On September 9, Milad Munther al-Rai was shot dead by Israeli forces in the Arroub camp, north of Hebron. He was throwing Molotov cocktails at the IDF troops.
According to Defense for Children International, he was 15 years old and shot for no reason. Others say he was 16.
Palestinian media were filled with articles about how Milad was just a child, with a "dewy" singing voice he inherited from his father and his love for playing football even though the camp had no fields.
While his body was wrapped with the Islamic Jihad flag, I didn't see any official report from the terror group claiming him as a member, perhaps because the propaganda value of him being regarded as an innocent child was much higher than portraying him as a heroic fighter.
But three weeks later, when Islamic Jihad is publishing its accomplishments for the month, Milad Munther al-Rai has now transformed into that mujahid.
In a press release listing its "accomplishments" during September, Islamic Jihad listed six members as mujahadeen martyrs during that month including Milad:
Martyr mujahideen Milad Munther al-Ra’i (16 years old) from Al-Aroub camp in the city of Hebron was killed during confrontations with the occupation forces on September 9th.
Yet even today, there is not a word of condemnation from "human rights groups" about Palestinian groups recruiting child soldiers, a violation of international law, despite proof that many child soldiers have been killed this year alone.
Because they don't want to dilute their consistent anti-Israel messaging by saying anything bad about terrorists.
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A fire broke out on Friday morning in the Kissufim forest on the Gaza border according to a statement by Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), which manages the site.
Six firefighting teams were deployed to two different areas in the Ben Shemen area near the Adam IDF base in order to prevent the fire from spreading to the base, according to the Ayalon Regional Fire Brigade. Two planes were also deployed to help put out the fires.
It is suspected that incendiary balloons from Gaza started the fire. In 2018, the KKL-JNF statement said, a fire broke out in the exact same place at the outset of a string of incendiary balloon fires.
The last time incendiary balloons caused a fire in the region was in September 2021.
A group called the "Units of the Descendants of Nasser" claimed responsibility for what they called a "blast" of balloons being sent from central Gaza today.
The same group had also claimed to be behind a string of incendiary balloon attacks in 2020 and 2021, saying that "we promise you that we will not rest until the entire envelope east of our occupied territories burns."
Interestingly, in 2021, Hamas arrested members of the group for their attacks on Israeli forests. Which means that if this becomes a new wave of attacks, Hamas is allowing it to happen.
Environmental groups have been peculiarly silent about Palestinian groups deliberately setting forest fires.
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One of the Hamas terrorists arrested by Israeli forces in Jenin on Monday was Abdallah Hassan Muhammad Zubah. He is known to be one of the major forces behind the nascent West Bank rocket firing attempts.
There have been several attempts to fire rockets over the past few months into Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. They've so far either misfired or landed away from the Jewish targets.
The luck won't hold out forever. The genie is out of the bottle and Hamas and other terror groups have plenty of experience building rockets which they are anxious to transfer to the West Bank.
As unacceptable as it is to have large arsenals of rockets in Gaza (and Lebanon) aimed at Jewish communities, in some ways rockets in the West Bank would be worse. Their targets are often very close by, and unlike with Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel has no government to pressure to stop the rockets from being fired - just as with in the West Bank can easily get M16s, they will soon be able to put together crude rockets.
Right now, Israeli forces can arrive on the scene of a terror attack within minutes in Judea and Samaria. It can pro-actively stop rocket launchers being setup if it has proper intelligence. But if Israel would unilaterally withdraw from areas of those territories, each incident becomes an invasion.
This is reason by itself that unilateral withdrawals, or a Palestinian state even on provisional borders, is a supremely bad idea.
But the rocket fire will come, sooner rather than later. Jewish communities will be threatened. The same "primitive" rockets with a two-mile range that reach Sderot from Gaza can also reach the suburbs of Netanya from Tulkarm.
Not enough people are considering the dangers of West Bank rockets - and the media won't care until they kill someone. If even then.
Now is the time that Israel needs to pro-actively let the media and world leaders know that any rocket that injures or kills an Israeli will prompt a massive response that can cause unpredictable results. The PA needs to be pressured by its international friends to step up its presence in the "refugee camps" and other areas it has effectively ceded to Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups.
Because otherwise, as always, the world will be fixated on the "disproportionate" response more than the rockets themselves.
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The Israeli military arrested three members of the Hamas terror group during a raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank on Monday morning, marking the first overt entry of forces to the camp since a major operation was carried out in the area two months ago.
In a joint statement, the Israel Defense Forces, Shin Bet security agency, and Border Police said troops entered the camp and nabbed Abdullah Hassan Mohammed Sobeh, Ward Sharim, and Mus’ab Ja’aydah.
The IDF said troops opened fire at the wanted gunmen as they attempted to flee a building when the forces arrived. One of the armed Palestinians shot in the leg and seriously wounded, and was taken by helicopter to Rambam Hospital in Haifa.
An assault rifle belonging to one of the wanted Palestinians was seized, the IDF said.
The IDF said troops also responded with live fire against Palestinian gunmen who opened fire at forces in the area, and Palestinian rioters hurling stones.
A local wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group said its gunmen opened fire at Israeli forces on the outskirts of the camp.
The Palestinian Authority health ministry said four people were lightly wounded by Israeli fire in the area and taken to nearby hospitals.
No Israeli soldiers were wounded in the operation.
The IDF did injured the captured terrorists, and transported them by helicopter to a hospital.
Imagine the difficulty of such an operation.
The goal, as always, is to arrest terrorists - not to kill them. The IDF knows that it will be attacked from all directions in a crowded camp that is filled with booby-traps, IEDs and angry youth with stones, firebombs and automatic weapons.
And in the end, no one was killed on either side. The terrorists were captured alive.
This must have involved many, many hours of planning, intelligence and practice.
But this result is always what the IDF wants to see. It doesn't want to kill people, but when under fire, soldiers must return fire towards the source. Nearly every person killed in the past two years were involved in fighting or members of terror groups. For urban warfare, this is incredible, and military experts know this.
But the media ignores all of that. "Human rights groups" insist on perfection in a war zone and that the IDF use peacetime, law enforcement standards when the enemy is often a heavily armed military group. As much as they can, Israel tries to live up to those standards, and it showed that today, even if it is not at all clear that the more flexible laws of armed conflict wouldn't apply to Jenin today.
The world is so obsessed with demonizing Israel that it ignores how unique it is for an army to have so few civilian casualties in urban war zones.
Try to find stories where US or British troops entered a crowded town and extracted wanted men under constant fire without killing anyone. If it has ever happened, it is incredibly rare. Yet the IDF strives to do that each and every time - and its success today proves that.
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The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas has hailed the position of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese condemning the flagrant Israeli violations against the Palestinian people, especially the collective punishment policy.
Hamas spokesperson Abdel Latif al-Qanoa called on the international community and UN and human rights organisations to put this condemnation into action and to take practical steps towards holding the Israeli occupation leaders accountable for their crimes and violations against the Palestinian people.
He had been a child soldier, joining a terror group at 15.
Articles about the Lion's Den have implied that it was a home-grown group that just popped up out of frustration with Israel or the PA. Members claimed not to be loyal to any one armed faction.
But today, Islamic Jihad has written a new obituary for Ibrahim al-Nablusi, where they take credit for the creation of the Lion's Den.
Today, Wednesday 8/9/2023, the Al-Quds Brigades - the Nablus Brigade confirmed, on the first anniversary of the martyrdom of Ibrahim Alaa Al-Nabulsi "Abu Fathi", one of the most prominent leaders of the Al-Quds Brigades - the Nablus Brigade and the fighter Islam Muhammad Sabouh, that the blood of the two martyrs will remain a light for the Mujahideen and a fire for the aggressors Zionists at all times .
The battalion revealed for the first time that the martyr, Commander Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, was part of the department for developing military action in Nablus and that he was one of the first leaders in establishing the battalion.
This makes a lot more sense. The many armed groups that have arisen in the West Bank over the past two years were not spontaneous, but planned - and they were planned by Iran, via Islamic Jihad.
It was in the Palestinian interest to tell Western media that these were organic groups that were created at the grassroots level, and Islamic Jihad had a "department for developing military action" in the West Bank.
More evidence that Iran was behind these groups comes from the Tehran Times "Man of the Year" last year - none other than Ibrahim al-Nabulsi.
Iran's actions in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza are not haphazard, but they are coordinated and planned to keep Israel under siege and on the defensive.
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This morning, the IDF demolished the home of the Hamas terrorist who killed brothers Hallel Yaniv, 21, and Yagel Yaniv, 19, as they drove through Huwara in February.
I always wondered whether this policy actually deterred some terror attacks. Reading between the lines of the angry reactions from major terror groups, it appears that they may indeed act as a deterrent for at least some attacks.
Islamic Jihad issued a statement saying "the demolition of the house of the martyr Abd al-Fattah Kharousha in Nablus will not weaken the resolve of the resistance fighters, but rather they will increase their determination and adherence to resistance and jihad....the crime of demolishing houses will not achieve the deterrence goals that the enemy army is looking for."
That is a lot of words to protest a policy that they claim is ineffective.
Similarly, the PFLP said, "The policy of demolishing the homes of the martyrs will only increase our people's determination to continue the path of freedom and dignity that was paved with the blood of our martyrs, the sacrifices of our families, and the struggles of our people with all its components."
Hamas said, "Our people and their factions will remain a support for our steadfast people who are targeted by the enemy by demolishing their homes and property. This struggling people will continue to unite with the heart of one man in the face of the occupier, until our rights are fully recovered, no matter how long it takes and no matter how much they sacrifice." It also said that this was "a Zionist policy of impotence, which proved its failure to quell the resistance and affect the morale of the fighters."
If the home demolition policy only encourages more terror, and these groups want to recruit more members, then why are they so insistent on how the policy is ineffective? These statements appear to be more a message to Israel to stop the demolitions and to their own people not to be deterred from attacking Jews because of the knowledge that their families will lose their homes.
Israeli authorities know far more. They interview the actual terrorists and know whether some of them say that the demolition policy affects their fellow terror group members. Almost certainly these interviews are what prompts Israel's High Court to continue to allow that policy, as the objective of discouraging terror attacks is a higher priority than the issue of collective punishment that is the usual argument by NGOs against the policy.
This is indirect proof, of course, but the strident reactions to the destruction of Abd al-Fattah Kharousha's home in Nablus seem to indicate that the policy does indeed cause some militants to think twice before attacking, and the leaders of the terror groups are trying to quash that reluctance.
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The Al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad - Jenin Brigade today issued a warning, and a not so veiled threat, to any media that reports things it doesn't like:
In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful
* Notice issued by the Jenin Battalion - Military Media *
Media brothers, institutions and individuals,
We note to you that it is forbidden to carry out any media activity such as photographing people or places or otherwise inside the camp, specifically with regard to the capabilities and connections of resistance work, without permission from concerned brothers. Whoever disobeys bears responsibility for that. We note that the capabilities of the resistance and the sacrifices of the mujahideen are not a place for a press scoop.
I think they make themselves quite clear.
And it is almost a certainty that the international media will adhere to these rules.
Which is why you won't see photos of terrorists burying IEDs in their own streets, or booby-trapping houses of Jenin residents, or any of the other gross violations of human rights that the terror groups do daily in Jenin. And without photos, there will be no reporting. And without reporting, the only aggression being reported on is from the Israeli side.
Remember how reporters used to be brave and fearless in their commitment to telling the entire story no matter what the consequences?
Those days are long gone. Now we have reporters who stay in hotels in Tel Aviv and drive over to Ramallah and Jenin to parrot the terrorist talking points about how awful the Israelis are - and justify the lies by calling it a "narrative," before returning to their bars in Israel where they can boast about their "speaking truth to power."
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For the past week, Palestinian media has been filled with articles about how the Jenin Battalion defeated the IDF in Jenin. They don't quite explain how they come to the conclusion that 12 dead terrorists and much destroyed terror infrastructure is a "victory."
Today, the Islamic Jihad-linked Palestine Today published a video of their latest "proof" of this illusory victory.
The video shows an IDF armored D9 bulldozer clearing an area and being targeted with 3 IEDs.
The terror website claims that their explosives "disrupted" the bulldozer's work.
But the video shows that the bulldozer didn't even slow down while detonating these bombs.
Israel has created many different armored versions of the Caterpillar D9. According to this Wiki page, in testing the D9R version withstood IED belly charges of 500 kg - more than 5 times the mass of high explosives needed to destroy a main battle tank!
The IDF has been using D9s since the 1950s, and the armored versions have been recognized as saving many lives. D9s prompted top Palestinian terrorists in Jenin to surrender in 2003 as the machinery would slowly dismantle the buildings the terrorists were in - and they had no defense against it, forcing them to surrender before the building would collapse. (It takes about a half an hour for a D9 to destroy a building.)
The terrorists released this video to pretend that they effectively countered the D9s - but in the end, they created an advertisement that showed that these bulldozers are effectively indestructible.
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The Safa news agency reports that the Palestinian Authority arrested some would-be jihadists on their way to Jenin Tuesday to attack the IDF:
The Jenin Brigade of the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, said on Thursday that the arrest of a number of resistance fighters by the Palestinian Authority security services while they were on their way to repel the aggression on the city of Jenin and its camp was a "disgrace."
The battalion said in a statement, a copy of which was received by the Safa agency, that "it is heartbreaking that the fatal stab comes to us from the back, by our people, by the security services of the authority, which last Tuesday did an act that no fighter and defender of this land would accept."
The statement indicated that the Preventive Security Service arrested the resistance fighters Murad Malaisha and Muhammad Brahmin and assaulted them along with a number of resistance fighters who were on their way to support their brothers in the Jenin battalion.
The Jenin Battalion confirmed that the tension is still present with the continued arrest of Malaisha and Brahmin from the authority's apparatus.
The statement continued, "The political arrest of our mujahideen brothers and sons is a disgrace, and it is shameful that we engage in battles with the occupation and are stabbed in the back."
The Jenin Brigade called on the Fatah leadership and movement to stand up to their responsibility in curbing such actions, pursuing and arresting them.
If this is true, it sounds like the PA publicly says that it ended security cooperation with Israel but privately - perhaps at the behest of the US or UAE, or under threat from Israel - has been trying to do at least a minimum of its official security role.
Many times, things are happening under the radar, and all we analysts can do it take best guesses based on parsing statements and trying to line them up with facts on the ground and news from opposing parties.
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The secretary general of the Islamic Jihad terror group, Ziyad Al-Nakhala, gave an extensive interview to an Iranian newspaper, and he mentioned a few things that the Western media rarely reports.
While most people understand that Iran funds most of Islamic Jihad's operations, Al-Nakhala admits that Islamic Jihad essentially is part of Iran's military, and that its decisions originate in Iran.
First he praises the Iranian regime for providing the technical expertise to build weapons:
We gained from the Islamic Revolution other expertise in the level of manufacturing and arming. Today, we see the action of the resistance taking different roles from the past, and the Palestinian has more experience than before, and today the Palestinian manufactures many weapons with which he confronts the occupation and manufactures them locally, with the exception of machine guns. Missiles, anti-tank weapons, and explosives are manufactured locally. An important part of this expertise was gained by the Palestinian people from our brothers in the Islamic Republic, and this has a great impact, and what we are witnessing today of resistance action in which missiles are used to strike the occupied cities, and in particular Tel Aviv, and all the central cities of Israel. These experiences from the Islamic Republic benefited the resistance and the Palestinian people , in addition to the expertise of mortars and explosives.
But then he says that it was Iran's leader who called for local armed groups in West Bank towns like Jenin:
When His Eminence [Ayatollah Khamenei] called for the arming of the West Bank, ...everyone cooperated in order to bring about change and a qualitative shift in the Palestinian situation, and programs were developed for this, whether through smuggling of weapons or by purchasing weapons from the Israelis themselves. The important thing is that there was a lot of focus in order for the West Bank to move from a state of coexistence and calm to a state of resistance that we see today, and this, of course, was completely consistent with the directives of His Eminence the Leader on the possibility of arming the West Bank. During our visit to Iran and during the meeting with His Eminence the Leader, His Eminence confirmed once again to develop the armament of the West Bank, and the development of resistance work in the West Bank.
Interestingly, Nakhala also downplays the amount of money Iran provides for terror operations and "martyr" families, because he is aware that there is a backlash in Iran of how much it provides to Palestinians while Iranians are in severe financial straits. "I say this so that people can be reassured, because it is possible for them to think that the Palestinian people took all the money of the Islamic Republic," he says, which means that this is a very sore point and Iranian citizen anger is a threat to terror groups like Islamic Jihad.
Al-Nakhala then emphasized that the targets of terrorists are specifically Jews, and the purpose of terror attacks is to frighten Jews into fleeing:
We are optimistic and we will win even if 10 or 15 years pass. years, but we are optimistic that if we exert more effort, the Zionist project will disintegrate, because the reality of the Jews in Palestine is that they came to this country in order to live in peace, stability and an opportunity for life, but when the opportunity for life and peace is not available and when the Jew finds only the place where he is killed is Palestine, he will inevitably leave. He came to Palestine to live in safety and stability. When he does not find this stability and peace, so he returns to where he came from, because there is no Jew in the world today whose life is threatened like the Jews in Palestine. Jews in other countries live and prosper. The only Jew who is killed is in Palestine. We must work to change the conviction of the Israeli that the chance of life here is non-existent and that the only place in which the Jew is killed is Palestine, and therefore he must leave this country.
So while these terror groups claim in English that they have nothing against Jews, they freely admit that their targets are specifically Jews and the only people they want to terrorize are Jews.
Notice also that Al-Nakhala admits that the purpose of Zionism is for Jews to live in peace and security - not to steal land, as they usually tell the West and each other. (h/t kweansmom)
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What is currently taking place in Palestine is not a religious war, but some Israeli officials and political parties are keen on turning it into one.
Though warnings against “religious wars” in Palestine — in fact, the entire region — have been mostly linked to Israel’s current “most rightwing government in history,” religious discourses have been the most dominant since the establishment of Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, in the late-19th century.
This is absurd to the extreme.
This has been a religious war for decades, and it has been Palestinians making it one.
From their first leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, their claims have been based primarily on religious themes and arguments. Religion suffuses everything they do - their words, their actions, their thinking - all the way back to the Mufti's claim that "Al Aqsa is in danger!" from Jews.
The Palestinian constitution says, "Islam is the official religion in Palestine. ... The principles of Islamic Shari’a shall be a principal source of legislation."
Members of the PLO executive Committee marked Eid yesterday by laying a wreath on the grave of Yasir Arafat.
Mahmoud Abbas' speeches - even to the UN - all begin with "In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful."
Abbas referred to rebuilding Gaza in 2016 as a "jihad."
Every Palestinian media outlet refers to those killed by Israeli forces as "martyrs," not "victims."
The religious aspect is so ingrained that a supposedly secular UNRWA is asking for Muslims to give it "zakat" (religious charity) funds, quoting the Quran. Do any other UN agencies ever quote any other religious texts? (I found an exception that proves the rule.)
And, of course, Gaza groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad are Islamic extremist groups which use Islam to justify attacking Jews.
It isn't Israel that seeks a religious war. It is the Palestinians, and their own religious justifications are accepted without any objection by the world.
But whenever Jews assert their own religious desires in the land of the Torah, they are demeaned - not only by Palestinians - for acting in such a primitive, non-enlightened manner.
The Palestinians claim, and much of the world accepts, the idea that only Muslims have an unquestioned religious claim on the land and the holy sites that were all invariably Jewish holy sites 1500 years before Mohammed was born.
Jewish religious claims are treated with scorn while Muslim religious claims are accepted without question. And part of the reason is exactly because religion is the major component of the Palestinian nationalist philosophy.
Disparaging the Jewish religious claims to the land - especially while not questioning the Palestinian Islamic-based claims - is another manifestation of the antisemitism that is accepted as normal nowadays..
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It is summer, and that means that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are proudly parading photos of their violating the war crime of recruiting child soldiers, calling it "summer camp."
These pictures from an Islamic Jihad "Revenge of the Free" training camp are not ambiguous.
The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child differentiates between States and non-State armed groups in setting the age-limit for recruitment and use in hostilities. For States, the age limit for direct participation in hostilities and for compulsory recruitment is 18. This means they can accept voluntary enlistment of persons between the ages of 15 and 18. Armed groups, on the other hand, are bound by a stricter prohibition, affecting both voluntary and compulsory recruitment of under-18s.
There are no photos of the kids engaging in sports, playing games or otherwise having fun. Calling this a "summer camp" is a joke. It is a military training camp for kids. And Islamic Jihad makes this clear in their recruitment video:
Not only that, but Islamic Jihad freely admits that the targets of the weapons the children learn to use are Jews. Islamic Jihad official Darwish al-Gharabli said, "These camps qualify the generation to carry the banner after this generation, part of which has been martyred; it also establishes a generation that is aligned with the path of jihad and resistance; believing in this option and that Palestine is the central issue and fighting the Jews is an act of worship."
The UN and its agencies, and Defense for Children International Palestine, and other "human rights" NGOs are curiously uninterested in this incitement to violence and these violations of children's human rights and international law
It's just another "Palestine exception" where Palestinians are exempt from the laws and rules for the rest of the world.
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In the framework of the existing efforts between the State of Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA), with emphasis on Palestinian economic development and maintaining security stability in the region, it has been decided to develop the Gaza Marine gas field off the coast of Gaza.
Implementing the project is subject to coordination between the security services and direct dialogue with Egypt, in coordination with the PA, and the completion of inter-ministerial staff work led by the National Security Council, in order to maintain the security and diplomatic interests of the State of Israel on the matter.
This is very vague.
In the past, Israel has tied the development of the field off the Gaza coast to returning the Israeli hostages and recovering the bodies of Israeli soldiers still held by Hamas.
An unnamed Israeli official at the prime minister’s office told Ynet on Sunday that all of the security agencies recommended the government approve the project. The same agencies had also approved the resolution of the maritime border dispute with Lebanon in November 2022, but Netanyahu rejected the recommendation, and the agreement with Lebanon was reached under the previous Bennett-Lapid government.
“The issue of the [Israeli] prisoners and missing people was and still is a condition for the development of infrastructure in Gaza. In this case [of the Marine field], we are not talking about Gaza infrastructure, but rather about an agreement with the PA and with Egypt," said the official.
Hamas has been pretty much maintaining calm in Gaza since Israel has allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel. It seems like Netanyahu (and Israel's security agencies) are looking at Gaza Marine as a means to make life easier for Gazans but Israel could theoretically turn the spigot off in case Hamas decides to resume hostilities.
If that is the logic, there are a couple of flaws. One is that if there is a direct line of natural gas from the field to Gaza, Israel could not turn it off, because that would look clearly like collective punishment.
The real fear is that the revenues would help fund more Hamas weapons and attacks. This will undoubtedly happen. Is that certainty worth the possibility/probability that Hamas will keep Gaza quiet?
Which brings up the other problem. While Hamas might be quieter in Gaza, they are active in the West Bank and taking credit for terror attacks. When Abbas is gone, while there is infighting within Fatah to replace him, Hamas is planning to take advantage of the chaos to make its own bid for controlling the West Bank. And the Gaza money will be critical to that plan succeeding.
Beyond that, what's wrong with leveraging Gaza Marine to get the hostages back? Why give up a concession and get nothing in return? Why not publicly tell the world, "We are happy to allow Gaza gas to be exported as soon as our boys come home?" Europe needs to replace Russian gas, which is why this has become a hot issue over the past year again. Why not give them a reason to pressure Hamas?
I hope Bibi knows what he is doing, and that there will be appropriate guardrails on this effort.
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As is always the case, Amnesty assumed that ay Israeli actions were war crimes before writing a single word and then fit the facts to their predetermined conclusion.
Amnesty International investigated nine Israeli airstrikes that resulted in the killing of civilians and in the damage and destruction of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Three separate attacks on the first night of bombing on 9 May, in which precision-guided bombs targeted three senior Al-Quds Brigades commanders, killed 10 Palestinian civilians, and injured at least 20 others. They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.
The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
The legal definition of proportionality demands that the attacker weigh the military advantage of the attack against the expected loss of innocent life. Israel clearly did this: Amnesty admits the targets were senior terrorist commanders, and Amnesty agrees that Israel used precision weapons meant to minimize collateral damage. But even so, it declares the attacks "disproportionate" without a grain of evidence that the military advantage was not great enough.
Of course, Amnesty doesn't have a clue as to the military advantage of killing senior PIJ terrorists. It doesn't even try to quantify that. But that is the entire point of the principle of proportionality to begin with.
Amnesty is saying that any civilian deaths, even when the attack is clearly against significant military targets, are war crimes - and that is exactly the opposite of what international law says.
Ironically, one of the ICRC's main sources for a detailed discussion of proportionality and the difficulty of defining it comes from....the Israeli High Court. Israel has teams of international law experts who approve these kinds of airstrikes. In this case, certainly Israel knew ahead of time - based on huge amounts of intelligence - that civilians were going to be killed, and it determined that this was a necessary but unfortunate consequence of defending itself legally. Amnesty, with next to no information about the military targets, breezily declares them not to be very important.
As a reminder, the international law standard on what is proportionate allows far, far more dead civilians for far less military advantage.
Amnesty's obsessive hate for Israel and willful ignorance of international law doesn't end there. It describes an airstrike that destroyed a building but didn't hurt anyone:
Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian homes also took a heavy toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip, including on people living with disabilities.
On 13 May, Israeli forces targeted a four-storey building in the Jabalia refugee camp. The building was home to 42 people from the extended Nabhan family. Five members of the family live with disabilities, including three being wheelchair users.
Hussam Nabhan, an eyewitness to the attack, told Amnesty International he had received a call he believed to be from an Israeli intelligence officer at around 6pm, saying residents of the building had 15 minutes to evacuate. Hussam told the caller that there were people with disabilities in the building and they needed more time, but the caller just repeated the warning.
After the strike, 22-year-old Haneen Nabhan was so traumatized she found it hard to talk, saying that her wheelchair had been buried under the rubble of her home so she could no longer move around independently.
Research by Amnesty International found no evidence that the Nabhan building – and other residential buildings destroyed or damaged during the last two days of the offensive – had been used to store weapons or any other military equipment or that rockets had been launched from their direct vicinity.
“The root cause of this unspeakable violence is Israel’s system of apartheid. This system must be dismantled, the blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately lifted, and those responsible for the crime of apartheid, war crimes and other crimes under international law must be held to account,” said Morayef.
The bias here is undeniable. According to Amnesty, Israel - for no reason whatsoever - targeted a building filled with disabled people, and ensured that it was empty before attacking.
This is a blood libel.
Israel has an extensive methodology for determining valid military targets. Only the most rabid antisemite would claim that Israel went through all the effort - determining a target, warning residents, choosing the appropriate weapons - just to make civilian lives miserable. And only Amnesty International is so self-righteous to assume that their parachuting in and talking to a few residents who are frightened of Hamas is enough of an investigation to determine that the targeted buildings had no military value.
An expert on the laws of armed conflict states, accurately:
For commission of a war crime, a culpable state of mind is an essential element. Article 8 of the ICC’s Rome Statute requires a showing of either intent to harm civilians or recklessness: ordering an attack with the knowledge that the resulting harm to civilians would be “clearly excessive in relation to the … military advantage anticipated.” The high threshold for proof of a culpable state of mind is no accident. Rather, it is a recognition that a less demanding test would not adequately acknowledge the risk of harm that inevitably flows from the fog of war.
Amnesty is not interpreting international law. It is twisting international law to damn Israel - without any evidence whatsoever that Israeli actions were reckless or meant to intentionally harm civilians.
We've come to expect such libels from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but it is important to call it out each time. Because the pattern of ignoring facts, and blaming Israel for war crimes that all evidence proves otherwise, and of determining the outcome of the faux "investigations" before they even occur - this pattern proves that these NGOs are not interested in the truth, in international law or even in human rights.
Their entire aim is to demonize Israel.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Khader
Adnan didn’t eat for 86 days and died. Because that’s what happens to people
who don’t eat for 86 days. They die.
Adnan was a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad “official.” In
other words, a terrorist. A high-up terrorist in a major terror outfit. Now he is
a dead terrorist—likely too dead to care that there were no brown-eyed virgins awaiting
his corpse.
While Khader Adnan was dying (because he, of his own
volition, decided to die by not eating for 86 days), Palestinian Islamic Jihad issued
a statement that Israel would “pay a heavy price” should Adnan die in custody.
When Adnan’s physical condition deteriorated and his condition became critical,
the “Palestinian Prisoners Club” announced that Khader Adnan could die at any
minute.
Which he did. Which is generally what happens when someone
doesn’t eat for 86 days. They die. Virgins or not.
Khader Adnan died not only because he was too stupid to eat,
but because he wanted to die to give his fellow terrorists a pretext to shoot
rockets and mortars from Gaza into civilian Israel, a favorite pastime of Arab
terrorists. And now in the south, we have frightened Jewish children stuck in
safe rooms as sirens go off all around them. As these children well know,
rockets and mortars can and sometimes do kill their friends and relatives, and
destroy their homes and cars.
More than 100 rockets and mortars have now been shot from
Gaza at Southern Israelis, including my little grandchildren, since Khader
Adnan killed himself on Tuesday morning by deciding not to eat until he died. Yes,
dear old DEAD Khader Adnan achieved his fondest goal in life: to make life
miserable for the Yahud, an ideal for which Khader Adnan was apparently willing
to kill himself. By not eating for 86 days.
Last night, when “only” 32 rockets had
been shot at my grandchildren and other Israelis who live in the south, I
stumbled upon a friend’s post:
“So why do you think Israel let that piece of cockroach
excrement die from the hunger strike.”
That was kind of cringey. Still, I took her point. Why didn’t Israel kill Adnan to begin with,
instead of letting him commit slow suicide? He was a terrorist. Now he is a
dead terrorist by his own hand. We could have helped him along, expedited
things. Did he really deserve to live? A man whose fondest desire is to kill
the Jews?
Alternatively, if we lacked the impetus to kill the
terrorist Khader Adnan for political considerations, we might have force-fed him
like a goose on a foie gras farm. Would world censure of Israel have been any
worse than it is right now at this moment, even as my people are under rocket fire,
had a feeding tube been forced down Adnan’s now-dead nose or throat?
Maybe. But I’d take that censure in exchange for keeping my
grandchildren and other Southern Israelis safe. Because rockets and mortars may
indeed break bones but names can never hurt me. Or any other Israelis,
including my grandchildren, who will, God willing, give me great grandchildren,
while Adnan’s starved and lifeless body rots in the ground, with not a virgin
in sight.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
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