IDF Gaza Operation expanded — rightfuly ignoring Obama & Kerry


Three Israeli soldiers killed in action in Gaza and 27 injured. Cabinet orders operation expanded

Re-Post from DEBKAfile Exclusive Report July 30, 2014, 9:30 PM (IDT)

IDF Gen. Sami Torjeman, commander of Gaza operation

IDF Gen. Sami Torjeman, commander of Gaza operation

Three Israeli soldiers were killed and 27 injured in the Gaza Strip Wednesday, July 30, on the 23rd day of Israel’s counter-terror operation Defensive Edge against Hamas. A bomb planted in the wall of a building in Khan Younes blew up as the soldiers went in to examine a tunnel shaft.

Maj. Gen. Sami Torjeman, OC Southern Command, told reporters that the soldiers had fought “stubbornly” and “seriously impaired” Hamas’ strength. Hundreds of enemy fighters have been killed, he reported, including scores of Hamas’ elite troops and some of the commanders hunkered down in their hideouts. Dozens too had been taken captive and were providing a stream of valuable intelligence. In all their direct engagements with Hamas in Gaza, Israeli units had come out the winners, the general reported.

It was inferred from Gen. Torjeman’s replies to questions that IDF special operation forces had gone into action in the Gaza Strip for the first time. He said that Israeli units had moved into new terrain in central and southern Gaza after standing in place for five days. They entered Khan Younes and Jebalya Tuesday night.
The general referred cautiously to the terror tunnels, which had been described officially as all taken care of earlier this week. He reported that four new tunnels had been discovered over and above those so far tracked and no more than “a few days” remained for the military to finish its “tunnel mission.”

He warned, however, that no reliable estimate could be made of the underground passages which the IDF has not yet discovered and which might be located in areas outside the battle zones.
Gen. Torjeman added that the vast scale of the tunnel-building project was beyond belief. With the amount of cement poured into those tunnels in the last four years, he said, the Palestinians could have built four modern hospitals, 20 schools or 100 kindergartens.

Asked about the misfortune at the Nahal Oz outpost, where five soldiers lost their lives Tuesday, the general commented, “I would expect a different outcome from an engagement with terrorists.” All the same, he stressed the infiltrators failed in their mission to attack civilians.

Asked why the army was not functioning on two levels: clearing up the tunnels while at the same time striking Hamas control centers in Gaza City, he replied: “The army acts according to the operational directives handed down by the political level.”
Gen. Torjeman’s first-hand account of the war fought under his command was the most lucid and convincing the public has seen in the entire offensive. At the same time, he offered no pointers to the next stage and where the conflict was heading. He was very clear about these decisions being up to the heads of government who are managing the war, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.
As they led a security cabinet meeting Wednesday, those leaders were under heavy foreign pressure to terminate the conflict, especially by Western powers led by Washington. Former Israeli president Shimon Peres added his voice to Israel’s detractors when, during a visit to injured soldiers in hospital, he declared: “The war has exhausted itself.”

He spoke into the empty space left when talk in the last five days of an impending ceasefire ran up against the immovable wall of Hamas’ rejection. A Palestinian delegation has sat on its luggage for four days packed ready for a trip to Cairo to take up Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisis’s proposal for resolving the Gaza crisis.

His only pre-condition was that both sides, Israel and Hamas, observe a ceasefire first. But Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal demanded that in any ceasefire, Hamas be free to attack Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Cairo’s response was crisp: So don’t come.

After sitting most of the day, the Israeli security cabinet rejected any plan to end the war or interrupt it with a unilateral truce and instead approved is expansion. Its decision read:

“The IDF is directed to continue its powerful offensive against Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip and complete the destruction of terror tunnels. This action has a significant impact on the field and smashes a strategic resource in which Hamas invested years.”
debkafile’s military sources: It remains to be seen what this decision means in practical terms. Are Israel’s armed forces instructed to expand the battle zones in earnest, or only marginally, just enough to put the squeeze on Hamas for an unconditional cessation of hostilities.

Obama support for Hamas not helping them against the IDF


In face of truce bids, Hamas’ Deif gives Gaza war fresh impetus, makes it a religious jihad

Re-Post from DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis July 30, 2014, 12:12 PM (IDT)

Israeli Air Force bombards Gaza

Israeli Air Force bombards Gaza

Despite the rush of diplomats and analysts declaring that a ceasefire in the Gaza fighting is imminent, the war refuses to end. Wednesday, July 30, the commander of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif gave the conflict fresh impetus by injecting a religious dimension that cannot be ignored.

The conflict was sparked essentially by the June 12 abduction and murder of the Israeli teens Gilad She-ar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrach. Forty-nine days later the crisis is evolving into the longest and toughest of Israel’s wars, with the exception of its War of Independence.

As fierce as the fighting is on the battlefield, and as arduous the diplomatic wrangling, the emerging and largely overlooked jihadist element is the most troubling.

The wars raging in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have demonstrated that armies bigger than the IDF – like the US military and a coalition of nearly all the NATO countries – were not able to end wars against Islamist fighters. This may be that, because of political machinations and self-interest, none of the statesmen and military commanders leading those wars ever sought a decisive end. They gave up on victory on the principle that “Modern wars have no winners.”

But Islamist religious and military leaders do not subscribe to this principle: The Afghan Taliban’s Omar Mullah, the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Hamas’ Deif all seek all-out victory over the enemy.

Deif did not leave this in doubt in the pre-recorded statement he released on June 30 from his hidden Gaza bunker.

“What the planes, artillery, and warships haven’t achieved, the defeated [Israeli] forces will not achieve in the field for, thanks be to Allah, they have become prey for the guns and ambushes of our jihad fighters,” promises Deif in the tape.

“IDF soldiers are facing soldiers who are eager for death and factions that are united,” Deif goes on. “The firm resolve of the Palestinian people will bring victory on the battlefield. The enemy is sending its soldiers to a certain holocaust.”

To Israel, this war has been primarily defensive as implied in its name, Operation Protective Edge. But for Hamas and perhaps a large portion of the Palestinian people, it is Mohammed Deif’s personal accounting with the Zionist enemy.

Israel has tried to have this dangerous terrorist mastermind killed several times – and failed, earning Deif the moniker “the man with nine lives.” On August 22, 2001, Deif and his deputy Adnan al-Awal escaped a targeted assassination attempt. On September 26, 2002, an IDF Apache helicopter fired two Hellfire missiles at Deif’s car as he returned home from a visit of condolence in the Sheikh Rawan district of Gaza. After hours of conflicting reports about the terrorist leader’s fate, Deif turned out to have cheated death once again, although he lost an eye and the use of one hand.

The IDF gave it another go in August 2003, bombing an apartment building where the Hamas military leadership, including al-Awal, Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, Deif and the movement’s spiritual leader Ahmad Yassin were meeting. Although intelligence had correctly pinpointed the conclave’s time and place, the men were on the building’s bottom floor and escaped with light injuries.

For some years, Deif has not shown his face in public. In a recorded communiqué some eleven years ago, he boasted: “God wanted to make the Jews mad, so He saved me. I believe that only what God wants is what will happen.”

The notorious Islamist sees the war as an opportunity to repolish his personality cult. It must therefore go on unabated wtihout the let-up of a ceasefire until all the truce brokers,  including US President Obama and Egyptian President Fattah El Sisi, force Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to cave in and meet his demands.

When UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited Jerusalem on July 28, Netanyahu warned him about the troubling similarities between Deif’s Hamas and extremist Islamist groups like the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram.

Israel’s counter-terror offensive, Netanyahu explained, is part and parcel of the war on fundamentalist Islam. As self-appointed commander-in-chief, ensconced in his subterranean lair, Mohammed Deif couldn’t agree more.

And so the not-so-secret contacts between Washington, Cairo, Riyadh, Doha, Jerusalem and Ramallah are doomed to go nowhere, because they take place on one level, whereas a fanatical religious war is taking place on a completely separate one.

So long as the IDF does not breach Hamas’ main lines of defense to the east of Gaza City, and has not destroyed its underground command system and terror offshoots, Deif will cling to his belief that victory is his. And so long as that belief is not shaken, the war will go on.

Obama/Kerry support for Hamas pays off for Hamas!


Nine out of 10 Israel’s war dead Monday died on Israeli soil – a microcosm of the IDF operation

Re-post from DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis July 29, 2014, 3:25 PM (IDT)

A Hamas terror tunnel

A Hamas terror tunnel

That nine of the 10 Israeli servicemen who died in the counter-terror operation against Hamas Monday, July 28, were killed on Israeli soil was a wake-up call for Israel’s war leaders. It meant that Hamas had used the 22 days of combat to carry the contest from its own home ground into Israel by grabbing the tactical advantage of surprise.

The Nahal Oz encounter was a tragic microcosm of the current face of Operation Defensive Edge.

The tunnel, from which a band of Hamas infiltrators jumped out – and about whose existence the IDF admits to have known – ran app. 150 meters from Shejaiya in Gaza to the military pillbox guarding Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Between five and seven terrorist nonetheless were allowed to reach their destination armed to the teeth with automatic and anti-tank and explosives.

This brought two facts to light: First, the battle for Shejaiya was not over, although it had slipped out of sight. According to debkafile’s military sources, the shattered town has become a no-man’s land where Hamas gangs hide out for attacks on Israeli troops.

Second, while the IDF and government officials issue upbeat communiqués claiming that the entire tunnel problem will be disposed of in a matter of days – one officer asserted that the IDF is in control of all the terror tunnels – the Nahal Oz episode told a different story.

That it was allowed to happen shows that: –

1.  Although the secret passage used for attacking Nahal Oz was known to the military command, the unit charged with its defense was taken by surprise with tragic results: five Israeli combatants lost their lives. The single defender who survived opened fire on the infiltrators and put them to flight, so stopping them snatching the bodies of the fallen men as bargaining counters.

2.  Even if the IDF had decided to leave the tunnel shaft open for operational use, such as a secret route for Israeli troops to steal into Gaza behind enemy lines, it must still be asked why not fit it with sensors and cameras for tracking invaders and sounding the alarm?
3.  One Hamas terrorist was killed in the encounter; the rest made their escape back to Shejaiya. It ended in an appalling score of 5 to 1 dead.

4. The IDF spokesman claimed that Hamas was bent on a terrorist raid on the kibbutz. The truth was they had come to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

debkafile’s military experts outline the obstacles facing the destruction of Hamas’ underground passage system:

a)  Explosions cannot reach their entire length, which often runs to a kilometer or more with a web of multiple branches which fork off in uncharted directions. So when the IDF reports that 15 or 17 of the 31 tunnels uncovered have been destroyed, this means that explosions have demolished a section that runs from a point under the Israeli surface to a point controlled by IDF troops in the Gaza Strip.

b)  Explosions that run further and deeper are technically feasible, but only at the risk of setting off earth tremors strong enough to topple buildings on both the Gazan and Israeli sides of the border.

c)  Israel will never be rid of Hamas’ multi-branched underground empire and its threat of surprise raids for murder and kidnaps, without first physically demolishing the war rooms hidden in the deeply buried branches forking off from the main passages. Even then, some of those passages may remain undiscovered.

A senior IDF officer commented Tuesday: “We were surprised to find an elaborate system which connected the tunnels with Hamas’ chain of command.”

d)  Some officers are saying that too much focus may have been placed by official spokesmen on the tunnel problem, possibly in order to distract attention from the extent to which the heads of government have held the armed forces back from gaining any serious advantages in the war on Hamas – or even terminating its rocket blitz.

The US Congress needs to pass HR 5194


I support The Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act currently in committee in the US House of Representatives as HR 5194 because… the Muslim Brotherhood is, in fact, a terrorist group whose sole purpose is to make America a Muslim country under Sharia law. We see every day the violence that is pervasive in all the countries that are dominated by the Muslim way of life and I do not think that civilized people wish to live that way, I know I don’t.

I urge you to read the rest of this post and then you can do the same and here is the link to PopVox which makes it easy to do. It would also help if you contact your representative to congress and tell them they need to pass this bill.

What follows is a quick summary of decades of study by many good honest Christian and Jewish Americans whom going back to Thomas Jefferson knew that Islam and Western Civilization, which was based on Judo/Christian beliefs, are not compatible in any way shape or form.

Based on a situation in Maryland by an alert State Trooper in 2004 a web of deceit unwound around the infiltration of radical Islamic terrorists know as the Muslim Brotherhood the same group that took over Egypt a few years ago and were later thrown out and many executed for what they did. The arrest of the Maryland Brotherhood terrorists eventually resulting in the Holy Land Foundation Trial convictions in 2008 of many of those Brotherhood members involved in supporting Hamas and the identification of many of the other groups spawned by the radials that mean to bring down America and turn it into a Muslim state not governed under the U.S. Constitution but ruled under Muslim Sharia Law which is much like their Constitution.

Sharia Law has little to do with religion but a lot to do with how the citizens subject to it are ruled. Suffice it to say that it is, in essence, a codification of the tribal laws of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. This was a barbaric time where women were brutalized and consider not much use other than for breeding and they, as if cattle, were commonly sold as any property could be. Sharia Law also forces those that follow it into a constant state of war known as Jihad, which is nothing more than the physical conquest of the entire world such that all humans would be subject to Sharia dictates.

The following is from The Center for Security Policy

Want to know what our Islamist enemies have in mind for America? Look at Europe.
Virtually every country there has found itself under siege from Muslims seeking to impose the supremacist Islamic doctrine they call shariah on everyone else. The preeminent organization promoting this agenda is the Muslim Brotherhood, now banned as a terrorist group in its home country of Egypt, but prospering in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in what has been known as the Free World. In fact, as Egyptian courts hand down death sentences to those engaged with the Brotherhood’s violent efforts to overthrow the government there, ours is opening the door to asylum for those who have only engaged in “limited” material support for terrorism.

More insidious than the Muslim Brotherhood’s violence, however, is its stealthy subversion. In a 1991 strategic plan introduced into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, a senior Brother named Mohammed Akram described this form of warfare as “civilization jihad.”

In Akram’s words, the goal of the Brotherhood’s civilization jihadists is “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within…so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” His “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” lays out how this ambitious goal is to be achieved under our noses by penetrating and subverting “from within” the West’s civil society and governing institutions.

The London Telegraph reports that this campaign has just scored a major success in Great Britain. That country’s trade association for lawyers, the Law Society, has declared its members can begin drawing up shariah-compliant wills that will be enforceable in British common law courts.

As the Telegraph put it on March 22nd:

“Under ground-breaking guidance, produced by The Law Society, High Street solicitors will be able to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude unbelievers altogether.

“The documents, which would be recognized by Britain’s courts, will also prevent children born out of wedlock – and even those who have been adopted – from being counted as legitimate heirs.

“Anyone married in a church, or in a civil ceremony, could be excluded from succession under Shariah principles, which recognize only Muslim weddings for inheritance purposes.”
Such inroads are coming on top of the presence of something on the order of 87 shariah courts that operate side-by-side with Britain’s own judiciary. As one of the U.K.’s most courageous opponents of such practices, Baroness Caroline Cox, told the Telegraph: “No longer do we have a single legal code in our society. Instead, alongside our own law, there is now effectively a parallel quasi-legal system operating within some Muslim communities.”

Think that cannot happen here? Think again. The Muslim Brotherhood’s largest front group in this country, the Islamic Society of North America, requires each of its chapters to maintain arbitration panels that serve as proto-shariah courts. It is a matter of time before Islamists and their apologists begin demanding that such courts be allowed to adjudicate disputes not just between willing parties, but in cases where one party – most likely women and/or children – would prefer to have the protections of our Constitution.
Worse yet, as a study published by the Center for Security Policy in 2011 has documented, there have been at least 27 different instances in which U.S. courts have allowed the use of shariah law to govern – even where doing so has violated constitutional rights of the plaintiffs or defendants. (An updated version of this study now nearing completion indicates that, as of today, there are many more such cases.)

As a corrective to this civilization jihadist incursion into American jurisprudence, seven states have adopted legislation known as American Laws for American Courts (ALAC). If they wish to avoid the fate now facing British citizens who are likely to be denied their rightful inheritances and, in due course, other privations at the hands of shariah, every state in the country should adopt ALAC.

Of course, our Constitution’s Article VI declares that it is the supreme law of the land. But that will no long be the case if the civilization jihadists have their way. We must ensure that shariah is not allowed to undermine that constitutional precept – to the detriment of women, children and the rest of us.

From Wikipedia we have:

The Holy Land Foundation was the largest Islamic charity in the United States. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, it was originally known as Occupied Land Fund. In December 2001, the U.S. government designated HLF a terrorist organization, seized its assets, and closed the charity. In 2004, a federal grand jury in Dallas, Texas charged HLF and five former officers and employees with providing material support to Hamas and related offenses. The prosecution did not allege that HLF funded violence; rather, its theory was that HLF distributed charity through local zakat (charity) committees located in the West Bank; that Hamas controlled those zakat committees; and that by distributing charity through Hamas-controlled committees, HLF helped Hamas win the “hearts and minds” of the Palestinian people.

The first trial, in 2007, ended in the partial acquittal of one defendant and a hung jury on all other charges. The jury did not return any guilty verdicts. At a retrial in 2008, the jury found all defendants guilty on all counts. The 2008 trial of the charity leaders was dubbed the “largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history.” In 2009, the founders of the organization were given sentences of between 15 and 65 years in prison for “funneling $12 million to Hamas.”

An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America is a document seized by the government that was used in the 2008 United States v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development case. The verdict found the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development guilty of laundering money to Hamas. According to the Anti-Defamation League, some observers have suggested that this document “identifies a conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood to convert the United States to an Islamic nation.”
The memorandum was written in 1991 by Mohamed Akram, a senior Hamas leader in the U.S., a member of the Board of Directors for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America (also known as the Ikhwan) and one of many unindicted co-conspirators in the HLF trial. He asked them to read it for approval as an update and restatement of the plan they had adopted in 1987.
The memorandum was cited by the September 2010 Center for Security Policy (CSP) report, “Shariah: The Threat to America” and endorsed by several members of Congress.

“Don’t worry, Bibi, we’ve got your back.” Another fundamental Obama transformation – what we once called “diplomacy” is now “duplicity.”….


They got this one dead on and that’s no pun.

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Moderates Be Damned – The U.S. Sides With Islamists – Perhaps John Kerry Is Not Clueless, Perhaps He and Obama Actually Do Support the Muslim Brotherhood…


Obama needs to be impeached!

REMEMBER…YOU’RE NEXT


The Muslims hate western civilization and America more than anything!

Obama pressures Israel for ceasefire and Hamas attacks!


High IDF death toll in Hamas upsurge of violence on “ceasefire” day. Israel expands Gaza counter-offensive

Re-Post from DEBKAfile Special Report July 28, 2014, 11:55 PM (IDT)

In the past 48 hours, Israel was pressured to accept its fifth “humanitarian” ceasefire in Gaza by President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu came close to folding, whereas Hamas saw the truce as applying only to Israel and therefore used it as a call to arms.

The slogan Israel broadcast: Quiet will be met with quiet and fire with fire, was seen by Hamas as a sign of Israel weakening.

This impression was confirmed on Sunday when the order went out to Israel troops to exercise restraint in the face of sporadic Hamas rocket fire, so as to give the truce a chance.
The Palestinian Islamists used it as a welcome respite for getting organized for the next stage of their onslaught.
Neither Israelis, Americans or Egyptians anticipated the radical Hamas launching an escalated assault on the first day of the Eid el-Fitr festival. In fact, by coordinating rocket, mortar and tunnel terror attacks, they inflicted on Israel one of the worst days of the three-week Operation Defensive Shield, claiming the lives of ten servicemen.

A grim omen of the deadly attacks ahead cam from a surge of rocket fire Monday noon, after a relatively quiet night. It targeted Gaza’s closest neighbors as well as Ashkelon and was followed by a salvo against the Lachish District and the towns of Netivot and Ofakim.

At around 4:30 p.m. Israel time, Hamas thought to give Israel a nasty surprise by sending one of its heavy Iranian Fajr-5 missiles (range 75 km) smashing into Tel Aviv. Instead of taking to the air, the missile plummeted to the ground in the nearby Shifa Hospital compound and exploded. Ten people were killed in the blast.

Half an hour later, Hamas directed mortar fire at the Eshkol District, where a group of soldiers was meeting. One hit its mark, killing four men and injuring nine.

The mortar attack was coordinated with another rocket barrage, this one directed at Ofakim and Mt. Carmel.

At around 6 p.m., a band of 5 Hamas terrorists came out of a tunnel near Kibbutz Nahal Oz They shot dead five defenders and were killed themselves in a firefight with the soldiers.

The tenth soldier was shot dead by Palestinian sniper in the Gaza Strip Monday morning

Their deaths raised to a total of 53 the IDF toll in the three-week counter-terror operation in the Gaza Strip.

Monday night, Israeli troops appeared to have started expanding the operation to the west. The inhabitants of Jebalya and Zeitun were told to leave their homes and, soon after, Israel artillery began shelling Ain Bureij.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz made a joint TV appearance Monday, offering a pledge to continue the campaign against Hamas until all goals were achieved, however long it takes.
Netanyahu said: “Today we suffered terrorism from above and below.” The destruction of terror tunnels, he said, was an essential step towards the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, which offered the only path to real peace.

Ya’alon said Israel would no longer a tolerate dialogue through terror tunnels and rockets. Hamas had been punished and would continue to be, he said, until it understood that Israel will never be brought to surrender.

Gen. Gantz: “As a human being, it is hard for me to accept civilian deaths,” he said, – unlike Hamas, which is solely responsible for 10 deaths at Shifa hospital, in whose grounds a missile aimed at Tel Aviv exploded prematurely.

The 24-hour “humanitarian ceasefire” was the stage for a major escalation in violence as Hamas strutted its stuff, fully confident of its ability to stand up to the next stage of the IDF operation. Will Israel’s war planners finally show iundivided resolve to win this momentous struggle against an expansionist Islamist terror movement?

Inteligent thoughts on Gasa and Israel!


Re-Post from PowerLine Posted on July 28, 2014 by Scott Johnson

14 Israel-Gaza notes

In the spirit of David Bernstein’s “Some Israel-Gaza notes” at the Volokh Conspiracy, I would like to add my own notes summarizing points I have been making here, some of which Bernstein also makes.

1. Hamas has promoted phony casualty statistics as a propaganda tool and the media have dutifully provided the statistics every day without any reservation. The media fail to report the source of the statistics as anything other than Gaza health officials.

2. Bernstein puts it this way: “The Ministry of Health counts everyone not in uniform as a civilian. Most Hamas fighters don’t wear uniforms. The UN is sometimes sourced for the figures, but the UN gets its figures from … the Gazan Ministry of Health.” MEMRI set forth casualty statistics in “Reporting of casualties in Gaza” on July 14. Bernstein links to updated casualty statistics posted here at Aussie Dave’s IsraellyCool site. The Times of Israel reports the analysis of an Israeli intelligence center on this issue in “When numbers in Gaza masquerade as fact.”

3. MEMRI has posted Hamas media management instruction regarding the inflation and use of civilian deaths as a propaganda tool. MEMRI’s highly illuminating report is “Hamas Interior Ministry to social media activists: Always call the dead ‘innocent civilians’; don’t post photos of rockets being fired from civilian population centers.” So far as I am aware, if you didn’t pick up this key to Hamas media management here on Power Line, you haven’t picked it up.

4. Despite Hamas’s attempt to prevent images depicting the use of civilian facilities for martial purposes, the IDF has made relevant videos available. The IDF, for example, has posted videos illustrating the use of apparently civilian facilities for purposes including the firing of missiles. The IDF YouTube channel is here.

5. Among the facilities featured in the IDF videos are Hamas hospitals, schools, mosques, and graveyards. Here is one of Hamas firing rockets from civilian areas, posted yesterday by the IDF.

In the video below, Hamas terrorists fire from a Gaza school.

If you haven’t picked up these videos here, I doubt you have picked them up anywhere, yet they provide invaluable context for understanding the war.

6. Hamas uses Gaza Terrorist Theater to promote the theme that Israel irresponsibly causes civilian deaths when the opposite is the case. The most notorious incident of the current conflict is the alleged deaths that occurred at the UN Gaza school last week. Yesterday the IDF released the results of its study of the incident, reported here by the Times of Israel’s Mitch Ginsburg:

An Israeli army inquiry into fighting at a UN facility in Beit Hanoun Thursday found that IDF mortars did not play a role in the killing of 16 people in the school courtyard, dismissing claims that the military was responsible for their deaths.

The army admitted that an IDF-fired shell did hit the UN-run school’s yard, but at a time when there were no people in the area.

“A single errant mortar landed in the school courtyard, injuring no one,” Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said Sunday in a conference call.

Ginsburg has posted the IDF photo supporting the IDF analysis with his article.

7. The Gaza school story replicates on a larger scale the Gaza Terrorist Theater invoking the death of Jihad Masharawi in 2012′s Operation Pillar of Defense. The media were tools of Jihad then and they are tools of Jihad now. It is way past time for them to get a clue.

8. Permit me to repeat what I said on this point yesterday. The IDF is the most scrupulous reporter on the scene in Gaza by far. The Gaza Terrorist Theater continues with all on-the-scene broadcast and cable network reporters in Gaza playing their assigned roles and performing as miserably as ever in the pageant of “Tools of Jihad.”

9. Israel’s discovery of the extensive Hamas terror tunnels was a turning point in the war. Lawrence Franklin explained why last week in the Gatestone column “Hamas mega attack planned through Gaza terror tunnels.” We posted Omri Ceren’s email summary to us in “Hamas’s big plan disrupted.”

10. The lack of interest in civilian deaths in Syria by contrast with Gaza is noteworthy. More than 700 Arabs were killed in Syria on Thursday and Friday in what was probably the bloodiest 48 hours of that conflict to date. I bet you haven’t heard a single word about those deaths and you can’t help but wonder why. Jeffrey Goldberg purports to explain why in “Obsessing about Gaza, ignoring Syria (and most everything else).” Goldberg quotes one Joyce Haram, the Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Hayat: “Only reason I can think of is Muslim killing Muslim or Arab killing Arab seems more acceptable than Israel killing Arabs.”

11. On a related note, Jay Nordlinger passes on “the comment of the month” in this article by Professor Marc Lynch of George Washington University. Quotable quote from Lynch: “It must be so awkward having to check whether the dead child is from Gaza or Syria before deciding whether to be morally outraged.”

12. John Kerry is reliably reported to have adopted key Hamas demands in a ceasefire proposal presented to the Israeli government on Friday. The Israeli government has unanimously rejected John Kerry’s ceasefire proposal, characterized by the Israelis as a capitulation to Hamas. The Times of Israel’s Raphael Ahren has filed an updated report on the Kerry ceasefire proposal here.

13. On Sunday Barack Obama placed Israel under enormous pressure to undertake an immediate ceasefire, yet Israel has not completed its important mission of eliminating Gaza’s terror tunnels. He is undoubtedly threatening to withhold funding for Israel’s depleted Iron Dome defense if the Israeli government refuses to cooperate. One could have predicted this based on the general theory that Obama reliably supports the interests of America’s enemies and undermines the interests of America’s friends, yet it is a striking illustration of the phenomenon.

14. John Podhoretz commented on Obamna’s ceasefire demand yesterday here, Bernstein here. By functionally aligning itself with Hamas, the Obama administration is undermining Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other key players who resist Iran and/or the Muslim Brotherhood for good and sufficient reasons, as should we. Isi Liebler puts it this way: “Obama abandons Israel.”

Hamas used kids to dig tunnels and many died!


Re post from PowerLione Posted on July 28, 2014 by Paul Mirengoff in Middle East, Terrorism
Report: At least 160 children died digging Hamas’ tunnels

Because of their size and agility, children make good tunnel-diggers. The English knew this when they were digging coal mines during the Victorian era; Hamas knows it now.

Thus, the Journal of Palestine Studies (edited by President Obama’s pro-Palestinian friend Rashid Khalidi) reported in 2012 that Hamas uses children to help dig tunnels into Israel. The finding appears in a paper called Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel’s Siege.

The author of the paper, Nicolas Pelham accompanied a police patrol in Gaza during December 2011. He reported that “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels, where, much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies.”

He also found that “at least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials.” And, as noted, this was as of the end of 2011. How many more Palestinian children have died digging tunnels for Hamas since then?

It’s not surprising that Hamas endangers Palestinian children by having them engage in highly dangerous child labor. Hamas is willing to use children as human shields, so why would it not use them to dig tunnels?

Still, this additional example of Hamas’ inhumanity is worth noting.