RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/gaza-hospital-boss-admits-hes-a-hamas-commander-used-medical-facility-as-terror-base/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Ahmed al-Kahlout, the manager of the Kamal Adnan Hospital in northern Gaza, admitted during an interrogation with Israeli security forces that Hamas used the medical facilities to advance its military operations.

“I know 16 employees in the hospital — doctors, nurses, paramedics and clerks — who also have different positions in the Qassam Brigades,” Kahlout told Israel’s Shin Bet in a video clip released on Tuesday afternoon, referring to the military of Hamas. “They hide in hospitals because, for them, a hospital is a safe place.”

Kahlout, whose hospital is located in the Jabaliya neighborhood of northern Gaza, explained to Israeli security officials, “They [Hamas] won’t be targeted when they are inside a hospital.”

“That they will not be harmed when they are inside a hospital. Hamas has offices inside the hospitals. There are places for senior officials, they also brought a kidnapped soldier there. There is a designated place for interrogations, internal security, and special forces. Everyone has private phone lines inside the hospital,” Kahlout added.

The hospital manager also told Israeli officials that he’d been involved in the Palestinian terror group for over a decade and had risen through its ranks over the years. “I was recruited to Hamas in 2010 with the rank of Brigadier General. There are employees in the hospital who are military operatives of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades – doctors, nurses, paramedics, clerks, and staff members,״ Kahlout said, according to an Israeli military press release.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israels-right-of-reprisal

“The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations acknowledge retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves to his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.”

President Abraham Lincon’s military orders resonate 160 years later, after Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas-run Gaza, effectively an independent country, organized the massacre and murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, the vast majority civilians, with widespread torture, rape, and mutilation.

Hamas bound victims, including young children, and burned them alive, leaving ashen remains that took weeks to identify. Hamas tortured and killed parents and children in front of each other, and, in one instance, sat down to eat the family’s holiday meal. Hamas broke into one home, tortured the father, raped the mother, murdered both, and burned alive their baby child in the oven. Hamas ripped open the stomach of a pregnant woman, stabbed the baby, and shot the mother. Hamas took 240 hostages, some of whom it raped and paraded around Gaza. Hamas videotaped its atrocities with GoPro cameras, and sometimes with the phones of its victims.

“It is the duty of every government to give protection to its citizens, of whatever class, color, or condition,” said President Lincoln. No government but Israel’s carries, or will fulfill, this responsibility to protect the Israeli people. To do so, the Israeli government must destroy Hamas and convince Palestinian Arabs that massacring Israelis will backfire. Its response must be devastating enough to deter Israel’s other enemies, chiefly Iran. The Islamic Republic wants to erase Israel from the map and may soon have the means to do so with a breakout time of a month to build multiple nuclear bombs.

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231219

Though they will not expose it in the media, Arab-Muslim anti-Israel activists feel a profound and debilitating sense of humiliation at the inherent failings of their own societies. So, what better way to deflect their dissatisfaction within the Arab and Muslim world than to employ the language of the Left – in particular, such phrases as “national liberation, anti-apartheid and anti-colonialism – with which to level false charges against the embattled Jewish state?

It doesn’t matter to these Arab-Muslims, or to their leftist and ‘progressive’ amen chorus, that Israel is dwarfed by an enormous Arab landmass, which is 570 times greater than that of tiny Israel – a state no larger than Wales or New Jersey. Indeed, the leftists, while ironically turning on the one state in the Middle East that provides its people with freedoms no Arab or Muslim country will ever provide, choose to embrace the Arab falsehoods. Why? Because the Left is terrified of being seen as racist. Yet by their very own actions and words, they are just that.

The Left buys the Arab and Muslim lies against Israel because they believe that the Arabs can never change for the better. That is pure racism of the worst kind. The corollary to this put-down of an entire Arab ethnicity is that the Left refuses to admit that it is the Arab-Muslim culture that actively engages in the very evil practices that they falsely hurl towards Israel. And where do you find apartheid, racism, repression, torture? Why, in the very Arab-Muslim world the Left supports and embraces.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/half-of-young-americans-say-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas-poll/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Roughly half of young Americans say Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians” amid the ongoing war despite continuing support for the Jewish state among older Americans, according to a new poll.

While 51 percent of 18–24-year-olds in the U.S. want Israel to lose to Hamas, that sentiment decreases significantly among the higher age brackets in the monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris poll. Thirty-one percent of 25–34-year-olds, 24 percent of 35–44-year-olds, 15 percent of 45–54-year-olds, 13 percent of 55–64-year-olds, and only 4 percent of Americans aged 65 and older say Israel should be wiped out.

In comparison, an overall 81 percent of Americans support Israel over Hamas. However, support between the two sides is split evenly among the 18–24 age bracket.

Although the slight majority of respondents in that age group support the genocide of Jews, 58 percent of respondents aged 18–24 say Hamas should be removed from running Gaza. The same group further displayed contradicting views, with 66 percent saying Hamas’s October 7 attack was genocidal and 60 percent answering that Israel’s campaign in Gaza also constitutes genocide.

Additionally, 32 percent of young Americans want Israel and Palestine to be recognized in a two-state solution and 17 percent think Arab states should absorb the Palestinians displaced by the conflict. Overall, a two-state solution was the preferred answer to that question, with 60 percent of all respondents favoring it.

The poll comes over 70 days since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel two months ago, killing over 1,200 people and kidnapping approximately 240. About 110 living hostages remain in Gaza, although that number has dropped in recent days.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

War has been around as long as has man. President Obama said as much in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2009: “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man.” Efforts to outlaw war, or even to impose rules as to its conduct, have failed. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, an effort to outlaw war, signed on August 27, 1928 did not prevent Japan (a signatory) from invading Manchuria three years later. Nor did it stop Germany (also a signatory) from invading Poland eleven years later. The best means to prevent war is to prepare for it. When I was at the University of New Hampshire, I often drove past Pease Airforce Base with its seemingly oxymoronic, but in fact accurate, sign, “Peace is Our Profession.” The projection of strength is necessary to curtail war. Unfortunately, that air base, and the entire Strategic Air Command was “disestablished” in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The conduct of modern war is supposed to follow rules of international humanitarian law established under the Geneva Convention of 1949, as they pertain to non-combatants, the wounded and treatment of prisoners of war. But such good intentions are never followed, as we have seen throughout all subsequent wars, and as Senator John McCain, along with thousands of other servicemen, learned during their years as prisoners of war in North Vietnam. As Carl von Clausewitz noted in On War, “The object of fighting is the destruction or defeat of the enemy.” The Swedish war historian Peter Englund, in his new book November 1942, wrote of a British tail gunner flying over Germany: “The aircrews are not guided by moralistic motives or complex explanations; they are given orders to carry out their missions…”

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are not asking for a two-state solution. Their call for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea,” is a call to eradicate Israel. When terrorists hide among civilians it is they who are causing civilian deaths. “Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary,” wrote Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolutions in France, but “just” is in the eyes of the beholder. “Unjust war is to be abhorred,” spoke President Theodore Roosevelt at the University of Berlin on May 12, 1910 (only four years before Europe embarked on a four-year war of devastation), “but,” he added, “woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it.” And woe to the state of Israel now if they do not confront and destroy Hamas.

 “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”  General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891).

The tragedy of friendly fire killing three Israeli hostages haunts us today. It will be investigated thoroughly by the IDF. This particular event reminds us that Israel has a citizen army -everyone serves-and alas, some are less experienced than others in the fight for survival against genocidal enemies.

But, as Michael Ordman reminds us, Israel has another nonmilitary army of researchers, doctors, technical experts, and civil servants who work around the clock to bring succor and a better and peaceful life to billions of citizens on every continent. rsk

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR

From war to the Olympics. Israel’s Sports Association for the Disabled and Israel’s Paralympic Committee have launched a voluntary initiative for IDF personnel who have lost limbs. Rehabilitation and recovery include personal trainers, coaches, physiotherapists, and sports psychologists. More than 20 have already joined.

https://www.israel21c.org/paralympians-to-help-war-wounded-heal-trauma/ 

When father meets son. Rambam hospital’s Dr. Arik Schechter has been serving in the IDF reserves deep inside Gaza since the outbreak of the Swords of Iron War. With three sons and a son-in-law also serving, perhaps it should not have been such a surprise when he was reunited with one of his sons in the fighting.

https://www.rambam.org.il/en/rambam_news/father-son-meet-in-gaza.aspx

When Dad meets wife & new son. I admit that I shed a few tears when I read this story and then saw the video on Instagram.   https://www.rambam.org.il/en/rambam_news/dad_arrives-for-birth_despite_war.aspx

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cz0NpHksLYG/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

What motivates us. Research led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered that the impulse for motivation is generated by the balance in the striatum area of the brain of simultaneous wavelike patterns of two neurochemicals – dopamine and acetylcholine. The team used advanced genetic tools and imaging.

https://en.huji.ac.il/news/wave-theory-neurochemical-balance-brain

Impact of early life trauma and possible treatment. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have also been studying the brain. In lab tests they found that trauma in early life caused problems in adults that showed up on brain scans. But a short treatment of diazepam soon after trauma erased those signs on adult brain scans.

https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/traces-trauma-young-brain-%E2%80%93-and-how-erase-them

Bring back the light. On Chanukah, Shiloh Israel Children’s Fund (SICF) launched its campaign, “Bring Back the Light.” for children scarred by terror.  SICF uses individual and group therapies, both traditional and alternative, administered by a team of skilled social workers, psychologists, and specialty therapists.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/miracle-of-healing-shiloh-israel-childrens-funds-bring-back-the-light-initiative/

Empathic robot companion in NY State. (TY OurCrowd) A few weeks ago (see here previously) the ElliQ empathic robot from Israel’s Intuitive Robotics was being offered free to seniors in two areas in South Florida.  It is now being offered to seniors in New York State. The pilot shows a 95% reduction in loneliness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZBKjK9WXE8  https://elliq.com/pages/free 

https://abc7ny.com/seniors-ai-robot-companionship/14154002/

https://aging.ny.gov/news/nysofas-rollout-ai-companion-robot-elliq-shows-95-reduction-loneliness

Simultaneous simulations. Israel’s QuantHealth (see here previously) has upgraded its platform for simulating clinical trials. Its new product, called Katina, simultaneously simulates hundreds of thousands of combinations of each element in a clinical trial to maximize the probability of success when real human trials begin.

https://nocamels.com/2023/12/new-ai-platform-simulates-thousands-of-clinical-trials-at-once/

Best Buy remote monitoring. Israel’s BioBeat (see here previously) is integrating its wearable devices for remote patient monitoring into the Current Health home care platform offered by Best Buy Health in the US.  The devices monitor 13 parameters, e.g., blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, pulse rate and respiratory rate.

https://nocamels.com/category/news-briefs/#post-125875  

https://www.currenthealth.com/remote-patient-monitoring/

When dormant bacteria revive. Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have discovered how bacteria spores retain vital genetic information during dormancy and activate when revived. The RNA polymerase, inside the spores, initiates copying processes. The knowledge could help research into controlling pathogens.

https://www.afhu.org/2023/12/01/hebrew-university-researchers-discover-mechanism-for-dormant-bacteria-spores-to-retain-genetic-memory/

Herbal diabetic remedy and more. Israel’s Curalife manufactures Curalin – a herbal supplement formulated to treat diabetes but with anecdotal indications for stress reduction, improved metabolism and even insomnia. It contains nine herbs based on Ayurvedic medicine – an ancient Indian practice.

https://www.israel21c.org/ayurvedic-herbal-supplement-targets-diabetes/   https://global.curalife.com/

US approval for glaucoma laser device. Israel’s Belkin Vision (previously Belkin Laser – see here) has received US FDA clearance for the use of its automatic and noninvasive glaucoma laser surgery device. The Eagle is the first and only contactless laser surgery for glaucoma patients.

https://nocamels.com/category/news-briefs/#post-125889

AI sensor to monitor kidney function. Israel’s FIZE Medical has developed a new AI device that measures production of urine by the kidneys via a patient catheter. It identifies problems with kidneys, heart, medication, etc. Fize has FDA approval and has completed a pilot at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. 

https://nocamels.com/2023/12/ai-sensor-monitors-kidney-function-one-drop-at-a-time/  https://fizemedical.com/

How does your dog smell?  Israel’s Tech4animals lab (see here previously) has developed an algorithm that detects the canine breathing condition known as Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS). It is common in dogs such as boxers, pugs and French bulldogs that have been bred with short snouts.

https://nocamels.com/2023/12/ai-doggie-doctor-diagnoses-breathing-problems-pugs-boxers/

ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL

Occupational therapist, soldier, and bone-marrow donor. Lee, an occupational therapist at Israel’s Rambam Health Care Campus has been serving as a casualty officer since she was called up for reserves at the beginning of the war. She volunteered as a bone-marrow donor and was a lifesaving match for a woman in need.

https://www.rambam.org.il/en/rambam_news/three-in-one.aspx

She just can’t stop. I was surprised to see this on the BBC. Praise for a woman (Yael Noy) whose heads the organization “Road to Recovery” group of Israeli volunteers. Despite Oct 7, Yael drives sick Palestinian Arabs – mostly children – from security checkpoints in Judea and Samaria to hospital appointments in Israel.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-67592468 

1000+ volunteering TAU students. Some 6,000 Tel Aviv University students are serving in the IDF reserves. At least 1000 more are volunteering to help patients at hospitals; make food for serving soldiers, harvest fields and transport people to the Gaza border; help run factories at evacuated kibbutzim, and more.

https://english.tau.ac.il/news/volunteering_initiatives  https://english.tau.ac.il/news/Helping_Israeli_farmers

Lost and asleep. (TY Hazel) In the middle of fighting a war, IDF reservists discovered a 4-year-old Gazan girl who had got lost, stumbled barefoot into an IDF camp, and fallen asleep. They cleaned her up, bandaged her injured feet and then arranged an ambulance to take her to the safe civilian area of Southern Gaza.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/watch-reservists-help-lost-gazan-child-who-fell-asleep-in-idf-encampment/

Rescuing abandoned pets from Gaza. Many of the IDF’s heroic efforts go unnoticed, such as the rescue of abandoned animals from Gaza. They include cats, dogs, parrots, owls, and even a neglected, malnourished lion from the Gaza Zoo. Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority is working with the IDF to bring the lion to safely.

https://worldisraelnews.com/idf-rescues-abandoned-pets-exotic-birds-and-even-a-lion-from-gaza/

Rescuing unsold food. Israeli food rescue startup SpareEat (see here previously) shut down when Covid-19 regulations prevented people from collecting food in person. It has now re-launched and is even more popular than the first time around. Israelis collect “surprise” bags of highly discounted excess food from businesses.

https://nocamels.com/2023/12/spareeat-app-unsold-food-rescue/

US National Academy of Inventors “fellow”.  Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of Israel’s Technion Institute (see here previously) has been chosen to be a fellow of the prestigious American National Academy of Inventors. She is a founder of Aleph Farms (see here), NurExone (spinal cord regeneration) and Nanosynex (see here).

https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-777863

https://nurexone.com/professor-shulamit-levenberg/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-CRXROorw

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-persistent-two-state-delusion?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The simmering tensions between Israel and the Biden administration over the plan for post-war Gaza have now come to the boil.

The US is doubling down on its insistence that Gaza must be run by a revamped Palestinian Authority. The Americans are still obsessed with a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

This week, US President Joe Biden told a White House Chanukah reception that there had to be a Palestinian state in the future and that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed to make an effort to strengthen, change and “move” the PA.

Netanyahu riposted that Israel would permit neither Hamas nor the PA to rule Gaza. Israel, he said, would not repeat the “mistake of Oslo,” a reference to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organisation under which control of Gaza and parts of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria were handed over to the newly-created PA.

The previous day, Netanyahu had caused outrage by stating that the Oslo Accords caused as many deaths as the October 7 Hamas massacre, “though over a longer period”.

His enemies immediately claimed that the comparison was invidious, that he was seeking to shrug off any blame for Israel’s vulnerability to the Hamas pogrom and that he was already campaigning to win the general election that many assume will follow the war.