas under PA administration, openly contesting the PA’s legitimacy and making a mockery of its security forces.

Most of the gunmen there belong to Hamas and PIJ, which are strongly opposed to the Palestinian Authority and its policies, especially the security coordination between the PA security forces and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The two groups do not recognize Israel’s right to exist and seek to replace it, through Jihad, with an Islamist state. One of the reasons the PA is reluctant to crack down on the “battalions” is because PA officials are aware that the terrorists enjoy widespread support among the Palestinian public.

The Israeli military operation in the northern West Bank could have been avoided, had the PA fulfilled its duty of combating terrorism by dismantling the armed groups.

Article XIV, “The Palestinian Police,” of the Oslo Accord signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993 states:

“Except for the Palestinian Police and the Israeli military forces, no other armed forces shall be established or operate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

Article XV, “Prevention of Hostile Acts,” states:

“Both sides shall take all measures necessary in order to prevent acts of terrorism, crime and hostilities directed against each other, against individuals falling under the other’s authority and against their property, and shall take legal measures against offenders.”

The PA, however, has constantly violated the terms of the Oslo Accords by, among other things, failing to stop armed groups from operating in its territory and from attacking Israelis. The PA has therefore become part of the problem, not the solution.

Since 2021, several “battalions” made up of hundreds of gunmen, have appeared in the PA-controlled territories in the northern West Bank. They have carried out countless terrorist attacks against Israelis, both within Israel and in the West Bank. Since the beginning of this year, 30 Israelis have been murdered in terrorist attacks. Yet, we are not aware of a single instance in which the Palestinian security forces, tasked with maintaining law and order in the areas under PA control, have arrested or prosecuted even one perpetrator.

Many Israeli and Palestinian lives could have been spared had the PA done its job and taken action against the “battalion” gunmen. The PA, however, is still reluctant, or too terrified, to take on the armed groups. That is why the Israeli security forces were obliged to launch the current counterterrorism operation.

The Israeli operation aims to prevent Iran and its Palestinian proxies from opening a new front against Israel from the West Bank. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote on August 29:

“Iran is working to establish an eastern terror front against Israel through special units of the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], involved in smuggling weapons, funding, and directing terror organizations.

“In the first stage, they smuggle weapons into the Kingdom of Jordan, mainly through the Syrian border, attempting to destabilize the regime and turn the Israel-Jordan border from a peaceful one into a volatile front.

“From there, the weapons are smuggled into Judea and Samaria, particularly into Palestinian refugee camps, where an Iranian-Hamas terror infrastructure is being established, following the proxy model they’ve set up in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. The Palestinian Authority is unable to confront this threat, which also endangers its existence…

“All actions must be carried out with determination and speed, alongside tightening sanctions on the Iranian regime to curb its subversive activities.”

The PA has a history of failing — or refusing — to take action against armed groups operating in regions under its jurisdiction. The PA did virtually nothing to stop Hamas from building its terror infrastructure when it controlled the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s actions included smuggling weapons across the border with Egypt and building dozens of assault tunnels in various locations throughout the Gaza Strip and near the Israeli border.

The Palestinian Authority eventually fell victim to its own passivity. In 2007, Hamas staged a violent and brutal coup against the PA in Gaza, killing dozens of PA loyalists. According to a Human Rights Watch report:

“Hamas military forces captured 28-year-old Mohammed Swairki, a cook for [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard, and executed him by throwing him to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City.”

If anyone is upset with Israel for its counterterrorism operation, they need to be more upset with the PA for not standing up to the armed groups and preventing Iran from establishing a terror base in the West Bank. Failing to do so means that Iran’s proxies may soon hurl Abbas himself from a high-rise in Ramallah, the de-facto capital of the Palestinians in the West Bank, in addition to launching more terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-817022

For fifty years, many world leaders and politicians have been promoting the idea that “there’s no alternative to a Palestinian state, the ‘two-state-solution’” (2SS) – despite on-going terrorism and the fact that such a state will be run by terrorists who are committed to Israel’s destruction.

Supporters of the 2SS argue that Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and support terrorism are entitled to a state, “self-determination,” and “ending the occupation,” which includes Judea, Shomron, Gaza and east Jerusalem – the “West Bank,” areas conquered by the IDF in the 1967 Six Day War. In other words, they advocate for Israel to withdraw to the cease-fire/armistice lines of 1949, arguing that this is required according to International Humanitarian Law, regardless of the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to end terrorism.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-brink-civil-war

Tens of thousands of protesters were swarming the streets of Tel Aviv on Sunday, calling on all restaurants, bars, and shops to shutter in solidarity. Many did. Highway 4, the major coastal route that runs from the Lebanese border down to the cusp of Gaza, was blocked in several locations by protestors setting tires on fire and confronting the police. The Histadrut, the country’s largest labor union, declared a general strike, which meant closing schools, businesses, and other essential institutions. Outraged, a slew of municipalities declared the strike illegitimate, with mayors threatening to take action against anyone who doesn’t show up for work. Although Histadrut abided by the Labor Court’s order to end the strike by Monday afternoon, the battle lines were drawn: town against town, brother against brother.

What are Israelis fighting about?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20915/eu-should-condemn-iran-not-israel

[T]he fact that the EU’s foreign policy chief [Josep Borrell] has even suggested imposing punitive measures against Israel, a country smaller than the state of New Jersey, when it is involved in a desperate fight defending itself against the world’s largest sponsor of state terrorism, Iran, and its proxy terrorist groups — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iraqi militias, as well as Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — on at least seven fronts, shows a woeful lack of understanding of the conflict.

Borrell’s constant articulation of anti-Israeli views also raises questions about his suitability to continue holding such an important position in the EU. Earlier this year, he launched a blistering attack against the “Israeli occupation authorities” for imposing punitive measures against an openly genocidal Palestinian Authority (PA).

Even so, Borrell’s stance reflects the deep anti-Israel sentiment that exists within the EU bureaucracy… After Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, rather than receiving support for her gesture of solidarity by visiting Israel, during which [European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen went to the Kfar Aza kibbutz (where at least 52 of 700 residents were murdered), she faced a barrage of criticism from EU insiders, with 800 EU staffers writing an official letter of complaint criticising her “uncontrolled” support of Israel.

[UN Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres’s willingness to focus his criticism on Israel, and not the Iranian-backed terrorists, is yet another example of the UN’s institutional anti-Israel bias. If the UN has any genuine interest in taking a balanced approach to the violence in the West Bank, then, instead of focusing its criticism exclusively on Israel, it would call on Iran to cease backing the network of terrorist groups it backs in the region, whose main goal is the destruction of Israel on the way to destroying the United States — the main representative of the West.

The failure of international bodies such as the EU and the UN to demonstrate any pretence of balance when intervening on vital international security issues such as the Iranian-sponsored conflicts taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon not only makes a mockery of their claim to be independent arbiters on the issue. It also runs the risk of making them utterly irrelevant, to the extent that they suffer the same fate as the League of Nations in the 1930s, whose inability to confront fascism condemned it to abject failure.

The European Union’s dangerous bias on the Gaza conflict, where it constantly backs Iranian-backed terrorist groups at the expense of a democracy, Israel, has been exposed yet again by the latest anti-Israel stance adopted by Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign minister.

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2024/09/04/the-evil-of-cowardice-n4932220

On Saturday night, the Israeli military made a macabre and horrifying discovery: the slain bodies of six hostages taken by Hamas, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. All six hostages had been shot point-blank in the head some 48-72 hours prior, presumably upon the approach of IDF soldiers; Hamas terrorists chose to murder the hostages they had held in terror tunnels for over 300 days rather than risk their liberation.

The discovery sent the entire nation of Israel into mourning. On Oct. 7, Israelis were forced to remember that the enemy they face is not merely violent, but purely evil. In subsequent months, with the extraordinary progress of the IDF in Gaza over the protestations of the Biden administration, Hamas’ evils were relegated once more to the realm of military conflict. But the very thought of these victims — Goldberg-Polin, 23; Eden Yerushalmi, 24; Ori Danino, 25; Alex Lobanov, 32; Carmel Gat, 40; and Almog Sarusi, 27 — suffering without sunlight, food or water for nearly a year, all to be shot to death within hours of their possible freedom, reopened all the wounds of Oct. 7.

It turned out that all the diplomatic overtures made by America — overtures largely accepted by the supposedly intransigent administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — meant nothing. As Netanyahu pointed out, “whoever murders hostages does not want a deal.” That was predictable enough, given the fact that Hamas’ chief goal is its own survival — a goal directly at odds with Israel’s necessary goal of extirpating Hamas. That is why Hamas has consistently declared for months that there would be no hostage release without a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, along with the discharge of hundreds of convicted terrorists and murderers. Anything less than survival for Hamas is a loss. Dead Palestinians help Hamas achieve its goal of pressuring Israel; dead hostages help Hamas achieve its goal of pressuring Israel.

https://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Kamala told CNN. And then insisted that the “war must end.”

What Kamala was really saying was that Israel has a right to defend itself against an attack, but it doesn’t have a right to win.

Democrats and some Republicans have offered the same formulaic responses since Oct 7.

And long before that.

“Israel has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks,” Obama said in 2014 before calling for a ceasefire. Israel has a right to defend itself, Bush and Clinton used to say before urging a quick end to the fighting in order to make a deal with the terrorists Israel is defending itself against.

Israel has a right to defend itself is the bare minimum allotted to anyone. Everyone has a right to defend themselves when they are attacked. Agreeing to it is not a pro-Israel statement. It is at best a neutral position to which the alternative position is that the Israelis should have allowed themselves to be overrun, destroyed and massacred, men, women and children, on Oct 7.

Anything less than the assertion that Israel has a right to defend itself is a declaration that it deserves to be destroyed. And that is the state of the debate within the Democratic Party.

On one side are the supporters of a two-state solution who want to split Israel between the Jews and the Islamic terrorists. Every time the terrorists invade and kill Jews, the Israeli army would have the right to briefly defend the country before the politicians make a new deal with the terrorists. On the other side are the one-state solution backers who don’t believe Israel has a right to exist and therefore no right to defend itself and support the Islamic terrorists who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ in their quest to destroy it by any means from BDS to genocide.

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.