RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/enablers-of-hamas-should-take-gaza-refugees-c7c4b44c?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Thousands of civilians in Gaza are about to endure another nightmare brought on by Hamas’s mass slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis and foreign nationals. Now that the border between Israel and Gaza is mostly under control, Israeli forces are preparing for a ground invasion to end Hamas’s brutal rule. The battle isn’t likely to end quickly.

Civilians are seeking to flee in advance of the fighting, and we shouldn’t expect Israel to take them in. With nowhere else to go, Egypt is the only possible escape route for Palestinians hoping to find refuge by land.

The U.S. has already started to discuss this with the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to recent reports. An Israeli military spokesman, when asked by reporters where displaced persons might go, suggested Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is the logical location. He added, “Anyone who can get out, I would advise them to get out.” In an interview with Army Radio, Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Kisch also said that Palestinians seeking to flee Gaza should look to Egypt.

The Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border is open. The Israeli military issued a statement on Oct. 10 indicating that it was briefly closed. Egyptian officials later told Reuters that operations at Rafah had been disrupted by a nearby Israeli airstrike but had reopened shortly afterward, at least for humanitarian purposes. On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Hamas has been preventing people from leaving through the Rafah crossing.

Egypt may not be thrilled about the role it is being asked to play. Egyptian security sources have said it wouldn’t permit a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai. Cairo is deeply skeptical of Hamas, given the terrorist organization’s roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt’s government views as a threat. Moreover, Cairo has consistently tried to distance itself from any responsibility for Gaza, which it occupied between 1948 and 1967.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20052/should-we-help-gaza-palestinians

The countries of the European Union are divided over whether to continue aid to Gaza. However, the question of whether it is possible to help the civilian population without strengthening Hamas is not part of the current debate.

Most international aid to Gaza is channeled through UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinian refugees and their descendants… Unfortunately, UNRWA’s very existence and modus operandi directly reinforce Hamas. For this international organization, though there are only a handful of surviving refugees from 1948, supposed “refugee status” is passed down from father to son, so there are now around five times as many “refugees” in Gaza as there were originally.

It appears intended as political thorn to be administered for the purpose of maligning Israel for a war that was started by five Arab armies… which they then lost. Perhaps they should have thought of that before they started the war.

Meanwhile, roughly the same number of Jewish refugees, about 650,000, were fleeing for their lives from Arab countries to Israel. The newly created Jewish state, about the size of New Jersey or two-thirds of Belgium, and with no funds, managed to absorb everyone.

Given Palestinian demographics, return to the places deserted in 1948 would mean the end of the Jewish state of Israel, and is just as utopian as the idea of the returning German refugees from 1945 to areas of pre-war Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic.

[A]id, even humanitarian aid, to dictatorial countries inevitably strengthens that power, even more so with an Islamist totalitarian power such as Hamas, which does not care about the well-being of its citizen as Western countries do.

The US and the EU, if they want to continue officially supporting an increasingly unrealistic “two-state solution”, should first stop funding UNRWA, whose tasks could eventually be taken over by other organizations unrelated to refugee status.

UNRWA, which is inordinately active in education, has been criticized for helping to indoctrinate children with radical Hamas rhetoric through school textbooks and extremist teachers…. UNRWA does not have the reputation of being accountable. A recent report discloses that “UN Teachers Call To Murder Jews.”

The problem is therefore not, as we hear today in European circles, to avoid supporting organizations linked to Hamas. All aid benefits Hamas, which can then concentrate on war and terrorism, since it is largely exempt from the tasks normally devolved to those who control a territory.

No one will dispute that it is useful to teach Gaza’s children to read and write, but it is legitimate to question whether literacy training is actually being used to indoctrinate students and ignite a terrorist drift…

Sometimes, refraining from assisting people is the least bad solution when there is no good one… [O]ne wonders why the United States and the European Union want to help in Gaza and thus help Hamas… It is also usually not clear how much aid actually gets to its intended recipients and how much ends up in Hamas’s coffers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20048/hamas-israel-what-next

They [the Israelis] ignored one of the advice of the Florentine clerk that “Don’t wound a deadly enemy and let him live to recover. Either turn him into a friend or kill him!”

Israeli leaders tried to apply to Hamas the strategy they had used against hostile Arab neighbors since 1948: “Taking them to the dentist every 10 years to defang them.”

The error the Israelis made was not to see the difference between classical state structures that have to run a country and respond to the minimum needs of their society and a non-state actor that has little concern about the people under its rule.

Hamas has been in a position to totally ignore the needs of people living in the enclave. Essential needs as food, education and health care are covered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), over 100 NGOs from some 30 countries and frequent donations from countries wishing to show solidarity with Palestinians. In some cases foreign, donors even pay the salaries of the personnel in the local administration.

Thanks to “gifts” from “certain friendly powers”, Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, even don’t have to buy their arms.

Hamas, as its charter clearly states, is not in the business of nation-building: what it seeks is the elimination of Israel, something that Israelis are unlikely to offer.

The threat of executing hostages, that include citizens of several countries other than Israel, could sap much of the sympathy that there is for the Palestinian “cause” especially in the West.

The current showdown also shows the inability or unwillingness of the Biden administration to discard then President Barack Obama’s disastrous Middle East policy of cold-shouldering friends in the hope of getting warmth from foes.

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.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/10/13/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-israeli-occupation-that-is-everything-the-left-wont-tell-you-n1734997

” The idea that Israel is occupying Palestinian land was furthered in the 1990s by the Oslo Accords, to which Israel unwisely acceded, and in which it agreed to work toward the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which would only become a new base for more jihad attacks against a diminished Jewish state. But a Palestinian state, if it is ever created, would be the first-ever such entity in the history of the world. There is actually no Israeli occupation at all. The Squad, and the left in general, is either ignorant or malicious. Or, of course, both.”

There would be peace in the Middle East if Israel just ended its occupation, right?

That’s what the Squad wants you to think, anyway. The statements of the three primary members of this winsome leftist House coalition on the Hamas massacres in Israel had the distinct odor of canned talking points. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Make Mine A Double) issued a statement that said, “I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms.” That was a good start, but she then turned on a dime to blame it all on Israel: “No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.” Ongoing oppression and occupation, see? If Israel would just ease up on the poor Palestinians, Hamas jihadis would all open restaurants and shops, and peace would dawn upon the region.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-israeli-victory-would-look-like-hamas-war-b5a2ee80?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Mr. Falk says, “I truly hope, and I actually expect, that the civilized world will support us not only when we’re the victims, but also when we’re the victors here.” Victory might also save the prospects for a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. “In this neighborhood, the strong survive,” Mr. Falk says. “The main reason that prior peace agreements were reached was because we’re strong.”

“I’m driving south to the Gaza corridor, the place Hamas invaded on Saturday,” Yonah Jeremy Bob says in our first phone conversation. “But it’s a straight drive, so let’s talk.” Mr. Bob is an expert on the Israeli shadow war with Iran, the subject of his new book, “Target Tehran,” and he covers the Israeli intelligence agencies and military for the Jerusalem Post. He’s busy tracking down answers to the questions every Israeli wants answered: How could this have happened? What’s the plan? Who will pay?